Too little said, too much communicated

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I’ve been thinking about this matter of lying that came up in the last post, and it occurred to me we operate under three assumptions when we’re considering whether to be truthful with others:

  1. Only what’s said counts
  2. The person to whom I’m talking is small and fragile and couldn’t possibly handle the truth
  3. No-one will know I haven’t been truthful if I just say nothing.

1. Only what’s said counts

We have it that we’re not communicating if we’re not speaking. Wrong. The unsaid is communicated, and the unsaid shouts louder than the said. Not only does the content of the unsaid shout, the fact of it does too. All of us are geniuses of the first order when it comes to knowing something is there, something is off. As the great US novelist, Anne Tyler, has one of her characters say of his family situation:

Too little said, too much communicated.

And saying something rather than nothing doesn’t change the equation one jot if the something is not the truth. Withholding the truth and giving a “white lie” instead is still a case of the unsaid. The fact of the lie, the fact of the withholding, registers. It registers in the speaker and in the other person and in the world.

The world is not merely the said; it is also the unsaid. The world is not merely the things; it is also the non-things. The world is not merely being; it is also not-being.

2. “They are small and fragile and couldn’t possibly handle the truth”

Only one thing to say here, and I’d suggest a mirror would come in handy. Who is small and fragile and not able to handle the truth?

All of us are large and able. Unexpected wonders occur when we give up our listening of others as small.

3. No-one will know if I haven’t been truthful

Wrong again. You’ll know.

***

Image: Photograph by George Roder

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Good-looking

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There’s a passage by the best-selling author and philosopher, Alain de Botton, that makes me laugh like … well, “like a parent on the opening night of a school play.”

… my priority was to be liked, rather than speak the truth. A desire to please led me to laugh at modest jokes like a parent on the opening night of a school play. With strangers, I adopted the servile manner of a concierge greeting wealthy clients in a hotel … I sought the approval of figures of authority and after encounters with them, worried at length whether they had thought me acceptable. When passing through customs or driving alongside police cars, I harboured a confused wish for the uniformed officials to think well of me.*

Priceless. I see myself as an seven-year-old walking down the street in a new dress with my mother and sister, holding my sister’s hand for once, preening and thinking to myself  “Everyone will think we’re so good.” Or my father, driving the five of us, telling us to “sit up straight” as we passed a police car.

Wanting people to think well of us, wanting to look good, is universal, fundamental and the root of much anxiety and difficulty. It was running the show in a story I heard yesterday.

***

A writer was invited to speak at a conference about happiness and its “causes”. For some time leading up to the event he was worried because he did not feel happy. How was he going to speak on happiness to 1,000 people when he was feeling unhappy?

The event went ahead and he spoke on this and that, and did not come clean that he was struggling. A little while later he did come clean, though not with the original audience. He confessed to his blog audience instead, and his unhappiness over the lie was still palpable.

His story has a number of interesting angles. You can look at it from the angle of integrity. From everything this man has written in the past, the absence of integrity will be eating him alive. It also vividly demonstrates our desire to look good. It was so strong in him, as it is in all of us, that it overrode his desire to be honest, even though honesty is what he regards as the “calling card” of all his writing. Do you get that? His desire to look good at the conference – his desire to be seen as a happy person – trumped what most mattered to him, the very essence of his identity.  Small wonder he’s feeling miserable.

There are a number of things he can do to restore his sense of self, but that’s a post for another day.

Consider that true freedom, true peace of mind, happiness even, lies in giving up our desire to look good.

***

* Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy

Straight-talking is not about changing anyone

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When we contemplate speaking with a colleague about something that’s bothering us, there are two things that usually stop us. The first is fear; the second is resignation. Fear doesn’t need any explanation, nor any discussion of remedies. There’s just “do it”.

Resignation is more subtle. Underneath resignation is the thought “they’ll never change”. In this we’re perfectly correct. People don’t change, or don’t change as a result of us speaking with them. However, something else can change, and that’s the relationship.

Here’s an example from my own experience. It’s about a small everyday concern, just the type of thing that can make our work lives miserable.

***

By the end of week one in the new workplace, I realised it wasn’t unusual my new manager was talking constantly. She was always like this. When I’d get out of the lift in the morning I’d hear her strong, ex-smoker’s tones from the other side of the floor, and ahead of me would stretch the prospect of a day sitting at the neighbouring desk being battered by a stream of her random thoughts and complaints. She never stopped talking. It wasn’t stuff that required an answer or a comment; it was literally the contents of her head. And because she was highly anxious, the contents, let me tell you, were no picture.

It was like sitting next to a car alarm.

By week two I knew I had to do something. The next day I invited my manager for coffee. Over coffee, I told her the ongoing conversation was making me distracted and unable to concentrate, and I asked her what we should do. As you’d expect, she was taken aback at first and she said what I’d suspected. “It’s what I do. I have to say my thoughts out loud.“

She said a couple more things including “I can’t not do it”, until she realised I’d asked a question and then the conversation took a little turn and I knew it was going to be alright. She suggested I wear headphones if I wanted quiet, and that I tell her if I was working on something that required extra concentration. She also suggested we review the situation in a few weeks’ time. I agreed and we went back to work, with me feeling happy because she was genuinely concerned and because I’d got to say what was there for me.

Eight months later when the project was complete and I was going on to my next consulting engagement, my manager took me out for lunch. Over lunch, and again in a card, she thanked me for my work and acknowledged me:

Trust is the most important thing to me, and I just knew I could absolutely trust you to do what was required.

I don’t think it’s any coincidence she cited trust. She cited trust as a direct result of the conversation eight months earlier. Because here’s the thing: she did not change her talking habits one iota. She was just as loud and talkative at the end of the eight months as she had been at the beginning. What changed was our relationship.

We went from knowing each other only as manager and subordinate, to knowing each other as human beings. I got she was someone who was prepared to participate in a difficult conversation with generosity and aplomb, and she got I was someone who wasn’t prepared to hide things. And thereafter, I just cut her some slack when she went on and on, and she gave up the micromanaging and let me run things as I thought fit.

What started out unpromisingly ended by being a satisfying experience for both of us. And I’d work for her again. Neither of us changed. The relationship did. And it was the relationship that did the work of having us operate together successfully. Where two people are concerned, the relationship is a third and infinitely powerful participant.

***

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More 360-degree foolishness

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Susan Scott, author of Fierce Leadership, describes 360-degree reviews as one of the worst “best practices” used by organisations.

Feedback, she says, is invaluable. It’s just “the anonymous part that gets us in trouble”.

We’re like Woody Allen saying, ‘I’m not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’

Similarly, we’re not afraid of feedback. “We just don’t want to be in the room when it’s delivered.”

Here are some of her issues with anonymous feedback:

  1. Anonymous feedback doesn’t tell us what we need to know because it is anonymous;  ie, “most people don’t provide specific examples to support their evaluations because more specifics might help the recipient guess who wrote it.”
  2. When the feedback is given, usually once or twice a year, it “rarely immediately follows the behaviour that generated the evaluations, so exactly what we did right or wrong [...] remains a mystery.”
  3. Mostly, such feedback “merely affirms what we already know about who we have been since the day we were born.”
  4. Anonymity is “addictive and contagious”; we “grow accustomed to withholding our real thoughts and feelings. We become anaesthetised, barely registering the consistent message our gut has been sending us for years: Tell the truth. And we infect others.”

Why can’t we be straight with our work colleagues? It’s very simple, though we cook up a storm of reasons and justifications to pretend otherwise. “No, no, they’d be too upset”, “He couldn’t handle it”, “She’s going through a divorce”, “He’d get uncomfortable if I praised him”.

Ah. There’s the clue, the “tell”, as Scott calls it.

Who’d get uncomfortable?

The simple reason for our reticence is that we’re addicted to safety, addicted to being comfortable. Even if it’s momentary, we avoid discomfort at all costs.

She asks,

What is it we fear?

And answers thus:

The consequences of authenticity – intimacy and vulnerability. We fear being real, being ourselves, disclosing our real thoughts and feelings, being seen, being known.

She concludes,

It’s time to change all that.

To read her manifesto about changing it, read the book or go to the Fierce website.

***

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360-degree cruelty

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Earlier this year, when chatting with a client, I happened to mention I was writing a book about leaders. Instantly, the atmosphere changed, and the idle chit-chat became a real conversation. She told me a tale to make any employee’s hair stand on end.

In the previous year, she had had difficulties in the working relationship with her boss who had since left the company. She didn’t elaborate about the difficulties. Somewhere in the midst of the strife she had been asked to complete a 360-degree review.

A 360-degree review is an online survey which rates different aspects of an employee’s performance. It is sent to a certain number of people who are peers, “subordinates” and managers of the employee, the idea being it will provide various viewpoints – a 360-degree panorama – of an employee. The employee chooses the people to whom the survey will be sent, but does not know which person has given which response because the responses are anonymous.

The client did as requested and got a big shock. On the parameters purporting to measure emotional intelligence she scored close to the negative end of the spectrum. This was directly counter to her expectations. She said,

I was totally devastated.

She mentioned two other points:

  • as a result of the review a coach had been hired to help her raise her performance in specific areas
  • over a year later, she still puzzles about who said what, and why they might have said it.

I’ve thought about her story several times since I heard it. Here are some observations.

Institutionalised cruelty

360-degree reviews represent institutionalised cruelty. Franz Kafka wrote about modern man’s worst nightmare: the unspecified crime alleged by the unspecified accuser. And here we are, practicising the nightmare every day.

Institutionalised cowardice

360-degree reviews represent institutionalised cowardice. Such is the terror at the prospect of speaking to another human being in a way that’s straight and frank, a whole industry of cowardice has been concocted to avoid it.

The impact

A person treated in this way may be seriously impacted for months, even years, into the future if he or she doesn’t have the opportunity to get complete on the experience. In this person’s case, the coach may be able to assist her; however, at the time we spoke the emotional charge was still palpable.

How’s she left?

This person was big enough, courageous enough, to continue in her job, and since that time things have improved dramatically. The problematic manager has resigned and she admires her new boss. On the other hand, she is left unsure of where she stands with her colleagues and what they really think of her. That’s potentially crippling.

What about you? Do you have any horror stories of 360-degree reviews and other organisational instruments of torture? Add a comment or write me an email. I’m going to start keeping a file of them.

****

Image: From the movie, The Trial by Orson Welles, 1962, based on Kafka’s book

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Five kick-arse questions

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A couple of years ago on this blog I discussed a woman who was going round asking people a question and turning their answers into a book (hey, books are created on a lot less). Now, I didn’t mind the idea; it was just the question that sucked:

Have you had a happy life?

I ask you. Is that not a dumb question? Not least because you gotta catch people on their deathbed it seems to me before you’d get a response. Who else would be strong enough to give an answer to that question, except the dying?

And if the past tense thing is not enough to make you squint, there’s still the whole beside-the-point thing. Really, there’s only one correct answer to this question and that’s “who cares?”

No, no, no, questions are precious jewels and have to be handled accordingly. Here are some not-so-dumb questions for your delectation over the weekend.

1. What does it mean to be?

Martin Heidegger was a philosopher with a very big insight, in fact, the biggest since about 500BC.

Consider that every time we say something like “I am confident”, “I am no good at numbers”, “They are stingy”, “John is always on time”, “My wife doesn’t understand”, “My son will never get a job”, “Muslims are x” or “Christians are y”, we are communicating our understanding of what it means to be.

Heidegger realised all these instances of the verb “to be”, all these is’s and are’s, indicated that we think of Being as something fixed and immutable in time and space. Not only that, he said, we’d been thinking of Being as something fixed and immutable since the time of Socrates over 2,000 years ago.

Before Socrates, Heidegger realised, it had been a whole other picture. The pre-Socratic Greeks did not think of Being as something fixed and immutable, but as an arising into presence, an arising and an abiding. The ancient Greek term is poïesis, from whence the word poetry, and it translates as something like coming forth, emerging.

What would life be like if we thought of people and situations as instances of poïesis, as instances of being which arise or emerge according to context, as mutable, malleable, contingent, something that can be called forth? Every time on this blog I seem to be saying something weird, or something you may not get, consider that this is where I’m coming from, or intending to come from.

2. What is Nature asking for?

When I read this question by Rosamund Stone Zander in The Art of Possibility I was stopped in my tracks. What is Nature asking for? Man, I love this question.

It occurred to her when she was out in a canoe “on a dazzling summer day off New England’s coast” and she found herself “not knowing how to cope with so much beauty.” What is Nature asking for?, she thought. The answer, when it came to her, “springing from a naive part of me”, was that it’s asking us to participate.

Her question, and answer she found, reminds me of a favourite, half-remembered quotation of a fisherman, from a Daphne du Maurier book:

his dull eye surfeited with undigested beauty.

3. How to live?

All the great writers are asking this question. The greatest of the great, such as Leo Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf, are asking it explicitly. Like all questions, only more so, it demands its asking, over and over again.

4. Who am I being?

This one’s the natural corollary of question 1. If what it means to be is not what we think it is, who might we be, now and in every moment? If being is not fixed in time and space, but is called forth, who or what might we call forth?

If I’m facing a difficulty — if I’ve lost my job, if my marriage is breaking up, if one of my children is in danger, if I’m facing illness, if I’m uncertain or I’ve lost my bearings — who am I being in the face of it? Am I being righteous, indignant, resentful, bitter, timid, passive, resigned, a victim? Or am I being trusting, powerful, resourceful, in action, courageous, mighty, loving, inventive, accepting, forgiving?

Who are we, who we be, is in our hands, not in our circumstances.

5. How do you stop the wind from coming through the other end of your telephone line?

The inimitable Totsymae asked this question this week, and had me and thousands of others pondering the mysteries of ending telephone calls. Tots, you are a gem.

***

Image: Piazza d’Italia, by Giorgio de Chirico, 1913

Relationships: The Art of the Well-Met Breakdown

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When an upset occurs in a relationship, I often go straight to the script of my most successful play entitled “Relationships are hard work”. Here are some of its best-known lines:

“This always happens.”

“It’s just not possible for us to have a relationship.”

“This person is really not for me.”

“It’ll never work out.”

What I sometimes forget is that there’s another play showing in the theatre next door. This one is the lesser-known “Relationships are hard work and it’s not a problem they take work” and it has two sub-plots:

  • a successful, thriving relationship is a series of well-met breakdowns
  • breakdowns are an opportunity to bring forth something that is missing in the relationship.

Which play are you starring in?

***

Two blows for freedom this week, via language

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First, we had a ballot to decide who would lead the Labor government and be Prime Minister of Australia. Would it be Julia Gillard, the incumbent, or Kevin Rudd, the man who was pushed out of the role two years ago?

In the week leading up to the ballot, Ministers and other parliamentarians launched a war of words on each other. Not on the members of the other party, but on each other, the members of their own party and their fellow Ministers. The words were vicious, destructive, the kind you might spit out in the bitterest of your bitter moments. And it was all in public. The whole country looked on in shock and amazement, and the imminent demise of democracy seemed a foregone thing.

Then, late in the day, one Minister, Anthony Albanese, a man who had kept his silence for the week, held a press conference and spoke with integrity. He described, with tears in his throat, how he had given his life to the Labor Party and to “fighting the Tories”. He recounted the achievements and gifts of both Ms Gillard and Mr Rudd and honoured them as “formidable politicians … with good hearts and smart heads”. He stated without drama or side that the deposing of Rudd had not been correct, and for that reason, he would be voting for him in the ballot. In saying this, he was going against his close colleague, the Prime Minister, and allying himself with the camp that was not predicted to win. Yet he said it anyway.

The result was immediate. As one journalist put it,

the runaway public invective between the party’s leadership contenders screeched to a halt.*

Everyone woke as if from a nightmare. People remembered who they were. Both leadership contenders, burnished by another’s dignity, responded with grace. The Prime Minister refused his resignation despite the fact he would be voting against her, declaring him a man who “always wants to put the best interests of the Labor Party first”, and Mr Rudd found words of collegiality, “What we’ve done together under my leadership and Julia’s has been fantastic for the country.”

One man, one speech, and everything changed.

***

Second, in a thrilling surprise, we had Bob Carr, a former premier of NSW who had retired from politics six years ago, installed as Australia’s Foreign Minister.

Know what? I don’t care what Carr does or doesn’t do as Foreign Minister. What I care about is that he is a man with a Vocabulary and he’s not afraid to use it. With his beautiful resonant voice, politics might be microscopically easier on the ear and brain cells.

***

* Misha Schubert, The Sunday Age, February 26, 2012

Situations pertaining to leaders #5: Casual vilification in the workplace

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First day of the new consulting project, and the kick-off meeting with the client is imminent. The new consultant, contracted to do the bulk of the work, arrives.

The Project Director and the Account Executive are nervous. This is their big chance to really hook the client. Sure, the client’s been buying some back-room services, but this? This will be the beginning of the front-room stuff. They take aside the consultant for a little pre-meeting meeting.

The Account Executive starts.

Now, A (the Manager of the client workplace) has been here for about five years but this is a new project for her and she really doesn’t know anything; she’s uncertain and out of her depth; this could be a big win for her … it’s our job to make her look good.

The Project Director nods. The Account Executive goes on.

C (the Senior Manager), on the other hand, is lazy. Sure, he’ll be hanging around for the first bit, but after that, he’ll lose interest.

Both nod. They studiously avoid elaborating.

A short while later, the kick-off meeting starts. During the meeting, A and C start a vigorous battle of tit-for-tat. C states something he construes as a fact, A resists and asserts the opposite. A smirks, C rolls his eyes and asserts something else. C smirks and A says, “No, we didn’t decide on that, we decided on this …”, and so it goes for 40 minutes.

After the meeting, the new consultant, aghast at the general vituperation, passes comment to the Project Director and the Account Executive. They shrug, their eyes shooting off in all directions.

The new consultant, jaundiced within the first hour by the behaviour of colleague and client alike, ponders these questions:

  • how did the context created by the Project Director and the Account Executive contribute to the playing out of the scenario in the meeting? To what extent did the consultants’ casual vilification of the client staff bring forth the very demons they discussed?
  • if, instead of rehearsing the shortcomings of the client staff, the consultants had rehearsed the gifts and skills of those same staff, how would the meeting have been different?
  • what is it about the workplace that has us think “success” depends on knowing the worst of someone? For the consultant can still hear the unspoken assumption of the Project Director and Account Executive — “without knowing ‘what we’re up against’, we won’t be able to deliver what the client wants”
  • what will have us get that the casual, ubiquitous vilification of fellow workers is utterly poisonous, no matter the “justification”, no matter who indulges in it?

***

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Situations pertaining to leaders #4

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Last week I had the opportunity to interview one of the leaders of a large charitable organisation whose mission is  “enhancing life and increasing hope for disadvantaged, marginalised and oppressed persons, especially women and girls”.

The organisation has existed for more than 150 years, and sprang from the work of an order of nuns whose vision and commitment still animate the organisation today. The leader shared a story with me about how he and the organisation discovered what integrity really meant.

The test

About 15 years ago, the organisation faced a test. The State Government, led by Jeff Kennett, a deeply divisive figure in recent Australian political history, had just overturned the basis on which governments and charities had worked together for decades.

Until that point, charities worked together to assist their clients. They shared information with other organisations, and each organisation looked out for the other. They understood the efforts and successes of one organisation benefited all.  At one stroke, however, the government decided that henceforth charities would have to compete against each other for government funding.

Shocked and confronted

Each organisation in the sector was thrown back on itself to contemplate a future in which they would be isolated, competitive and obliged to assume the role of supplicant.  It was a time of deep despair and dismay for all organisations. Many doubted whether they would survive, and they feared for the lives and wellbeing of their clients.

At first, this man’s organisation was no different.

Shocked and confronted, the leaders of the organisation gathered together to choose their course of action. And that’s when the spirit of the long-ago nun who founded the order, a woman known as an “innovator, an ambitious person, impatient of authority”, rose again.

The group decided they could not take the government’s money on these conditions and they decided to speak out about it. They considered their long and illustrious history and the impact on the thousands of clients should their organisation not survive, and then they chose to fight anyway.

The eye of the storm

It was the beginning of a very difficult period in the life of this man and his organisation. They were subjected to threats, had to make staff redundant and endured, he said, “many sleepless nights.”

The threat to the organisation’s survival lasted for many months and was only resoundingly decided when the government, against all predictions, lost the 1999 election.

Looking back on that time, the man said while it had been “torrid” and hugely confronting, there had been many unexpected benefits from the organisation’s refusal to participate in the game of competition; its refusal, as he put it, to “sell their soul”.  One of them was the impact on writing their next mission statement.

Shortly after it became clear the eye of the storm had passed, it happened to be their business-planning season. This time, he said, writing their mission statement was a whole different exercise. This time everyone was conscious they were choosing words they had to be able to stand by should the situation require it.  Everyone had gotten that

it’s one thing to talk about integrity, it’s another to live it.

***

Image: Girl not alone, 2011, acrylic, gold leaf and coffee filters on canvas, 135 x 240 cm, by the wonderful Ghadah at Pretty Green Bullet

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