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You look at some of the best organizations, and the first thing you’ll find is a deep core sense of honesty, at least at the most senior level. I’m not saying it’s perfect, but you need honesty specifically around problems. How we got here and how we’re going to solve it.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, in business, it’s math. It’s as simple as supply and demand. It’s as simple as the cost of the product and what you sell it for, the amount of inventory you have, and the amount of products that you sold. Those are very easy metrics, that are very clear, that determine the success for the most part of a business. That math does not have many emotions attached to it. That math is very, very honest. We sold three things widgets today. Our forecast was to sell 30. If someone’s not truthful as to, a. that you sold three, that’s obviously horrible, and that’s a whole another disaster if you can’t get the truth on the math part.
But going one step deeper, if you don’t get the truth as to why you only sold three, why the forecast was 30, how are you going to course correct the forecast and the actual selling of more product? People have to come together and be honest about that because somebody obviously didn’t do their job as correct as they forecasted or as good as someone expected. And truth-telling around something as simple as that forces the working team to accept what went wrong and move forward in a way that would rectify what went wrong based off the truth. Not finger pointing, based off the truth.