Top Tools of 2021: Honesty

According to James Altucher, author of Choose Yourself, honesty is a long-game strategy that “compounds exponentially, not over days or weeks, but years and decades.” Investing in honesty builds the collateral you have with others, which leads your employees to be more dedicated to their jobs and your customers, more loyal to your products and services. Investors and partners are also more willing to support your company and take a risk on your new endeavor, providing you with the opportunity to expand and increase your company’s viability.

But how exactly do you get there? A few of the things you may be wondering are:

• What does it mean to “invest in honesty” and how do you ensure that you’re doing it?
• Who is responsible for this amorphous task and how do you hold them accountable?
• Where should honesty be targeted and do all of your stakeholders require the same level of honesty?

Well, you ask really good questions. And we at Atrómitos asked some of the same ones when we started thinking about honesty as the next Top Tool of 2021.

WHO NEEDS HONESTY?

There are two ways to answer the question of, “who” when it comes to honesty. First, who needs to be honest, and second, with whom do you need to be honest?

Put blatantly: everyone in your company should be honest. And that behavior will come from the top, through a culture set by your company’s leadership. In an interview for The Economist’s Executive Education Navigator, fraud specialist Christopher Bauer, Ph.D. explained that how a company behaves at the top level is a critical factor when looking at behaviors of the entire employee base.

And the behavior of your company’s leadership does not stop with modeling; it continues with enforcing and accountability. We know that the terms “enforcing and accountability” have a fire-and-brimstone feeling to them and can invoke concerns about punishments and other punitive actions. In other words, they can often elicit fear. In fact, it is that “fear” that truth and communication expert Steven Gaffney says causes a lack of honesty in the first place.

According to Gaffney, the reasons people are dishonest, “are not often because we want to be unethical. It is simply because we are afraid to speak the truth.” The truth may call to light underperformance, such as a missed deadline or a lost customer. An honest opinion may be at odds with the views of teammates. Regardless of the reason, leaders must recognize if and when employees fear telling the truth at the risk of retaliation.

Given that we’ve all had enough of fear-based tactics in our leadership over the last four years, let’s decide to take a different approach in 2021. Instead of thinking about “enforcing and accountability,” let’s use 2021 to support employees in acknowledging where they need assistance performing their job functions. Let’s encourage the creativity of team members who think outside the box and against the status quo and celebrate opportunities to improve your company based on critical feedback from employees, customers, and collaborators.

If your leadership and employees are all embodying a culture of honesty, then your company can pivot to thinking about with whom you need to be honest. We’ll let you in a secret: it’s a really short (and maybe obvious) answer.

Everyone. You need to be honest with your employees, customers, collaborators, investors, Board members, and everyone in between. But don’t worry, we are not implying that everyone needs the same level of information. We’re simply advocating that the information provided to each group be the truth. If you are expecting your employees to be honest with you, then you should anticipate clients, Board members, and partners will expect the same from the company.

TOOLS FOR THE TRADE

So everyone in your company needs to be honest and your company needs to be honest with everyone. Thank you for reading and go forth and conquer.

…Just kidding—we have more to offer by way of methods.

It may not be easy to build the culture of honesty you desire in your company. If it were, everyone would be doing it perfectly and thoughts like ours would not be necessary. But honesty is not always easy, and we want to share some tools to help you along the way.

First, it’s important to understand the difference between “honesty” and “transparency.” You should always be 100% honest when you are being transparent, however, you do not always need to be 100% transparent when you are being honest. In the pursuit of helping you not get lost in the honesty versus transparency debate, we recommend this 2016 article from GovTech on how the two play out in the realm of government.

In said article, the author states that “Honesty means saying, ‘Hey, there’s something I need to tell you,’ before anyone even starts poking.” This leads us to our second tool of the trade: the three levels of honesty.

Gaffney outlines three levels of honesty: Reactive, Proactive, and Foreshadowing. By asking yourself what level of honesty you and your company have, Gaffney believes that you “can begin to address what to do to correct and enhance any relationship.”

Next, consider an Honesty Audit, as written about by Inc.com, which helps you better understand how your company is interacting with your customers. The audit coves six domains: Interaction Volume, Tenor, Speed, Results, Helpfulness, and Transparency. While it may be tempting to conduct such an audit yourself, the author does recommend using a third party to increase the objectiveness of the exercise.

Lastly, share your honesty. If you are going to invest the time and resources into understanding what honesty looks like at your company, it is important to identify a mechanism through which to share how the culture gets embodied in the work that you do. We have previously written about the importance of creating and revising your business plan, and see this document as a key opportunity to show how you are weaving honesty into your team’s work. After all, your business plan speaks to all of your stakeholders. 

HONESTY HOUR

In the time of social media and “fake news” and platforms for everyone, honesty can be hard to find. Sometimes it is impossible to locate. But that should not discourage us from the work of building an honest company.

In fact, in the spirit of deciding to be and do better, it is our responsibility to put honesty and truth into the world so that others who are looking can find it. Yes, honesty will help your bottom line and employee retention. But the honesty of your company will also help pave the way for others to act in kind, (re)creating a culture of truth and (re)building trust among and between us.