Facing the Truth
by Vic WIens
A number of authors have recently focused on the importance of facing the truth. I would like to highlight how this principle applies personally and corporately.
On a personal level, a colleque whose judgement I value, challenged me the other day about a "blind spot" in my parenting. A few days before I had read the following observation by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz in their book The Power of Full Engagement,
"It is one thing to clarify our values and quite another to behave in accordance with them each and every day. Facing the truth about the gap between who we want to be and who we really are is never easy. Each of us has an infinite capacity for self-deception. In myriad ways, we push from our awareness that which we find unpleasant or upsetting or contrary to the way we wish to see ourselves. Until we can clear away the smoke and mirrors and look honestly at ourselves, we have no starting point for change." (p. 148)
On a corporate level, Jim Collins makes the same point. He calls it "confronting the brutal facts." In the book Good to Great, Collins writes,
"The good-to-great companies displayed two distinctive forms of disciplined thought. The first...is that they infused the entire porcess with the brutal facts of reality.... You absolutely cannot make a series of good decisions without confronting the brutal facts." (p. 69, 70)
The good-to-great research also identified that,
"The moment a leader allows himself to become the primary reality people worry about, rather than reality being the primary reality, you have a recipe for mediocrity, or worse." (p. 72)
Our post-modern culture emphasizes the compulsion for humans to create their own meaning and to create their own truth. While that is a correct observation of human nature, it is a brutal fact that we often deceive ourselves about reality as we do so. It is only by creating a culture that values the pursuit of objective reality in our corporate settings that we begin to see the brutal facts of our corporate reality. While this will always be an imperfect process, it is an absolutely necessary process. One of the great values of bringing in an outside consultant is the consultant's ability to draw out the brutal facts that no one really wants to talk about.
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