791: Promoting and Sustaining Trust through Honest Leadership with Ron Carucci

Pete Mockaitis
Ron, welcome back to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Ron Carucci
Pete, so great to be back with you. I’ve missed you, my friend.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom. To Be Honest: Lead with the Power of Truth, Justice and Purpose is the latest book. Last time, we touched on your antique doorknob collection, so I think we need to revisit this.

Ron Carucci
Which, there it is.

Pete Mockaitis
I could behold it though the listeners can’t see it. It’s bigger than I thought it was. So, maybe, for those who didn’t hear you the first time, can you refresh the listeners on what that’s about and tell us if there’s any new developments?

Ron Carucci
So, I began making these jars years ago for other people, and, basically, they were people in my life who I felt were amazing at opening doors for people and helping people move over the threshold of the liminal space of a doorway.

And so, these are doorknobs that are dozens or hundreds of years old, there’s old hardware in there, there’s old hinges, there’s knockers, so all kinds of things to do with doors, that span hundreds of years. And if you think about the countless number of hands that have turned those doors open, that have passed through doorways, for me it’s a wonderful daily reminder that that’s what we’re here for. We’re here to make a way for other people. I’ve helped people in my talks over time. There are 7.2 billion doors in the world through which love, hope, and joy can pass. You’re one of them.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, thank you. Well, now let’s dig into To Be Honest. What’s perhaps one of the most striking, counterintuitive, surprising, fascinating discoveries you’ve made while putting this together?

Ron Carucci
So, it’s based on a 15-year longitudinal study of more than 3200 leaders, so we dug in deep, and we learned a lot. Some of it was very surprising. The most exciting part was that you can actually predict what conditions in which people will tell the truth and behave fairly and serve a greater good, and under what conditions they might be more prone to lie, cheat, and serve their own interests first.

One of the biggest findings is that honesty is not a character trait. It’s not some moral imperative. It’s not some sense of do good. Honesty is a muscle. It is a capability. It is something, if you want to be good at, you have to actually work at it, which is like going to the gym and building any other muscle. If you want your moral competence, your honesty competence to be effective, it isn’t something you can just assume that your good intentions will take care of.

In today’s world, we’re in a trust recession, and if you want to earn and keep the trust of others, you have to earn it every day.

Ron Carucci
So, it turns out earning and keeping the trust of others has far less to do with your good intentions of being trustworthy, and far more to do with working at your honesty muscle to ensure you’re giving people evidence and reasons to trust you.

Whenever I ask leaders the question, “Do your people trust you?” the reflexive response is almost always, “Well, why wouldn’t they trust me?” as though my good-hearted intentions to be trustworthy are enough. But the reality is, in today’s world where cynicism reigns supreme, we look around every institution there is and see trust in a freefall.

Today, leaders begin in a deficit of trust. You can go from being somebody’s peer and trusted, and just being elevated to being their boss, you are the same person and yet, in their eye, that you now have power, that you now have disproportionate levels of influence over their future, that you’re not one of them, starts you in the red. And you have to re-earn the trust you had as their peer, and most leaders just take that for granted.

Pete Mockaitis
intriguing. Well, Ron, I don’t want to get too much into the semantic wordplay game, but it’s funny, when you say honest, I think most of us would consider ourselves honest, and I assume that folks are being honest with me, and yet there is something of a gap in terms of whether I trust someone. I guess there’s levels and layers to it where I tend to think, “Well, I, generally, presume the vast majority of people aren’t straight up lying to me and telling me the opposite of what is true.” Is that fair in terms of like the state of honesty in the workplace today?

Ron Carucci
I would that it were that simple, my friend, but here’s a couple of problems. I think we’re in a world today where we have confused speaking the truth with speaking your truth. And so, I may tell you something that I firmly believe, and because I say it with conviction, it is my truth. I’m going to say it as if it’s the truth. I may be repeating heresy to you that I read on the internet somewhere, but if I believe it, I’m going to pass it on as if it’s so.

Pete Mockaitis
InternetHeresy.com

Ron Carucci
Secondly, so what we learned both in our neuroscience, we do a lot of brain science to understand how our brain processes our experience of honesty, and also in the initial research of our interviews, we used a lot of really cool AI technology to do some of the word text mean analysis. Honesty today is more than just not lying.

So, the definition of honesty, as the book title says, is truth, justice, and purpose. What that means is to be labeled as honest, you not only have to say the right thing, you have to do the right thing, and you have to say and do the right thing for the right reason. You may do less than that, and you might be labeled a good person or you might be labeled reliable. But if you want to earn and keep the trust of others, all three are necessary today.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. And that’s intriguing how, I’m thinking about, yeah, your truth versus the truth, quite a distinction. I have seen people say things with conviction, we’re at a party and someone was saying, “It’s not possible for media companies to be profitable just by the sale of ads. They have to engage in some other activities.” He said this with great conviction, I thought. Well, I own a profitable media company.

And so, he said it, he meant it, he believed it, he wasn’t trying to deceive anyone, and yet, I know that the statement he made was false. And in so doing, I did, I had less trust in subsequent statements he made. And I guess I could be a stickler…

Ron Carucci
But here’s the problem, Pete, the fact that he believed it to be true doesn’t make it true.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true. I mean, what you say is correct.

Ron Carucci
But he would proffer it as if it were truth. And were you to disagree with him, he would say, “You’re wrong.”

Pete Mockaitis
What’s funny, I did. I actually…it was interesting, like my reaction, I was a little angry at him for having said that even though he had no poor intentions. And I guess it’s just sort of like, I guess the way I operate is, “If I’m uncertain of something, I will put my cards on the table.” Like, I would’ve given him a lot of grace if he said, “Boy, you know what, when I was working for this media company, there was no way we could’ve been profitable. We’re paying the writers and all the stuff, and we’d look at the bandwidth fees, given the small revenue we have, so, thusly, boy, I don’t know how it’s possible for any…”

Okay. All right, so we’re conveying similar sentiments and yet I was like, “All right. Fair enough, dude. That’s your experience. I understand that’s where you’re coming from, and I’ve got a different perspective to share with you.”

Ron Carucci
And would you not have been more drawn to, “I trust him, I’d engage him because he was being thoughtful”?

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely, yeah.

Ron Carucci
Right? So, there you are. That’s a wonderful example of today in our dogma-proliferated world. We lose trust with chronic certainty when we confuse our truth with the truth.

Pete Mockaitis
Chronic certainty. Well said. And I’m thinking another time, someone was doing a very clever book promotion in which I could get a free copy of a book if I just pay the shipping charge.

Ron Carucci
You see it coming.

Pete Mockaitis
And then there was like an upsell video, in which he said, “Hey, can I send you some more training?” And I was like, “Okay, maybe.” And it’s like, “Well, right in the same box, I can give you my…” it was a CD set at the time, it was like $200 or whatever, and so I thought that was a clever move because you already have my credit card. I was already intrigued in the topic because I got the email and I said, “Sure, I want your free book.”

And then I was like, “Okay, clever move. All right, sure.” And then I remember they were not in the same box because I thought it was going to be…and it was not a pre-release copy of the book, which I thought it was going to be. It was piped through BarnesandNoble.com, and then the training CDs actually came separately earlier.

And it’s interesting because it’s like…and in that instance, I was more angry because it was like, “Okay, you’re not just mistaken. It’s like you knew darn well,” even though I still got the book for the cost of shipping, and I still got the trainings. It’s like, “You knew they weren’t going to be in the same box. This is part of your marketing strategy from day one to goose you and have one week at the New York Times’ bestseller list as you piped all these orders through these places.” And so, well, now I trust nothing this person says.

Ron Carucci
So, your examples are crystal clear, Pete, but those kinds of transactions happen to us all day long. And so, my scrutiny of you, and your scrutiny of those people, and people who are like them, because our brains process those experiences like little traumas so the imprint is thrust in our brains. And so, any time now anybody reminds you of the media guy or the book author…

Pete Mockaitis
The author guy, yeah.

Ron Carucci
..you’re going to hold that screen up and go, first of all, “Is it like them or not? And how much like them is it?” So, now, you have a new bar of what somebody now has to get past to earn your trust. Well, multiplied that by hundreds of transactions every day, they can go in either direction, and you see what it takes today for leaders to actually authentically show up in a way that does attract and keep, because the marketing guy had your trust for 20 minutes.

Pete Mockaitis
He did.

Ron Carucci
And then squandered it. He exploited it and squandered it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true.

Ron Carucci
And leaders do that every day with good intentions. They don’t realize the things that which people will withdraw their trust from you from. I had to give a client of mine feedback that he had lost his team’s trust because he got very defensive, saying, “I just try with them. I tell them what way things are. I go to bat for them. I advocate for resources for them. I tell them when they’re not working well. I tell them when they’re great.”

I said, “So, you’ve just listed all for me all the reasons you believe you’ve earned their trust, but trust is a currency. We all trade in different currencies. You believe they’re trading your currency when actually they’re not. So, it turns out that when you’re in meetings with your team, you tend to be a little bit impatient and you tend to let that be known through some sarcastic remarks. And when someone is going on a little bit longer than you wish they would, you cut them off.”

He said, “Well, okay, everybody has a bad day.” I said, “Well, apparently you have a lot of them and what you are telling people in those behaviors is you are not safe for them to be imperfect, that if their thoughts are not fully formed, if their arguments don’t align with yours, they shouldn’t speak. That’s what you tell them with those behaviors. That loses their trust. It doesn’t matter that you never intended for them to interpret those things that way, that’s what your behavior conveyed.”

And he was floored. And this is not a jerk, this is a good guy, a smart guy, a good leader, but here was a set of behaviors that he would’ve never equated with trustworthiness. But there you are, his team deciding that he was not a safe place, was not trustworthy of their candor, of their ideas, of their imperfectly formed views.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a good notion. So, to trust someone or for someone to be trustworthy, it’s not so much…it’s not just, “I don’t think that you’re lying to me, but rather, I can trust you with my incomplete idea. I can trust you with a proposal which may or may not work.” So, I get that. The use of the word trust in terms of “What do you trust people with?” or, “What do you entrust to them?” can be minimal or maximal and, thusly, the term currency really plays out nicely, “Would I trust you with a few pennies or would I trust you with my life savings?” But rather than talking about monetary matters, we’re talking about kind of emotional, intellectual contribution matters.

Ron Carucci
And some people hold up the arcs of character, “I’m going to judge by your character to decide whether or not I’m going to trust you.” Some people use competence, “If I think you’re not good at your job, if I don’t think you’re awesome at your job, I may trust you less.” It may be your personality. You may have a different kind of personality than me, and I find if I’m an introvert and you’re charismatic, whatever, I may trust you less. But if you’re like me, I may trust you more.”

There’s all kinds of currencies we trade in. The key is to know what currency the people whose trust you want are trading in, not to assume that they’re trading in yours because you may squander a great deal of effort trying to earn trust you’re not earning.

Pete Mockaitis
And I also think that it can be quite segmented in terms of like, “When you start talking about marketing ideas, I don’t trust you because I think they’re kind of nutty. But when you start talking about financial accounting health things, like, okay, you’re solid, you’re all over that.” So, all right. Well, please, Ron, unpack this for us. If we want to be maximally trustworthy, what’s our path?

Ron Carucci
There’s four doors to go through, using our door metaphor. So, we found four conditions under which you can guarantee whether or not people will earn your trust. These were the conditions we found, both in individuals and organizations, and there’s actual statistical factors that go with each. So, the first one is be who you say you are. Our organizations make promises in their statements – missions, values, visions, purpose statements.

It turns out, those matter to people in terms of whether they’re embodied or not. And if you work in an organization where those things are for cosmetic purposes only, but if you ask people, “Is this your experience of the place?” those are not the words they would use to describe it. You are now three times more likely to have people be dishonest.

Pete Mockaitis
To be dishonest.

Ron Carucci
Yup, but if there is an alignment between the actions and words, and if your organization does embody those words, now you’re three times more likely to have people to be honest. The reason you raise the risk of dishonesty is you’ve now institutionalized duplicity. You’ve now told people, “Around here, we say one thing and do another, and so that’s okay.” So, your people will now go, “Okay, so I’m allowed to say one thing and do another.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Ron, this is hard hitting.

Ron Carucci
The same with leaders. If you’re a leader, you have advertised what you value. You may not have done it intentionally, you should have, and so people will look at you. And if you’re embodying who you say you are, they’re three times more likely to give you their trust and see you as honest, but if your say-do gap is more than one-to-one, you are telling people you’re not trustworthy.

Second was accountability. So, if the way in which you account people’s work, how you talk about their contributions, how you measure their contributions, is seen as fair and just and dignified, meaning, “I feel, when I walk out of my conversations with my boss, that however my work was discussed, including my shortfalls, was dignifying and fair, meaning I have as much of a chance of being successful as anybody else,” you’re four times more likely to have people be honest.

But if I think the game is rigged, if I think I’m being demeaned or a cog in your wheel or a means to your end, or I don’t have as much of a chance at being successful as other of your favorites, now you’re four times more likely to have me be dishonest because, now, for me to get ahead, I have to embellish my accomplishments and hide my mistakes from you.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say be honest, or be dishonest, again, we’re not talking about stating things that are the opposite of the truth, but rather shades, nuances, withholding, embellishing.

Ron Carucci
Any form of truthin purpose, any form of saying the right thing, doing the right thing, or saying and doing the right thing for the right reason. It’s any misuse of those three things.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Ron Carucci
The third was decision-making. So, if I walk into a room in an organization, virtual or otherwise, commonly referred to as a meeting, and I believe what’s happening in that room to be an honest conversation, that the person who’s presenting something is giving me the full scoop on what data they’re presenting, they’ve given me both sides of an argument, I believe they don’t have some hidden agenda, and I believe that were I to offer a view that’s different than the countering, prevailing views in the room, I’d be welcome to do that. Now, you’re three and a half times more likely to have me be honest because I can trust what’s in the room.

But if I walk into that room and I think it’s nothing but orchestrated fear, and the person presenting the data has spun it, has an agenda of what they want, is clearly guiding the room toward that outcome, and the last thing you want to hear from me is a point of view different than the one that you’re trying to shape, now you’re three and a half times more likely to have me be dishonest because the truth is now underground. And if I want the truth, I have to go get it somewhere else.

Pete Mockaitis
And here being dishonest might mean just keeping your mouth shut.

Ron Carucci
Keep your mouth shut. Go outside the room and collude with somebody about…

Pete Mockaitis
“Can you believe that BS?”

Ron Carucci
“And so, here’s what we’re going to do now.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Ron Carucci
And the last one was probably one of the most surprising, was cross-functional relationships. What happens at the seams of your organization? If you have prevailing border wars, the classic sales and marketing, supply chain and operation, R&D and innovation, HR and everybody, if those seams are not stitched well, and there’s no way for those complexity, which are usually healthy tensions to be resolved, you are six times more likely to have people be dishonest because when you fragment the organization, you fragment the truth. Now, all we have is dueling truths, “My truth versus your truth. My only interest now is being right, which means I have to go about proving you wrong.”

But if those seams are stitched, if there’s cohesion and coalescence across the organizational story, if people recognize that there’s value we create together that’s bigger than either one of us, and there’s a way for those tensions to be held in a healthy way to solve those conflicts, now you’re six times more likely to have people be honest with you because now we’re all part of a bigger story.

The sobering aspect of those four findings, Pete, is that the models, the statistical models, are cumulative. So, if you’re good at all four of those things, you’re 16 times more likely to have people in your organization, or in your presence, be honest with you. But if you suck at all four of those things, you are now 16 times likely to find yourself on the front page of The New York Times in a story you never imagined being in.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Woo, Ron, there’s a lot of goodies here. I think the one that really hit home powerfully was at the beginning when you talked about institutionalizing dishonesty. And I could think of my first workplace was Kmart, and I remember we had these principles, and I thought to myself, “Oh, what a relief,” I’m so naïve, “Oh, what a relief.” I’m like 17 years old, don’t really know what I’m doing, first sort of job, it’s not a paper route, and I’m sure there’s going to be all sorts of ambiguous tenuous things, but I can look to these principles as my guiding light in the midst of this ambiguity.

I think I still remember the customers rule, teams work, change strengthens, diversity enriches, performance drives. It’s over 20 years ago. And yet when I saw, in our store in particular, not to throw shade on Kmart worldwide, when I saw these being violated, it’s like, “Oh, I guess not really. Okay.” Because I loved the idea of, okay, customers rule and I had the power to please, I was told in my training video.

Like, if they don’t have the sale 24 pack of Pepsi in stock, I can give them two 12 packs for the sale 24-pack price. I thought that was pretty cool, it’s like, “Ooh, that’s something I can do. I’ve got some power here,” and that was one of my favorite things to do, is write up the magic ticket, which says, “Hey, this is your new price for this thing.”

But then when they said, “Oh, don’t do that for these,” it’s like she’s got some sort of Pepsi dealer that’s got a special price, “Don’t do that for these things or these exceptions,” and they really added up. And you’re right, institutionalizing dishonesty, I was like, “Oh, okay, I guess we just kind of do whatever is expedient. I guess that’s how things really work here.” And that wasn’t a great feeling, and it made me kind of uneasy in terms of never quite knowing if things were right or appropriate.

And, thus, just sort of doing whatever got the job done without flagrantly, I guess, violating the law or causing risk to someone’s health and safety. But then elsewhere, I’m thinking about Bain where we had our operating principles, and they were real, and that was inspiring, and I was like, “Oh, this is what we do here. It’s like we’re open to the 1% possibility, which is that you’re wrong, and that’s okay. It’s okay for lowly associate consultant to challenge a stately partner and they won’t rip my head off. That’s pretty cool that that’s really how it works here.” So, yeah, the notion of institutionalizing dishonesty is a powerful phrase and really does ring true experientially.

Ron Carucci
when duplicity becomes a welcome norm, the offense of the hypocrisy causes what we now know to be moral injury. So, it’s not just exhaustion, it’s not just even burnout from the constant duplicity, we now know, we can measure it through neuroscience studies that it’s actually what we call moral injury.

Moral injury was first measured in people who were at war, people who were veterans and experienced or observed or were part of atrocities, and then throughout the pandemic, we realized, “Oh, healthcare.” Lots of moral injury there. It’s actually an imprinted trauma response similar to PTSD but not the same.

Well, when you’re in an environment of rampant hypocrisy, and the enraged part of you that feels trapped, that feels complicit, is actually imprinting like a trauma response. It’s called moral injury. People have often misdiagnosed burnout or exhaustion for what really is moral injury. And so, a rampant environment of saying one thing and doing another means that, “I will get my pound of flesh. So, if you’re going to be a hypocrite, watch what I can do. And so, I’ll start giving those price tags two for one, three for one, four for one. When my mother comes in, it’s going to be ten for one.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. That’s good. Well, so this is really intriguing that these kinds of environmental cues have tremendous power in shaping the behavior of folks. So, let’s say that our listener is not at the top of the organization but somewhere in the middle, and they are inspired. They want to be as honest as possible and shape some good cultural vibes within their spheres of influence, what are some immediate actions folks can take?

Ron Carucci
That’s a great question. And I will shamelessly plug the book because I left no stone unturned. Every chapter ends with a long luxurious list of practical things we can all do right away. But, for example, let’s talk about this duplicity thing. Next time you’re together with your team, pull those things off the wall. Pick your favorite set of promises; the values, the principles, the mission, the purpose statement.

Pick one. Put it on the table and ask your team, “How are we doing with this? Is this what your experience is? Maybe the rest of the place isn’t, but I want to make sure that the experience I’m creating for us sounds like this. Where could we do better? If somebody followed our team around with a video camera all day long, could that video tape be used as a training program for these values? Or, would it be like, ‘Here’s how not do this’?” Just open the conversation. Any one of these is an invitation to a conversation.

So, when we finished the research and found the findings. I thought, “I don’t want to tell the failure stories. We’re all a little bit sick of Theranos. We’re all a little bit sick of Wells Fargo. We don’t need to rehash those painful moments anymore. I want to know who the heroes are. I want to tell the stories of people who are doing this and living this out in a way I’d be proud to emulate. I’d want them as my boss.”

And so, the book is nothing but a book of great heroic stories of people who are beautifully and inspiringly embodying these four findings in a way that we can easily emulate, we can easily take a book out of their playbook that they’ve lived a path for us. And so, the border war one, the cross-functional things. If I asked you, “Who is your they? Who is the person in some other department who your team has to coordinate with, or you think of them, you go, ‘Here they come, what do they want?’ and you’ve othered them, you’ve made them other, they’re the enemy, and they make your life miserable and all you do is talk about how incompetent they are?”

It turns out, not as surprisingly, you are probably their they too, and they’re having the same conversations about your team, which, of course, you think are unjustified and your team is just angelic and does everything right, and couldn’t imagine making their life miserable. What if you just reached out to that leader and said, “Here, let’s have coffee,” and said them, “Look, we know our teams are struggling to get along. How can I be a better colleague to you? What could we do differently? How can we create better? What’s one thing we can do to make this better?”

And any time I bring teams together to do what we call seam startups to sort of regenerate a seam, inevitably, as you begin to talk about what value they co-create together that they don’t create on their own, and begin to talk about how they do that, or how they struggle, you start hearing a crescendo of, “Oh, that’s why you do that? Oh, that’s why that drives you crazy. I didn’t know you needed that. Wait, that’s what you guys do? That’s your KPIs? Oh, my gosh, we measure them just to the opposite. No wonder I can’t stand you.”

People discover and re-humanize the other from being the them to now it’s a part of a bigger we. And, suddenly, things change. So, all of us can initiate any one of these things to be better. There are organizational injustices all around you, in your accountability systems, in your budgeting systems, in your resource systems, somebody is getting the short end of a stick, somebody is not valued the way they should.

Just ask yourself, “Who are the roles in your organization that are privileged? If you’re a tech company, are your engineers privileged? If you’re in a brand company, are your marketers privileged? If you’re in a growth company, are your salespeople privileged?” And it’s not that all work is created equal. All work is not equal. Some work is more important than others but not all people should be more important than others.

And if those privileges and those jobs are disadvantaging other people, that means those privileges are a problem and the playing field is not level, and you have the power to right those wrongs. Somehow, some way, who’s the bully in your organization that your team has to put up with, that you turn a blind eye?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, Ron, so fundamentally, how do leaders earn and sustain their teams’ trust?

Ron Carucci
If you’re a leader, let me simplify your job. People come to work every single day with two foundational questions that they want to answer, “Do I matter and do I belong? Is my contribution important? Is it valued by you? And can I show up as who I am or do I have to hide part of myself?” Your job is to make sure that, every day, they never wondered if the answer to those questions is yes, because any time they spent doubting whether or not the answer is yes, is capacity they’re investing in hiding, in performing, in manipulating, in resenting, and that’s not capacity they’re putting into producing the results you want them to produce. So, take it off the table for them.

Make sure there is not a shred of doubt in how you care for them, and how you lead them, and how you guide them, and how you coach them, that they never wondered if they matter or do they belong so that the rest of their capacity can be devoted to performing.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, understood. Okay. Well, now I’m wondering about the shooting the messenger effect. It’s real and it really does make things difficult. And I guess we sort of talked about these four environmental organizational factors at work here with regard to contributing to or detracting from psychological safety. But if we’ve got bad news, and we’re in an environment that isn’t so welcoming of it, how do we even play that game?

Ron Carucci
So, let’s talk about both side of the equation here. Here’s a blanket statement that I can confidently say as my truth is the truth. If you are a leader and you don’t have somebody coming into your office, at least twice a week, telling you something that makes you uncomfortable, you can be 100% confident your leadership sucks.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Ron Carucci
That’s it. And if you think it’s because there isn’t anything to tell you that makes you uncomfortable, not only does your leadership suck, you’re stupid. But those stories are being told somewhere, and if they’re not telling you, you have to be curious about who they’re telling. You can be very confident that every night at the dinner table of the people you lead, you are being talked about. You are the subject of a story. If you don’t know what stories they’re telling about you, you should want to get in on the conversation.

Let’s start with the other side of the equation. Today, telling the truth has reduced itself to, if I just stood up the posture of a big middle finger, or a whiner, or a rant on social media, that’s literally speaking my choice or being the messenger. You have to deliver the message competently. You can’t just come in ranting, or whining, or complaining, or accusing, or, passively-aggressively, throwing somebody under the bus. You just need to show up with the credibility to say, “Hey, I have a concern. Here’s what it is. Here’s my suggestion for how to resolve it.”

And if you haven’t earned the credibility to do that before that moment, that moment is probably not the moment to do it then. What we know about competent courage, Jim Detert’s research, if you haven’t had him on your podcast, you want to get him. He wrote the book Choosing Courage.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, we had him.

Ron Carucci
And his research shows that the people who do this well are people whose credibility is already established, and there are things they do competently to bring in the bad news, to establish what to do about it, and to be heard. It doesn’t mean people won’t personally get defensive but there is a skill to it. I actually was told last week on social media, I’m still sort of wrestling with this, but someone said, “Ron is so good at what he does, he’s the only person I know that can tell someone to go to hell, and they’ll ask for directions.”

And I’m thinking, “It sounds like that was intended to be a good thing or a compliment.” I’m not so sure but I do work very hard to make sure that when I have to bring somebody uncomfortable news, a disconfirming news about how they see the world, that’s already going to make them uncomfortable, but at least I do it with care. I don’t pull punches, I don’t soft-pedal it, but I do it in a way that they know I’m not judging them, I’m not trying to shame them, and I will help them through this.

But withholding bad news from somebody is never kind. Leaders do it all the time when they withhold hard feedback from people, “I don’t want to hurt their feelings. It was just a one-off thing. They probably didn’t mean it.” Same with our bosses, we let them off the hook. Withholding feedback that could help somebody grow is cruel all the time.

Again, the competence includes timing. Barging into a room when your boss is in a meeting with their boss, and blurting out something they did that was terrible, probably a bad idea. So, timing, delivery, it all matters, but not doing it is never okay.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Ron, anything else you want to make sure to say before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Ron Carucci
If your own honest competence, your own muscle is important to you, I would invite you to just try one exercise that I give many leaders to do. The University of Massachusetts’ research says that, on average, we all lie about twice a day, give or take. Assume for a minute that includes embellishing something to your boss, leaving a piece of information out to your spouse, whatever. Think about the last ten days of your life, and think about, let’s say, 15 moments where you were not at your best, where you were not proud of who you were.

You could’ve been curt to a barista. You could’ve blown off your kids. You could’ve taken that slide out of a deck to ensure that you got your budget. You could’ve over-inflated accomplishments to somebody in a presentation about what you were doing when you spoke. Pick it. Little, big, whatever, no one has to see this. But what I guarantee you is if you look over those 15 moments over the last 10 days, you will see a pattern.

The moments that bring us to our dishonesty are not random. We adopt those behaviors because we believe that they serve some need or we wouldn’t do it. You have told yourself that these choices and these moments serve some purpose, “I will engineer a certain response,” “I will look a certain way,” “I will avoid a certain pain,” “I will appear to be a certain way.” And if you want to raise your game on honesty in order to make sure that, in fact, you are trustworthy, you have to, first, be honest about your dishonesty. You cannot be more true to yourself until you’re more true about yourself. And so, start with you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you, Ron. Now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Ron Carucci
As my mentor once told me many, many years ago, “Nothing in life is revocable except death.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Ron Carucci
At the Harvard University, they did this study on cafeteria workers, on looking to see how meaning in work happens, and they put cameras both on the person ordering their food and the people in the kitchen making the food. And when they could both see each other, the way the food got made changed. When, suddenly, people, in the kitchen, went from just frying eggs to, “I’m frying eggs for them,” the care and attention to detail and quality of what they were doing went dramatically up, meaning that no matter what task you’re performing, it can be meaningful.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. I’m wondering if this has something to do with why the scrambled eggs at the Waffle House are extra delicious. I could see them; they can see me.

Ron Carucci
Versus a buffet of golden brown.

Pete Mockaitis
Right there. All right. And a favorite book?

Ron Carucci
David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Ron Carucci
It’s Outlook. I live for Outlook, and I know how important it was to me because mine went down for two months, and people couldn’t figure out how to use the web version, and I was a neurotic mess.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I’m intrigued. Any Outlook power tips?

Ron Carucci
Color code your calendar. That’s a cool tool.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. And a favorite habit?

Ron Carucci
In the morning, when I have my coffee, I have a collection of mugs that, in my cabinet…

Pete Mockaitis
Doorknobs and mugs. Two collections for Ron.

Ron Carucci
And so, each mug is sort of attached to a person or experience in my life, and so I begin my day thinking about that person or thinking about that experience and those people, and just to sort of begin with a sense of gratitude and reminding myself that it’s bigger than me. My own story is bigger than just me. And so, I begin my day thinking about somebody else.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share with folks, they tend to repeat it back to you, retweet it, Kindle book highlight it?

Ron Carucci
I think the “Honesty is a muscle” is the one people tend to sort of double-take on.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Ron Carucci
Please come visit. So one of the cool things we did was, I knew that when I was interviewing all those heroes, I wouldn’t be able to use everything they said but it was all worth it, so we videoed those interviews, and we did a TV series, and it’s called Moments of Truth. It’s a 15-episode news magazine show, in a news magazine format, and you can binge watch all 15 episodes at ToBeHonest.net or you can find them on Roku.

At ToBeHonest.net, you’ll also find information about the book, the research, there’s a webinar there. If you want to hang out with me, come to my firm’s website Navalent.com. We’ve got really cool free e-books, and videos, and whitepapers, and lots of cool blogs, and you can have us in your inbox every month and get our wisdom about teams and workplace and leadership, and all that kind of stuff. And please do follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter and stay in touch.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Ron Carucci
Don’t take trust for granted. Level up and say the right thing, do the right thing, and say and do the right thing for the right reason, and you will live a far more gratifying and purposeful life.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Ron, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you all the best and much honesty and trustworthiness.

Ron Carucci
Pete, always a pleasure. I was just wearing your shirt, oh my gosh. That could be the accountability chapter, we did identify it. I love it. Always a pleasure, my friend. Thanks for having me.