All good-to-great companies began the process of finding a path to greatness by confronting the brutal facts of their current reality.
When you start with an honest and diligent effort to determine the truth of your situation, the right decisions often become self-evident. It is impossible to make good decisions without infusing the entire process with an honest confrontation of the brutal facts.
A primary task in taking a company from good to great is to create a culture wherein people have a tremendous opportunity to be heard and, ultimately, for truth to be heard.
Creating a climate where the truth is heard involves four basic practices:
- lead with questions
- engage in dialogue and not debate not coercion
- conduct autopsies, without blame
- build red flag mechanisms that turn information into information that cannot be ignored
good-to-great companies faced just as much adversity as the comparision companies, but responded to that adversity differently. They hit the realities of their situation head-on. As a result, they emerged from adverstiy even stronger.
the Stockdale Paradox: Retain absolute faith that you can and will prevail, and, at the same time, confront the most brutal facts of your current reality.
Leadership does not begin just with vision. It begins with getting people to confront the brutal facts and to act on the implications.
Spending time and energy trying to "motivate" people is a waste of effort. The real question is not, "How do we motivate our people?". If you have the right people, they will be self-motivated. The key is to not de-motivate them. One of the primary ways to de-motivate people is to ignore the brutal facts of reality.
Chapter 4 in Good to Great