Don’t-Want-to-Hear-It-But-Do-Want-to-Know

I thought I was crushing it
My Positive Organizational Change presentation to an over-capacity audience was knocking it out of the park. The audience was dialed in: learning, laughing, growing. 

I had just sent folks into discussion groups when a woman in the front row waved me over. 

“You have a….” She couldn’t finish the sentence as she fluttered her hand and fingers towards her face. 

“I have a…” I eagerly engaged, trying to help her end the sentence. I didn’t know what she was driving at, but since things were clicking it had to have been good. Maybe her hand was waving towards her face as she fended off the tears from the last insightful illustration. 

My mind filled in the blanks: I have a…great way of presenting? I have a…natural gift? 

“On your nose, you have a little…” She began digging through her purse and apologizing. Now, unfortunately, I knew exactly what I had. She handed me a tissue.   

I had a….dangler, booger, nose fruit. “Dried nasal mucus” according to Merriam-Webster. How long it had been there God only knows. (FYI, I’d done my typical pre-presentation check. Teeth, nose, zipper, hair. For the record, it had all been ship-shape.) 

She kept apologizing, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, but I would want to know if it were me.” She was apologetic, but I was grateful. Of course I wanted to know!   

Sharing Difficult News 

This is what I call “don’t-want-to-hear-but-do-want-to-know” information.  We encounter it every day:

• The quarterly numbers aren’t keeping pace, but does the boss really want to know? 
• An employee isn’t meeting expectations because they are pointed in the wrong direction and no one has the heart to tell him. 
• "I really need to take a vacation or I’m seriously going to snap." 

But here’s the thing… We all want to know

We all want to know. Whether it's spinach in the teeth, or I'm that employee pointed in the wrong direction? 

Sharing don’t-want-to-hear-but-do-want-to-know information is difficult. And necessary.

It demands a high trust culture. When done well, it actually lifts people up, guides them to bettering themselves, builds camaraderie on the team, and points towards solutions. 

Yet, everyday I train teams and coach leaders who don’t want to deliver difficult news because they are afraid it will demoralize their staff, or make the leader look bad.

So how do we do it? 

I advise people to name it with care-ful clarity. Name it because that’s what you would want someone to do for you. Even though it’s uncomfortable. Even though it may cause some low-level embarrassment now, it saves high-level embarrassment later. 

People who can do this are the people I want on my team. They share don’t-want-to-hear-but-do-want-to-know information because they care. They care about me, the team, and our performance. 

These are the people we want by our side. We know we can count on them.  And when we can count on one another our team performance goes into hyper-drive and we get more done, faster, and better. 

That front row truth teller earned so much of my trust in those 10 seconds. I knew I could count on her to tell be the hard truth even when it was news I didn’t want to hear. And so afterwards when she also shared with me how much she appreciated my session I knew I could believe her. I told her how grateful I was and thanked her over and over again.   

Greg Davidson Laszakovits trains teams to work together to achieve more than they ever thought possible.