Open, Honest, and Direct

by Aaron Levy

  I recommend going back to chapter 4 (page 69) or to the leadership toolkit (page 196) to see the steps. Plan for about thirty to sixty minutes for each stay interview.

  The performance conversation

  Make sure to hold a performance conversation—ideally quarterly or biannually. If your company requires doing them only once a year, that doesn’t mean you can’t have them more often. The purpose of this meeting is to evaluate the performance of your employee and to understand how she is tracking toward her long-term goals—measuring how she compared with her quarterly targets. This conversation is a time to assess her growth toward current goals and to set future goals.

  Have your employee come to the meeting prepared to share her results. It’s often best to review these before the meeting. The performance conversation is a powerful way to look at the big picture for your employee—pulling out of the weekly working items—giving her objective feedback on her growth and goals.

  Here are a few sample questions I ask my team:

  • What are some significant accomplishments from last quarter?

  • What didn’t go as planned? What happened? What did you learn?

  • What is an area of growth you want to focus on for next quarter?

  • What can I do to better support you?

  Plan for between sixty and ninety minutes for each review, with at least thirty minutes of prep time ahead of the meeting.

  The self check-in

  The most successful leaders make time not only for their team but also for themselves. It’s so easy to get caught up in the day to day, going from one meeting to another and seemingly not having time to pick your head up and take a strategic look forward.

  This weekly check-in with yourself is where you take the time to reflect on the week that just passed, to look forward to next week’s lineup of meetings, and to plan strategically what you need to accomplish versus what you have time to accomplish. I suggest setting aside an hour every Friday afternoon or Monday morning on your calendar to make sure you set up yourself and your week for success.

  Here are three steps to follow when conducting your weekly self-reflection:

  Reflect on the past week

  Take a look at your calendar, your to-do list, and your goals to clarify what you accomplished, what you missed, what you did well, and what you’re proud of. This step is designed to help you identify gaps and celebrate successes.

  Plan the week ahead

  Look at your calendar for next week. What do you have coming up? What prep work do you need to do? What big projects and small tasks do you need to accomplish by the end of the week? Use these questions to make your to-do list. If you don’t have enough time to do everything on the list, look to the next paragraph.

  Say no, delegate, or delay

  Based on the meetings you already have on your calendar, your personal or family commitments, and the projects you need to make progress on in the coming week, you’ve likely planned more work than you have time to accomplish. Instead of telling yourself you can get it all done, be a bit more realistic and strategic. Use these four questions to determine what you are really going to get done in the week.

  • What takes priority?

  • What should you be saying no to?

  • What can you delegate to someone else?

  • What do you have to delay?

  Once you’ve worked through these questions, you should have a more clearly defined plan of meetings, projects, and tasks. You’re now set up for success in the next week.

  If you take the few minutes today to put each of these on the calendar, you’ll stop worrying about being there for your people because you’ve already set aside time to listen, ask, and support them on a weekly, monthly, and annual basis. Scheduling your leadership drives consistency in the way you lead, what you accomplish, and what others can expect of you as a leader. When you do this, you create a whole lot more clarity for yourself and your employees. It will give you focus while also empowering your people to own their growth.

  DO ONE THING WELL

  I know there is a lot of information in this book, a lot of ideas that may spark you to take action, a lot that you want to make sure you incorporate into your leadership toolkit today. I encourage you to take that energy and move it toward taking one action, not ten. Start small. If all you take from this book is one thing, one idea, one action, and you start applying it to the way you lead, you’re moving in the right direction.

  Write down the one thing you want to focus on, how you’re going to make it happen, and how you’ll track your progress. Do it now! Focus on consistently taking action toward this focus, on learning from what’s working and what’s not, and I promise your actions will have an impact.

  WHERE WE’VE COME

  We’ve come a long way together. Thank you for your energy, engagement, and hard work. We started on this journey together in part 1, where we discussed why most managers suck and how to get it right when hiring and promoting managers in your company. We looked at the traits that define great leaders and dug down to find the underlying skills practiced and actions taken by great leaders. We looked at the critical difference between knowing what to do and actually doing it in chapter 3. Remember the field of grass analogy? We walked through the process of developing a new habit and laid out the steps to make it easier for you to create that new path, the new skill, and repeatedly follow the new path.

  We changed gears in part 2, where we focused on learning and applying the skills it takes to be better at leading people. Each chapter served as a practical guide for you and your managers to practice going down the ideal path. We set an intention to develop the skills of your leaders so you can get more out of your people. In chapter 4, we looked at the “bloomers” study, which highlighted the importance of listening with intention and attention. We identified your listening blind spot and introduced the stay interview as a way to practice listening with your team today. In chapter 5, we explored the systematic irrationalities of our brain through confirmation bias and learned how to overcome this blind spot by engaging in our three-year-old self—our curiosity as a means to be better evaluators of people and situations.

  Chapter 6 centered on the importance of clarity and psychological safety as key ingredients for creating and sustaining a high-performance team. Without either of these, people don’t know what they are working toward, how they should work together (the rules of the game), and how they can hold themselves and others accountable. We created our own team agreements, discussed how to make deals with your team, and then learned a set of tips to model open, honest, and direct communication with your people. We finished with the last and often most difficult skill to practice: critical conversations. This skill requires more than just knowing the steps to take but also a mindset shift, an understanding that as human beings we all see the world through our own filter; and in order to help others grow, we must be willing to give them the critical feedback even if it’s uncomfortable in the moment, because feedback is a gift.

  The chapters were laid out in a specific order, with each chapter built on your ability to understand and practice the previous chapter’s skill. It starts with listening; in order to properly be able to ask powerful questions, you first need to be able to listen with intention and attention. Open, honest, and direct communication doesn’t happen if you’ve not first shown your people you care, you hear them, and you are a strategic leader who constantly digs beneath the surface to evaluate the core issues at hand. You now have the four essential skills to be a better leader of people, to elevate your game from where you started to where you want to go.

  WHERE DO YOU GO FROM HERE?

  Start by taking the smallest action. Small actions taken consistently over time make a powerful impact. We rarely notice them because as leaders, we are constantly looking forward, forgetting to celebrate our successes along the way. We learn most from our mistakes because we sit in them, try to understand them, and make adjustments to
avoid them in the future. As important as this is, it’s equally important to celebrate your successes, however small they are, and to take a long look at what worked so you can make sure to continue doing it in the future. When we fail to identify the wins, we easily lose track of what’s worked, failing to notice our true factors of success. Don’t worry about developing all four skills right away. Start with one action, with one skill, and see the impact that developing it into a consistent practice has on your team.

  If you’ve not yet put the activities into practice, go back to the summary pages at the end of chapters 4–7, review them, and do the activities for each. Take one activity per week, then go back to the chapter summary and use the reflection questions to assess what worked, what didn’t, and what needs to be adjusted for the next time you put your learning into practice. Each of the tools in the book can also be found in the leadership toolkit or, in a more interactive way, online at openhonestanddirect.com.

  WHAT’S THE POINT?

  Open, honest, and direct leadership means you are present, ready to listen, curious as an evaluator, direct in your communication, and ready to take the next hard step, even if that means holding a critical conversation.

  When you practice these skills consistently over time, you and your leaders start to create a culture of learning, in which everyone is working together to reach the best possible outcome: a culture where you, your leaders, and the entire team get to be themselves and are rewarded for it with fun, fulfillment, and success.

  This freedom and growth come from doing the work. What I’ve shared in this book was designed to trigger you to take action, to help you and your leaders move from knowing what to do to actually doing it. The great secret of leadership isn’t the knowledge of what makes a great leader or even what gets in the way of your leadership. It is being willing to take the next hard step, to do the work it takes to lead others, to act with intention and choice and not by circumstance. This requires effort, energy, and commitment from you and your leaders. Change is not easy, but I hope I showed through this book that it’s also not too complex.

  Even with all the tools and skills learned in this book, to ultimately get the most out of your people, you need to be real, to be yourself, because no tool can replace authenticity, humility, and vulnerability. The best leaders are the ones who know themselves, who are willing to be open, honest, and direct. In doing this, you’ll be on the path to getting the most out of your people.

  Everything you want, any change you seek, is just outside of your comfort zone. Continue embracing a beginner’s mindset, continue challenging your status quo, continue showing up with authenticity and humility, and you will see results.

  LEADERSHIP TOOLKIT

  If you’re ready to take action and start practicing the skills from this book, I’ve compiled the activities and key models for you here.

  CHAPTER 1: WHY MOST MANAGERS SUCK

  Hire right

  The most important thing to do is make sure you have the right people in the right seats. This means taking a step back and looking at your hiring and promotion practices for leaders. Before hiring a manager, I recommend first asking yourself these three questions.

  ACTIVITY: THREE QUESTIONS FOR HIRING RIGHT

  □ Does she want to lead?

  □ Do I have the right metrics in place to measure her success?

  □ Does she have the skills to lead others?

  ACTIVITY: IDENTIFY YOUR INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTORS

  1. Create a list of all your people managers.

  2. Go through each manager on the list one by one and ask yourself: a. Does she truly want to lead? (yes, no)

  b. What is the impact of her managing people on your team? (positive, neutral, negative)

  c. Is she better served as an individual contributor? (yes, no)

  3. Put a big star by each manager who is a better fit as an individual contributor.

  4. Determine your course of action with each manager.

  CHAPTER 2: WHAT MAKES A LEADER GREAT

  Habits of a leader

  Instead of spending our time focused solely on the outcomes great leaders produce, we need to put more energy into the actions that drive the outcomes.

  CHAPTER 3: HOW HABIT FORMATION WORKS

  A process for habit development

  The learn-apply-reflect model is designed to get your leaders practicing skills and putting them into action. The quicker and more frequently a leader can take their new skill, apply it to a real-life situation, and dissect their performance of it, the quicker the skill becomes a habit.

  CHAPTER 4: LISTEN WITH INTENTION AND ATTENTION

  Notice your inner dialogue

  We all have internal conversations, but few of us pay attention to them well enough to control them. If you listen first to yourself, you can control your inner monologue so that you can then truly listen to others.

  Here’s an activity you can use to test yourself on this skill.

  ACTIVITY: BEING IN SILENCE

  1. Find a partner.

  2. Sit directly in front of your partner so that you are facing each other with your knees almost touching.

  3. Set a timer on your phone for three minutes and then put your phone facedown, near you, and in silent mode.

  4. Stay silent with this other person for the full three minutes.

  What thoughts ran through your head during this time? Did you look around the room? How many times did you think about the alarm and hope it would go off? Did you notice how uncomfortable the silence was? This is your inner dialogue. It’s where 90% of every conversation occurs—within your brain. Even if you’re thinking, This guy is crazy; I don’t have an inner dialogue! you are engaging with your inner dialogue at this very moment.

  Your listening blind spot

  We each show up with a tendency we fall back on when listening to others. Some of us listen to connect ideas; some of us listen to solve a problem; others listen to figure out what they are going to say next. Each of us listens for something, to do something. This is your listening blind spot.

  Common listening blind spots are when we listen

  • To determine my next steps

  • To decide if I should pay attention

  • To validate my ideas

  • To make sure I’m heard

  • To figure out what I’m going to say next

  • To prove myself

  • To learn the other person’s intentions

  • To understand the issue

  • To make my point

  • To help the other person

  ACTIVITY: DISCOVER YOUR LISTENING BLIND SPOT

  1. What is your natural tendency when listening to others (at work or home)? What are you listening to do?

  You may feel that several of the blind spots listed earlier describe you. For the sake of becoming a better listener, pick one. This is where you will focus your awareness and attention.

  I listen to ___________________.

  2. How has your blind spot helped you in your career?

  3. How has it held you back?

  4. What impact does your blind spot have on your team?

  Checklist for listening

  ACTIVITY: CHECKLIST FOR LISTENING

  Follow this checklist prior to a conversation in which you know it’s important to be present, and to listen with intention and attention.

  □ Remember your listening blind spot

  Simply being aware of your own listening blind spot ahead of time will help you notice when you are doing it. And when you notice, you can choose to stop.

  □ Remove all distractions

  This step is about removing the distractions that will get in the way of you being able to be present in the conversation. It could mean putting your phone on silent, turning off alerts on your computer, or not having your phone out. Even the presence of your phone facedown on the table during a meeting is a distraction for your brain, which is why my phone stays on silent in my pocket!


  □ Clarify the meeting’s purpose

  Start the meeting by getting clear on the purpose. What is each person trying to accomplish in this meeting? What would success at the end of the meeting look like? By beginning with the end in mind, you can let go of trying to wonder what the point of the meeting is and stay on task with the person and the meeting.

  The stay interview

  It’s time you put your learning into practice by holding a stay interview. A stay interview is the opposite of an exit interview. Instead of learning about why the person has decided to leave your company, it’s about going upstream and getting clarity on what will make your employee stay with you and your organization. A stay interview helps you connect with an employee outside of a normal one-on-one meeting, to learn about them and their desires for growth. Take the employee to coffee, out for lunch, or even on a walk around the block. Your primary goal is to learn about where your employee sees themselves in the next few years and what they want for their career.

  Start by asking these two questions, and then build on what you hear:

  1. What skills are you looking to develop?