Your worst enemy or your greatest asset?

I’ve always been a huge proponent of candor, talking it up to General Electric audiences for more than 20 years. But since retiring from GE, I've realized that I underestimated its rarity. I would call lack of candor the biggest dirty little secret in business.

Lack of candor blocks smart ideas, fast action and full-fledged participation from employees. When you’ve got candor – and you’ll never completely get it, mind you – everything operates faster and better.

“Lack of candor” is not about malicious dishonesty. It’s about how too many people – too often – don’t express themselves honestly. They withhold criticism to avoid conflict, and they sugarcoat bad news to maintain appearances.

This lack of candor is damaging, yet it permeates almost every aspect of business, at almost every level.

I’ve listened to employees at hundreds of different companies describe the complete lack of candor they experience in every type of meeting, from budget and product reviews to strategy sessions. People talk about the bureaucracy, politicking and false politeness that lack of candor spawns. They ask how they can get their companies to become places where people share their opinions and debate ideas from every angle.

Forget outside communication – sometimes, your own worst enemy is the way you communicate with one another internally.

The candor effect

Candor leads to winning in three main ways:

1. Candor gets more people in the conversation

When more people are involved in the conversation, many more ideas are raised, discussed, dissected and improved. Instead of everyone shutting down, everyone opens up and learns.

2. Candor generates speed

Ideas that are shared openly can be debated rapidly, enhanced and acted upon. That approach isn’t just an advantage; it’s a necessity in a global marketplace. You can be sure that any upstart five-person enterprise down the street or in Shanghai can move faster than you, but candor is one way to keep up.

3. Candor cuts costs

Although you’ll never be able to put a precise number on it, candor eliminates meaningless meetings and reports that confirm what everyone already knows. Candor replaces fancy PowerPoint slides and mind-numbing presentations, whether they’re about company strategy, a new product introduction or someone’s performance.

Put all of its benefits and efficiencies together and you realize you can’t afford not to have candor.

It can be done

Even though candor is vital to winning, it’s hard for any group, no matter the size, to fight entrenched organizational behaviors. At GE, it took us close to 10 years to instill candor, and it was by no means universal even after 20 years.

Still, it can be done. To achieve candor, reward it, praise it and discuss it. Acknowledge the people who exemplify it. Most of all, demonstrate it yourself – even when you’re not the boss.

Picture yourself at a meeting where the subject is a unit’s performance. The managers, self-satisfied, talk about double-digit growth and pound out slide after slide displaying their success. Top management nods in approval, but you know there’s room for that department to improve. To compound matters, the people presenting the slides are your peers, and it’s understood that if you don’t challenge their presentation, they won’t challenge yours.

The only way I know out of this bind – and to introduce candor – is to poke around in a nonthreatening way:

“What a terrific job. This is the best business we’ve got. Why not put more resources into it and go for more?”

“With the great team you’ve put in place, there must be 10 acquisitions out there for you. Have you looked globally?”

These questions, and others like them, can shift the meeting from a self-congratulatory parade to a stimulating working session. It’s pretty simple: Candor works because candor unclutters.

Yes, candor can run counter to human nature. So does waking up at 5 a.m. to make the 6:10 train every day, or eating lunch at your desk so you won’t miss an important meeting. But for the sake of your team or your organization, you do a lot of things that aren’t easy. The good thing about candor is that it’s more than worth it.

It’s impossible to imagine a world where everyone goes around saying what they think all the time. And you probably wouldn’t want that anyway – too much information! But even if we get halfway there, lack of candor won’t be the biggest dirty little secret in business anymore.

It will be business’s biggest change for the better.

Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate