Success in today’s business environment is contingent upon jumping over hurdles better, faster, and cheaper than the competition. There will be hurdles from both inside the organization (e.g., trying to please multiple masters in a matrixed environment) and outside the work context (e.g., a family emergency). Further, there will be very complex hurdles to confront in today’s global marketplace (e.g., SARS outbreak in Asia; war in the Middle East). These challenges will make leading effectively in today’s environment difficult. Count on it.

So if forthright discussions are conducted in dyads and off line, leaders aren’t making tough decisions from the same information base, at a just-in-time pace.

This is not ideal for today’s times.

Consider an analogous scenario: A teenager has been looking forward to a party for weeks, but the day of the party he gets ill. His mother forbids him to go to the party as long as he has a fever. So, in a ‘rabid pursuit of short term self-interest’ (I can say this: I have a teenager at home), the teenager sucks on an ice cube when his mom leaves to get the thermometer. She returns, takes his temperature, and ‘learns’ (from her ‘scientific’ data gathering) that he is fever-less. And off he goes to the party.

Wrong decision. But because the mom was duped into thinking all was ‘fine; a short-term self-interest agenda won.

After 20 years of leadership coaching, here is what I see: At the top of many companies, the tough truth telling, what I call real-time ‘vulnerability’ is not just infrequent, it’s taboo. While executives might be well schooled in telling what they think is the hard truth about YOU, they are in less of a rush to share the truth about their concerns, equivocation, uncertainty, doubts, imbalance. The appearance of personal and organizational control is, for many, perceived requirements for executive success and security.

Let me ask: How often in executive meetings do you hear:

• I don’t know
• I am having a really tough time and I need your help
• This makes no sense to me
• What are we going to stop doing to accommodate these new expectations
• I haven’t had fun at work in a long time
• I think we’re going about this all wrong
• This issue is still unresolved for me
• I don’t have an answer and I’m not even sure how to articulate the question
• We say all the right things and we try harder but our results are no better
• I feel stuck

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