Apr 23 07
Art Bell and Richard Cohn - Winning With Truth in Business
How important is leadership truthfulness in today’s business world? According to authors Art Bell and Richard Cohn, the cost of a lack of truth is in the billions. In this podcast, Bell and Cohn discuss the key elements of their book Winning With Truth in Business.
Click here to listen to the podcast
Host Renn Vara also covers a CommTip - you’ve been asked to be interviewed for a blog or a podcast. What do you do? How do you manage that interview to stay on message? Renn covers the tips of “bridging,” “blocking” and “breaking.”
Full transcript after the jump
Renn Vara: On this edition of More Than Talk, we talk with the authors a book called “Winning With Truth In Business”. Art Bell is a professor at the University of San Francisco and author of well over 40 business books. Dick Cohn has been the Vice-President of Communications for companies like Charles Schwab and Sun Microsystems.
Both of you, welcome to More Than Talk. Glad to have you here.
Art Bell: Thanks, Renn.
Dick Cohn : Thank you so much.
Renn Vara: The book is “Wiinning With Truth in Business”. Why is this an issue for businesses? Art, let me start with you.
Art Bell: I think that truth is one of the strategies that American businesses are more and more ignoring. We tend to park a couple of things at the curb when we get to business. One of them is our brains. Many times, we walk in with less intelligence than we felt we had in the morning we woke up. The other thing we tend to park at the curb is our sense of candor, our sense of openness, our sense of clarity. We’re willing to, for example, if something goes a bit wrong in the office, blame it on the computers, blame it on the copier, blame it on the secretary.
We’ve lost our sense of self-dignity. As a professional, what words will I or won’t I let come out of my mouth? What is true and what isn’t? Does it matter? Dick and I are here to say it does matter. It matters importantly to productivity in relation — R&D and all the other factors in business.
Dick Cohn: With that as the foundation, why? It takes a real collaborative environment where people trust one another for innnovation to really flourish. You can pour as much R&D money into a company but until the employees have a high level of trust that the idea they put forward will be processed — that’s how you get innovation. So, what this book is about really is looking at what are the true cause of this lack of candor and then what are the solutions to addressing this cause.
Renn Vara: Now, Dick tell me, you’ve had some statistics on how people view candor. Do you also have some estimation of cost to business by not embracing clarity and embracing candor?
Dick Cohn: We believe the cost is in the billions and billions of dollars. A recent study from Towers Perrin says out of 86,000 employees around the world, just 41% of employees think senior management supports new ideas and new ways of doing things. A mere third believe senior management communicates openly and honestly to employees. Think about what would happen if two-thirds of employees believe senior management communicated openly and honestly with them.
Right now, I believe companies are paying what I call a ’spend tax’, and that’s because they’re not being truthful and candid with employees. Employees don’t have clear ideas of the direction of the company, of customer needs. Another consequence of this is that we’re finding all these telephone service centers around the world. Employees do not feel empowered to pass along the customer complaints because there is that culture that inhibits truthfulness.
Art Bell: Part of the cost too can’t be named exactly in dollars. You know there is a human side to this. When, for example, people aren’t candid about what they know about an O-ring or when a memo comes forward on the Challenger Space Shuttle that says that a ring is defective and that memo doesn’t get passed on for fear of shaking up higher levels of employment — you know that’s a human issue as well as a dollar issue. If we’d had, for God’s sake, bought more candor with regard to weapons of mass destruction, think of the human side of the equation that would’ve been spared, suffering in that regard.
So, in organizations, we can look at the billions of dollars. We can also look at hundreds of thousands of lives and careers that are interrupted by lack of clarity, lack of candor in the organization.
Renn Vara: And that aside, you can also talk about companies like Enron, WorldCom where you have pensioners who still have not been able to get their retirement back because of people not telling the truth.
Art Bell: And Renn, that is our core assumption — that there is a consequence to a lack of candor. For the short-term, many companies almost make a business model around the idea that, “Well, we can fool some of the people for a little bit of the time.” The difficulty is, as Lincoln pointed out, you’re not going to fool all the people all the time, that in Shakespeare’s phrase, “Truth will eventually be out.”
Renn Vara: It sounds like, to me, the message is this: “For managers, this is good business, this is smart business, this is profitable business. For employees, it makes for a better work environment.” Between those two people though, who has the power to really institute this change? It sounds like, to me, that employees can’t do much about the lack of candor if their bosses aren’t doing it first. Am I right about that?
Art Bell: You are right. It’s not going to happen by a poster in the hallway of an organization saying that, “We value candor in this organization.” When it’s going to start happening is when candor becomes a line item in the performance review of every employee, when in addition to your sales figures and so forth, you’ve also hit your numbers with regard to your ability in the organization to express yourself with candor, with clarity and your boss recognizes that and rewards you for it. That’s when the rubber meets the road, and all of the benefits including productivity benefits and morale benefits start to flow from the trustfulness and the candor that you promoted.
Renn Vara: So, you agree that it comes from the top?
Art Bell: I think it probably comes from two directions at once. The top can announce it but it has to be immediately embraced as possible by the union, by the employees themselves. This has to be one that everyone has to want.
Dick Cohn: What we also see is there are a couple of ways that people get into this culture where there’s a lack of candor. One is what we refer to as ‘the tipping point’, where it is just a series of small half-truths, white lies, misrepresentations, obfuscations, lack of clarity and all of a sudden it tips and you have this culture where that’s the expectation.
The other thing that we’re seeing with companies is there will be a defnining moment — we call this ‘the turning point’, where maybe it’s about a layoff. They’ve been pretty truthful about most things but when it comes to some major announcement, they’re not truthful. And that turning point turns their culture into one that basically embraces this lack of candor.
Renn Vara: And that can happen pretty quickly too, I bet.
Dick Cohn: Very quickly.
[Them Music]
Announcer: You are listening to More Than Talk. We will return to Renn’s conversation with Art Bell and Dick Cohn, authors of “Winning With Truth In Business”, after this quick communication tip.
Renn Vara: So, you’ve been asked to handle a blog or press interview. What do you do? Well, here are some very top level ideas to consider. First, remember that the person who’s interviewing you is not the audience but instead the filter to your audience. You only need to answer the questions in ways that will serve you and your company whatever medium being used — audio, video, or print.
Second, get your message down to three ideas, and then as the pros always say, “Stay on message.” Simply put, don’t talk about anything except for the three ideas you pre-planned. Harder said than done, to be sure. And then third, use the three skills that help you stay on message. We call them ‘bridging, blocking and breaking’.
Bridging which means answer their question no matter what their asking but keep it short and then bridge back to your three ideas. Blocking meaning if asked something you shouldn’t or can’t answer you simply say something like, “You know, I didn’t come prepared to answer that issue but if you’d like more on that I’m glad to get someone who can.” And then you bridge back to your three ideas.
And then finally, what we call breaking. This is when the reporter either gets annoyed with you because you’ve been staying on message or keeps asking the same questions again and again. With breaking, you nicely stop the interview and say something like, “I sense that I’m not giving you the information you need. What are you looking for?” This forces the reporter or blogger to expose their agenda or helps them to clarify what their doing. It’s good either way.
So, there you have it. Get your three messages down and adopt the three B’s — bridging, blocking, and breaking. The next time you’re asked to talk with The New York Times, you’ll be ready for anything. For this week’s communication tip, I’m Renn Vara.
[Theme Music]
Announcer: You are listening to More Than Talk. Now let’s get back to the interview with Art Bell and Dick Cohn.
Renn Vara: I know in the book, you talk a lot about the solutions and what the company should embrace. We’re reminding the audience today that we’re talking with Art Bell and Dick Cohn, authors of the book called “Winning With Truth In Business”. So, let’s go into some solutions arguments.
Art Bell: Sure. Let’s start with the macro solution and then go to a micro solution. At the macro level, at the largest level in organizations, top management has to ask itself the question, “Are truthfulness, candor, clarity important values in this organization or not?” If they are, “How can we promote them throughout the organization and reward people accordingly who practice those values in the organization?”
From the micro level, we as individual employees wake up in the morning, I think we have to ask ourselves, “As part of my sense of self, as part of who I am as a professional, am I a person who speaks truthfully to other people or am I a huckster that basically is going to look someone in the eye and tell a convenient lie that will get me perhaps short-term to my result but long-term into either legal hot water, psychological hot water, moral hot water, or personal hot water?”
And, I think those are the two ends of the spectrum that do meet in the middle at a happy solution where work life becomes as truthful as having breakfast with the kids.
Renn Vara: I still have a problem with it because I know that a lot of people are convinced that they’re dependent on their boss starting this town change that, “I’m not going to risk it because frankly, I got to pay my house payment or maybe have a kid in private school. I’ve got a lot of bills to pay. I’m not going to risk this idea of candor if I don’t think my boss is truly going to embrace this idea.”
Dick Cohn: Companies who want to take this path have to reward candor. They have to reward dissent. They have to reward honest feedback. They have to do these with money, recognition, and promotion. They have to penalize those who do not speak out. They have to listen especially well to employees who are close to customers. This is key. They need to define loyalty to include pointing out weaknesses and suggesting alternatives and not just saying everything’s okay.
Art Bell: One of the most powerful channels of communication in any company, of course, is the grapevine. And companies that dissemble — companies that make it a policy to hide the truth from themselves, from their employees, and from their customers — usually have a grapevine going on that’s carrying very contrary messages.
The goal of our work is to bring some sort of harmony between what the grapevine’s saying and what’s being said throughout management circles within the building itself. When the grapevine tells you that, “Yeah, we pretty much credit what the boss is saying and we’re free to say that to the boss’s face” — that’s when you know you’re a forward moving organization, that you have a team.
Renn Vara: Is there a business risk to this?
Art Bell: The first business risk is that you’re going to hear information from your people that you’re not used to hearing. You have to get used to the fact that that’s good for you, not bad for you.
One of the things business leaders will find when they fill that truth vacuum is that all of a sudden, they will be empowered in a million ways that they haven’t felt for years. They’ll feel like the person who’s speaking their truth to their organization, and that can be an extremely powerful force in behalf of productivity.
Dick Cohn: And I’d also like to end this on a slight note of humor quoting one of my favorite authors, Mark Twain, who said, “Always tell the truth. That way you don’t have to remember what you said.”
Renn Vara: Very good point. Art Bell, Dick Cohn, authors of the book “Winning With Truth In Business”, thank you both.
Art Bell: Thank you. Take care.
Dick Cohn: Thank you, Renn.
How do you stay on topic with a clever interviewer that won’t accept your “talking points” as an answer, someone who is familiar with “bridging,” “blocking,” and “breaking?”
Hmmm. I believe that if you truly stick with the three Bs, you can be sure to stay on message. The point is to truly inform not to dodge questions. I think Art and Dick did well don’t you? Thanks for your comment.
[...] Art Bell, author of more than 40 books and a professor at The University of San Francisco, returns to the program to discuss another text he’s penned. The book, McGraw Hill’s Guide to Banishing Speaker’s Nerves, tackles a subject that most people have a lot of trouble with and we were glad to talk to him about it. [...]