The price for informed decision-making is transparency and accountability. And that’s a price that is often too high for many leaders to pay.
Some leaders are uncomfortable with transparency and accountability for fear of the unfair judgement it will bring upon them. They can feel they have no choice but to steer their organisation by gut feel, hearsay, anecdote or a biased selection of data. The actual truth about organisational performance remains unknown.
But what these leaders may not realise is that the price of transparency and accountability is usually much lower than the price of not knowing the truth. Organisations led by leaders in this predicament rarely perform well. And if they perform well in something, it’s usually at the expense of other important results and it’s short-lived. The ability for these leaders to lead their organisations to excellence is severely constrained by not knowing – and not being able to learn from – the truth.
In Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-truths and Total Nonsense, authors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton say it much more bluntly:
“The implication is that leaders need to make a fundamental decision: do they want to be told they are always right, or do they want to lead organizations that actually perform well?”
I’ve seen both of these fundamental decisions play out, firsthand.
Choice 1: Do you want to be told you’re always right?
One of my earliest teachers in organisational performance was the Safety Manager in a transport organisation. He invited my help to improve safety performance reporting, and part of my improvement was to display the safety performance measures in special line charts with about two years’ of history. This is the way to see how performance changes over time. It’s how we see the impact of our improvement initiatives. It’s how we see the potential for further improvement. This is what I assumed the Safety Manager was indeed trying to do.
But I was wrong. He wanted to know that what he was doing was working. Not if, but that it was working. The improved graphs I showed him told a different story. They showed that nothing had changed for the past two years. Performance was not improving under his leadership. To stay in ignorant bliss, his only choice was to attack the credibility of the graphs and their creator.
Without realising it, the Safety Manager had taken Pfeffer and Sutton’s first decision, to be told he was always right. And the price he paid was impotence, the lack of any effect at all on safety performance. And of course, that was the price his organisation had to pay also.
Choice 2: Do you want to lead an organisation that performs well?
In contrast to the Safety Manager that made the first choice, the CEO of a timber products company had taken Pfeffer and Sutton’s second choice, to lead his organisation to actually perform well. He was frustrated that he couldn’t see any bottom-line impact from all the investments they were making in process improvement projects throughout the company’s operations. Rather than hiding this from his Board, rather than making excuses, rather than looking for data that could paint a positive picture, the CEO took 100% ownership of the reality.
He and his senior leadership team spent the time to learn how to measure the company’s strategic direction. They aligned each operational team with that strategic direction and helped them learn how to measure the operational results that were drivers of the strategic results. They used the measures as a cornerstone to evidence-based management. And they saw the transformation of aimless process improvement effort into high-leverage strategic impact.
The price of proving that we’re right is impotence. The price of proving that our organisation actually performs well is transparency and accountability. Our world needs more courageous leaders who will accept the price of transparency and accountability, and pursue high performance. Because that’s really the only way that things get better.
Have you made your decision yet?