The unvarnished truth
- Louise Kelly
- 4 July 2008
Photo credit: ANTHONY GEERNAERT
A friend and colleague of mine who is a management consultant has a favourite saying that lives with me today: ‘like putting lipstick on a pig’. It was his way of referring to someone’s futile efforts to make something awful look good.
You need to have high self-esteem to eagerly accept criticism and apply it in your business. Most of us get defensive or, worse still, go into denial when we are on the receiving end of criticism. Yet that is exactly what we must be open to if we want our businesses to continually improve.
The most successful people recognise that criticism and problems are actually chances to grow and get better. Top sales people actually jump for joy when a customer gives them negative feedback or points out a problem. They know that it is in such moments the relationship can grow.
Self-awareness is vital to your growth as a business and as a leader. Self- awareness allows leaders to surround themselves with people who have strengths where they are weak. It gives a business the ability to see what is working and what is broken. Only weak leaders need to surround themselves with people who regularly tell them they are right.
There is an art to giving and receiving criticism. Some people give criticism poorly: the politically safe, the doom and gloomers, and the control freaks. Watch out for them and put any feedback through a reverse filter.
If people stay politically safe, they often withhold the information a business needs to grow. Control freaks use criticism to disempower you, while doom and gloomers fixate on things and make them sound worse than they are. A person who offers you authentic criticism for your highest good is giving you a gift. There is a famous saying in neuro-linguistic programming: there is no such thing as failure, only feedback. Ninety-nine percent of success is failure.
One of my all-time favourite business texts is Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy, Ram Charan and Charles Burck . It talks about realism being an essential ingredient in a successful business. It is about the unvarnished truth well told: having the confrontation, pointing out mistakes, admitting what you don’t know and acknowledging weaknesses. Make realism the goal of every conversation within your business and with your customers.
Customer research is vital to realism. You need to spend time looking at how your business fulfils your customers’ quality of life and rating the importance and performance of what you deliver to the customer. It needs to be a dialogue. Ideally, conduct in-depth, one-on-one interviews to really probe at what’s going on.
So what are the lessons for small business? Take your customers out to lunch and listen. Take your staff out to lunch and listen. Get customers’ voices into your business. One way is to make audio recordings of staff and customer feedback and use it to paint a picture of what is really going on. The secret is to get real.
Louise Kelly is the director of research and communications agency Hearts and Minds.
Tools for self-awareness
The Life Trap model, from the book Reinventing your Life by Jeffrey Young, Janet Klosko and Aaron Beck, is the most powerful tool I have discovered for self-awareness. You can listen to Jeffrey Young’s podcast at www.mentalhelp.net/common/ rss/podcasts/wisecounsel and learn about the 18 life traps at Young’s web site for schema therapy, www. schematherapy.com/id73.htm.
