What We're Reading Now
Candor is One of Our Favorite Things
19 June 2012
Allison read Keith Ferrazzi’s one-page article on Candor, Criticism, and Teamwork from the January-February 2012 Harvard Business Review and was glad to learn three great tips for helping people have meaningful conversations in meetings and ultimately stronger relationships.
Tags: allison partners favorite, allison read, communication, courage, culture, leadership, meetings, teams, thoughtful candor
If you were to spend a little time gazing at our home page, you’d notice that the following words flash on your screen: success, change, growth, action, balance, learn, experience, challenge, and candor. We think words matter and these are some of our favorites. I’ve been catching up on back issues of the Harvard Business Review and am glad I found out that Keith Ferrazzi wrote one of the most succinct and meaningful pieces on the importance of candor I’ve ever read.
Ferrazzi and his team have done the research to prove that candor matters. He writes, “The teams that scored the lowest on candor saw the poorest financial returns among those banks during the recent global economic crisis,” and “In our research at more than 50 large companies over the past three years, we identified ‘observable candor’ as the behavior that best predicts high-performing teams.” Now you may be thinking, “Well sure, but candor is pretty hard to come by!” Ferrazzi acknowledges that too and suggests three great tips to support meaningful and candid meetings:
- Break meetings into smaller groups;
- Designate a ‘Yoda;’
- Teach ‘caring criticism.’
As a lifelong Star Wars fan with a Yoda Pez Dispenser on my desk, I’ll confess that Ferrazzi sealed the deal for me when he brought the great Jedi Master into the conversation. I’m going to keep this post brief because I think you’d be better served if you actually read the article and HBR generously provides the full text here. Let me know what you think of his advice. I’ll definitely be passing the tips along to my clients and following Ferrazzi’s blog and Tweets.
Comments
Our Comment Policy:
Our blog posts are only half of the conversation. What our readers have to say is equally important to us, and we're grateful for all the comments that continue the dialog.
To ensure that the discussion here is as useful as possible to all of our readers, please be respectful of our contributors and refrain from harassing, threatening and/or vulgar language. We reserve the right to screen and remove any comments from the site. If you have a question about a comment or want to discuss our policy, please contact us. We'll talk it over.
There are no comments for this entry yet.