If you were CEO, it'd be no problem to speak in a credible voice informed by your authentic voice. But, alas, you are not.
Or if you are the CEO, well you can't say it's your upper management holding you back. But it's your legal department, or your strategic partners or the investors or the shareholders. The industry might go ballistic, the press would have a heyday or your customers would be appalled. Best case: You'd lose that professional veneer of infallability you've worked so hard to fortify.
So what level of authority would you have to attain for it to be absolutely acceptably safe to be straightforward and frank and...yourself?
Ricardo Semler, Harvard-trained CEO of the Brazilian corporation Semco, and the author of Seven Day Weekend, writes:
My own people have often been flabbergasted at my admission of guilt for product deficiencies during customer presentations. Dismayed, they would see our case going down the drain. More often than not, however, the customer would be taken aback by my frankness, and believe in the rest of what we had to say.In one famous incident, we'd been battling with Anglo American Mines over who was at fault in a mishap with gold mixing equipment. I went to see them, and confessed we had found drawings that definitely proved that the fault was ours. Though the drawings had been found some time before, I had only just learned about them.
Our people were shaken. The $450,000 cost of redoing the equipment was a lot to us at the time, but Anglo American reacted as I had hoped. They thanked us for our honesty, and ordered two more mixing machines. We used the money to fund the replacement of the older machines. They're our avid customers to this day.
On another occasion involving a presentation to a bank, I shared our findings about their engineering department with the directors seated around me. I said we should be hired because they had an incompetent engineering concept in place, and because their contracts were inflated, both of which indicated corruption to me. Everyone blanched. Jose Alignani [CEO of a the company that Semco had a joint venture with] glowered at me in the elevator down to the garage, as the rest of our group stared silently away. We received the contract, but Alignani and his people still spent the next two years explaining that I had not read the report carefully, and that I am a bit unpredictable. But after the bank's purchasing manager was fired for corruption in the second year, things improved.
My colleagues never know how I'm going to use internal information in front of a client, but neither do I. In the beginning, they didn't see the merit of being totally frank with the customer. They came to realize that this path is much more productive, although they are afraid of where the conversation can go when they're not conducting it carefully.....
One time, I visited the director of another bank whose building we had just begun to manage. The property manager there had been known to sexually harass the cleaning women.
This man was close to some of the bank managers, and they protected him. I asked the director what he'd think if I brought him a newspaper clipping with the headline: "Bank Manager Harasses Women - Board Aware and Silent." He looked stunned, and our team members, not knowing that I would bring this up, looked up at the ceiling, out the window, at their shoes.
After a brief pause, the bank director answered with two words: "Fire him." Since then, that bank has asked for our help with delicate issues that require meeting the truth head on.
At yesterday's Outsource-Proof Your Career seminar, it was either Daniel Pink or Tom Peters (I don't remember) whom quoted Roseanne: "Nobody gives you power, you just take it."
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