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I'm trying to encourage people, inspire people to get to Cangar as well and helping them make a choice about whether they want to amplify that in their lives through a rigorous investigation of how they're doing now, what the unintended consequences are of that and the untapped opportunities and what could be possible for them at work and lives for their people, their teams, their families, all of it.
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This is the Uncommon Leader Podcast.
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I'm your host, john Gallagher, and I am excited about our guest today.
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Once we get into this conversation and you leave today, you're going to have many tips that are going to help you communicate better with your team, with your family, with your friends, and make a lot of those things happen.
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So I'm excited about that.
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I have Todd Holtzman with me, who has dedicated his career to helping individuals and organizations improve their communication and relationships.
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He's the CEO and founder of Holtzman Leadership, and his upcoming book, the Power of Candor, is set to revolutionize how we approach difficult conversations.
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So, todd, I hope that was getting you teed up as well as I could and getting our conversation started.
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How are you doing today?
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I am great.
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I'm great, Sean.
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Thanks for having me.
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Absolutely Well, I won't give you any break.
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Getting started, I'll give you the same question I always ask my first-time guests on the Uncommon Leader podcast.
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That's really to ask you to tell me a story from your childhood that still impacts who you are today, as a person or as a leader.
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Now we talked a little bit before the show about our age.
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You've got to go back a little ways here.
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I'm going to test your memory, but we won't reveal that completely what we are.
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Let's just say we're mature.
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Yeah, what we are, but let's just say we're, we're mature, yeah.
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So let's see, it's probably circa 1975, 76, and my dad had brought home sony trinitron color 19 I mean, that was the big time for TVs back then and you know, it was kind of like this prized possession of the family my father was at work and my mom was in the kitchen doing whatever, and I saw this nail file and I looked at the screen and I looked at the nail file.
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For some reason I thought nail file and screen, why not?
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So I scraped it.
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And then I was just curious, you know, and apparently very stupid, and I saw it scraped the screen.
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I was like, oh, I threw the nail file like a smoking gun away, ran to my room and just started playing, know uh, to soothe myself.
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And then, you know, father comes home later, I mean many hours later, and comes to my room and would ask me so you know how's?
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How's your day been?
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Oh, pretty good, uh, anything interesting happen?
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No, not nothing, nothing I could think of.
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He goes, are you sure?
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And I start thinking I do that like something's up, I don't know what it is.
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And then he goes and it's not, it's close to christmas and he says santa doesn't like little boys that lie.
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And then I'm like like I have the flashback.
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Oh, my God, I'm so sorry.
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I saw the nail file, I saw the screen, I hit it, I didn't mean to do it and I'm just crying, crying, crying, crying.
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And you know, and he consoled me and he said it's not what you did.
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And he said it's not what you did.
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It's that the important thing is for you to be honest about what you did.
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And that was kind of a very early childhood memory about the importance of honesty and he really drilled that into me.
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You know, say what you think, stand up for yourself.
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Uh, don't lie, tell the truth.
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The problem is is that it was you know he was fine when I was doing that with other people, but when I was doing it with him, you know we didn't see things the same way, didn't go so well, and my mom would often she was, was more kind of emotionally reactive, would kind of react in a bad way.
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So I often felt, you know, if I wasn't honest I'd feel bad right, because my dad had kind of inculcated this into me.
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But then if?
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I wasn't, things would go badly.
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And I hadn't put like a term to it until probably 20 years later, which I called the honesty dilemma, and that has informed my life and my work ever since, because I think a lot of people feel that way every day.
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We all know, I mean, no parent would ever tell their kid, listen, the way to get ahead is try to like screw up the world and lie as much as you possibly can.
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Most parents, either explicitly or or implicitly, are trying to teach their kids like try to do some good in the world, and and and and and tell the truth.
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Um, but we all feel binds about that leaders, managers, salespeople because if we make the truth the thing that we prioritize, it's going to damage relationships.
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But then if we're too concerned about damaging relationships, then often the truth conversations are where candor goes to die, and so, yeah, that's the early childhood story.
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And so so, yeah, that's the early childhood story.
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And since then, um, since I was, since 1994, I've dedicated my life to helping people uh, solve this dilemma and god, I love the connection, love the connection.
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That story, yeah, I remember again, I told you before we got an episode.
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I got you know like like four listeners total.
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Three of them them are my mother, mother-in-law and wife that listen to the show all the time.
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But I think about that and I listen back or have these videos back as a kid, as I'm growing up as well, and I remember mom just saying you know of all the things, just don't lie to me, tell me the truth and keep it out there.
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So I can understand, but then again you'll probably hear if you have nothing nice to say, don't say it.
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So and you'll probably hear if you have nothing nice to say what Phil completely said Don't say anything and choose to say nothing.
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So notice the next message.
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There's the dilemma.
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Right, that's the dilemma.
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Tell me more about that honesty dilemma, because it is a barrier, right, for us in improved communication.
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The other side is, what I heard as well is that sometimes the truth hurts and maybe there's overlap with those two things.
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But you mentioned the honesty dilemma overlap with those two things.
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But you mentioned the honesty dilemma.
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Yeah, I mean, you know, I was on a it's on a podcast yesterday actually, where someone asked me uh, kind of a similar question, but not not so fine-tuned as that one, and I mean, so I think I explained it.
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It's like if you're not honest, bad things happen.
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If you are honest you're not honest, bad things happen.
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And if you are honest, you're afraid bad things are going to happen, right?
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And the question the guy asked me yesterday was do you think that people avoid having, say, honest conversations because of the risks, right, that they think are embedded in having those conversations and the bad things that could result from them?
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And I said yes in part.
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But what people aren't really aware of of all the bad things that are already happening because they're avoiding the truth of things in these conversations?
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Their relationships are already suboptimized, their results are already suboptimized, they're already holding on to something which is bothering them and so they're feeling frustrated and disappointed and demotivated and all of these kinds of things.
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And that's a big reason why people avoid having honest conversations, because if they were aware of all the problems the avoidance of honesty was creating or that we're creating.
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English is my first language, but sometimes grammar escapes me.
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They would be less likely to, much less likely to avoid them.
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And then of course there's, you know, the competence to ensure those conversations go well.
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We got a mentor that has said this to me before and it's one I've read from.
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I've not met him before in person, but it's from reading his stuff.
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He said the most expensive time is the time between when you know you need to have that conversation and when you actually carry that conversation out in an effective way.
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Conversation and when you actually carry that conversation out in an effective way and then all that time in between.
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There there is such an emotional barrier that exists inside of that.
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But also if it's a piece of feedback that you need somebody to improve and you're just afraid to tell them, you're losing all that productivity, you're losing all that profitability, whatever.
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It is in effectiveness that you're losing as well.
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But that becomes the most expensive time.
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I remember I had one of the most profound-.
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Who said that?
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By the way, that's brilliant.
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Oh, that's a John Maxwell quote that I read inside of his book, and I can't remember which one it was, because, unfortunately, that entire road is out there, but it is.
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I mean, it's so true, right, I had a conversation, and I say this I had an employee when I first got into leadership back in 1998 that I wanted to have a tough conversation with and I just didn't know how to have it.
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I finally learned a framework to have that conversation after going to a week-long leadership event.
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If this is all that I got out of that event, it was powerful.
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I was ready to terminate this individual because he couldn't get along with other people.
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His behaviors were bad and I couldn't figure out a way to tell him.
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I just wanted to be nice because I didn't want the guy to be mad at me.
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He was the same age as me, we came from the same class and all those things.
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But I ended up being able, with a framework, to have that tough conversation with him and he literally said he said that has got to be the best feedback I've ever gotten.
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That's 1998.
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That individual is still with that same company now as an executive director for the organization and I was getting ready to push him out the door.
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So I remember, um, I've got a few things I want to say.
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Sometimes you just got to pick one, john, you know well, I mean good for you, um, you know, allowing the truth to be your ally and having some faith that the best that could possibly happen will be as a result of prioritizing the truth, and good for you for having faith in this person as well, that they could hear it.
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We often give each other way too little credit and we attribute too much weakness to each other than is actually warranted as a general rule.
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But what it reminds me of and when I can mention clients rule.
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But what it reminds me of, and when I can mention clients I can.
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When I can't, I can't.
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We're working at my team and I were working at Red Bull years ago consulting them.
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We're in this beautiful ski lodge in Park City, utah, called Stein Erickson's and we ran these things called bull shops.
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We had to brand it properly for what they were doing, we'd have like three and a half days in the mountains.
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It was ridiculously luxurious and privileged to be able to even do that.
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And we had a bunch of the I guess it was the GMs or something around the table, running different geographies, and one of the GMs is ready, just like you, ready to get rid of this guy, and they're all agreeing with him.
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I was like okay, so, if I understand it, this is what you think his gap is.
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X, is that right?
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Uh-huh, and this is what your data for this is.
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Here's your examples.
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Y, that's right, and this is all the problems that his behavior is creating.
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Z.
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Yes, so have you told him all this?
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No, so you're ready to fire a guy?
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because he's not behaving these ways.
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He's behaving in this way, which I can understand right, because it is creating problems for sure, but you never actually told him the truth about these things and you're blaming him for being unchangeable and resistant to change.
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I mean, you actually can't make that claim unless you've actually given him the feedback.
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So what you're doing is listen.
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It may be the case that the horse has already left the barn and it's too late to recover the situation, but I think you do have to question the morality of your decision in light of this.
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And it's interesting, it's funny.
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I was angry about it.
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I remember it.
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I was a good bit younger then and this is like 15 years ago so.
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But they agreed and he had the conversation and the person was open to it and he turned his.
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He turned his behavior around, his performance improved.
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They didn't fire him and it's like, yeah, uh, look at how much chaos could have been avoided had they had the conversation earlier.
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And had they not look how coincidental at all.
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This guy's whole life was in the balance.
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And had these guys not come to utah and had that conversation not occurred, all these bad things would have happened and, of course, these guys would never have learned anything either?
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The leaders themselves, and this is why will I screw up your next question or can I just say a little more about this candor thing?
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Todd, go ahead, come on.
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So, okay, because I know we talked a little bit before and you spent a lot of time in healthcare and consulting to kind of healthcare entities, and we have too.
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We spend a lot of time with several global faculty 13 people, more than half of whom are overseas and the rest are here stateside, lucky enough to not only train leaders at very high levels, like senior levels, like CEOs of pharmas and things like this, but also customer-facing teams, salespeople, msls, patient access people all the like, and we have had a kind of privileged access to the way they actually conduct these conversations with customers.
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And when we develop people, we ask them bring to us a customer conversation.
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That didn't produce the result that you wanted and based upon the work of one of my, my idols, uh, chris argers from harvard.
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So chris taught at the business school, the law school, the graduate school of education, where I studied, the kennedy school of government, where I taught.
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For those of you who are interested in him, imagine, uh, imagine, I was going to say the Einstein of the social sciences, a-r-g-y-r-i-s.
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Chris wrote a bunch of stuff in the Harvard Business Review.
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I don't know.
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He wrote I don't know a few hundred articles, 30 books, received 14 honorary doctorates for his massive contributions to management, leadership, organizational behavior, research, education, anthropology.
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I mean amazing human being and he developed a foolproof tool that we use that helps you.
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It's the best.
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Next thing to like micing people up or filming them when they're actually having real conversation.
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So the point of me telling you this is we get very accurate data on how they're really behaving during these critical conversations with customers.
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Fine, the reason I'm explaining all this is that in every single instance the culprit was a candor gap that they were either not expressing important things they were thinking and feeling to the customer and or asking the kind of questions that were necessary so that the customer would open up and share the truth of what they were thinking with them.
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That's number one, and number two, by the way, largely unaware that that was the reason why the conversations weren't having the impact that they wanted.
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I'm not saying completely unaware, just for the most part unaware.
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They would mostly say the explanation was largely external they're not giving me the time I need, they're very busy.
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They prefer the other therapy, insert explanation.
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I wouldn't call them excuses.
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I think those things are also true.
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But here's what the consequences are, and this is why I have I was just writing a post on this today have made Canada the cause of my life is because the human toll is huge and the level of human suffering is incredibly underappreciated.
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So we'll talk about three levels of suffering For the customer, for the salespeople, in this case, themselves, and for the patient.
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So the customer maybe this is a healthcare, you know, hcp or somebody like this feels like the conversation has been a waste of their time and they're not getting any value out of it.
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Because if you're not saying anything valuable, you know.
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If it's provocative, why would it be interesting and useful to them?
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Fine, and so, of course, then if you're a sales rep, your access to them goes down, because they don't spend time on things they don't consider valuable.
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As a sales rep, you're miserable, right, at least with some set of customers.
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You're feeling very frustrated, you're disappointed, you're demotivated, you're deflated, all of it.
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And getting up out of bed day in, day out, man, talking to these customers when they want to give you a few minutes, I mean I couldn't do it.
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But then you start to think about the patients.
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Well, the consequences of this is that in these instances, the patient ain't getting the medicine they need.
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Oh, that's right, all right, and some of these patients you know.
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The best case scenario is there's an opportunity to improve a patient's life, a life and it's being squandered or delayed.
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The middle case is they're suffering from some horrible disease.
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They eventually get the medicine, but they suffer longer than necessary.
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The worst case scenario is they actually die and when we've had back to that time gap, by the way, too back to that time, how long it takes to get the information they need yep it's you're saying that partially triggered for me to say this.
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And so and by the way, this is not my analysis, it is our analysis, but it's their analysis so we take them through a process of taking a hard look at their case studies.
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We ask them so what is it that you did or didn't do that's preventing you from making progress?
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After we help them understand what good looks like so they could better analyze themselves, and they end up being pretty insightful and they say what are the unintended negative consequences on customers, you and patients?
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What I'm telling you is what they said, and so you know how this work can be, john is, you have a sense of mission about it, but you keep getting re-enrolled in it, because your clients teach you things that make the difficult work of helping people get better at this worthwhile.
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Well, Todd, look, I mean, I love the passion that you have for making that happen In the world of healthcare it exists Again in that consulting space that I've been in as well.
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How many times, frankly, a physician and I'm not taking shots of physicians they got a tough job.
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But in a three-minute conversation they have with a patient, how much time do they have to use candor with a patient that say, if you don't change your behavior, you are going to die at some point in time, because we're all going to die?
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But they don't want to have those conversations, they don't want the patient to be upset with them, and I make up that that's one of the biggest barriers to candor is the desire, whether it's a leader, as a family member, as a physician, whatever that is to be liked, and we don't want someone to be upset with us.
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And so I have two questions.
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The candor piece of it.
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Let's even go down to the basics of that.
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How do you define candor in communication?
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And then the second piece of that is what attributes are needed to be effective in that delivery, Because I make up.
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I could also communicate with candor, but do it by yelling at someone or whatever that is.
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So how do you define it?
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And then, what are the attributes needed to be effective at it?
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Okay, let me address the first question.
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If I lose the thread in the second question, just please bring it back so maybe I could say what it isn't first.
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So it isn't about saying everything you think and feel.
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My partner, olga, who has a reality show sitcom that's on now on Apple TV Okay, shameless plug called Olga Knows Best and unfortunately I'm in it because it's about her life, so I have no choice.
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She would love that.
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Right.
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Let me teach all of our clients to just be fully self-expressed, say whatever you think and feel.
00:21:52.640 --> 00:21:55.996
Great for a reality show man, but not great for real life.
00:21:56.377 --> 00:22:03.471
And actually a managing director of talent at one of our FTSE 100 banking clients told us that we tried something like that.
00:22:03.471 --> 00:22:17.765
We instituted a value years ago, before we ever came along, called something like straight talk or whatever it was, or direct conversations, and she said it gave license to every sociopath to say what they thought and felt, regardless of how unkind it was.
00:22:17.765 --> 00:22:20.272
So what we like to say and I like to say what they thought and felt, regardless of how unkind it was.
00:22:20.272 --> 00:22:29.529
So what we like to say and I like to say, like candor without compassion can be cruel, it's equally okay.
00:22:29.529 --> 00:22:47.184
It's equally not about only you saying what you think and feel, because none of us as individuals are omniscient, and so a piece of truth, hopefully, or some aspect of reality exists in my head.
00:22:47.184 --> 00:22:55.422
But we've all got pieces of the puzzle and we have to combine these puzzle pieces to form a more complete picture of what's actually true.
00:22:55.422 --> 00:23:01.191
And I was talking to the definition I'm going to give you.
00:23:01.191 --> 00:23:07.003
I have shamelessly stolen it, but it came from one of our clients.
00:23:07.786 --> 00:23:12.885
So Ed Jenkins I Ed British guy.
00:23:12.885 --> 00:23:13.869
I think he still lives in the UK.
00:23:13.869 --> 00:23:18.297
I think he might be working for AstraZeneca now, I'm not sure, but he was working for a different farmer when we worked together.
00:23:18.297 --> 00:23:23.181
I think he might be working for AstraZeneca now, I'm not sure, but he was working for a different farmer when we worked together and we had gone through this.
00:23:23.181 --> 00:23:24.221
He had gone through this program.
00:23:24.221 --> 00:23:28.545
He was the franchise head for important therapy for the United Kingdom and I think up reporting into him.
00:23:28.545 --> 00:23:33.429
He had kind of commercial leaders and salespeople and he had medical leaders and salespeople.
00:23:33.949 --> 00:23:40.635
So he and all these different levels went through our kind of candor program and it delivered a great result.
00:23:40.635 --> 00:23:52.587
You know, despite the company going through a big reorg, despite them losing their with the FDA.
00:23:52.587 --> 00:23:55.971
They didn't get the approval for the earlier line of therapy.
00:23:55.971 --> 00:24:12.902
People kept using what they learned and they grew orders which was amazing and I didn't think would happen because you're in the middle of reorg and then you don't get approved for earlier therapy and then your competitor does, and all the HTPs are looking at the competitor's drug and say why are you going to buy anything from you, okay?
00:24:12.902 --> 00:24:19.335
So I asked Ed amongst others can you help me understand why the program delivered?
00:24:19.335 --> 00:24:20.781
And it seemed like it delivered a result.
00:24:20.781 --> 00:24:22.362
Well, first of all, do you think it did, Okay?
00:24:22.362 --> 00:24:24.242
And if so, what actually happened?
00:24:24.242 --> 00:24:29.587
I mean, I have some sense of why it happens, but we're not there watching people what they're doing with it.
00:24:29.587 --> 00:24:34.200
They're not inside of people's heads, so I don't know 100% what they're actually doing.
00:24:34.701 --> 00:24:37.164
And this is the definition of candor.
00:24:37.164 --> 00:24:39.909
That now is kind of our North star as a firm.
00:24:39.909 --> 00:24:47.021
And he said I always thought of these conversations that either something to win or to avoid.
00:24:47.021 --> 00:24:59.269
Because now I understand that candor is treating every conversation as a collaborative search for the truth in order to make things better.
00:24:59.269 --> 00:25:14.679
And I have to say, john, that really hit me two years ago, I guess maybe two and a half and it's like wow, somebody finally explained to me what the heck I've been doing and I was very grateful for it.
00:25:14.679 --> 00:25:22.556
And so that's how we think of it, and I think this is why this is a mind shift for people.
00:25:24.621 --> 00:25:35.269
Um, because in some ways the conversations seem tougher for people because of how they're thinking about the conversation, like, oh, I've got to convince them they're wrong and I'm right.
00:25:35.269 --> 00:25:48.906
But if you think a bit, as this conversation is meant to do some good in the world, maybe it's also a way I'm trying to serve this person as well.
00:25:48.906 --> 00:26:03.003
So you're trying to serve something outside of yourself this person, the team, the impact this team has on important things and people then it kind of shifts your orientation.
00:26:03.003 --> 00:26:06.343
So then, and then if you start to think of.
00:26:06.343 --> 00:26:15.625
Okay, I'm trying to do some good through the conversation, but I have to treat it as a collaborative search for the truth and I have to have kind of courageous humility.
00:26:15.625 --> 00:26:22.060
This is maybe this is a variable, one of the variables you were talking about or aspects of it.
00:26:22.541 --> 00:26:35.539
It's like, okay, I have the courage to express the truth of what I think, but I have to have the humility to be open to and to even invite people to tell me where I'm wrong, because what I care about is not being right.
00:26:35.539 --> 00:26:36.842
I care care about what's true.
00:26:36.842 --> 00:26:45.723
So then a lot of you who are listening and thinking about having tough conversations it doesn't mean it makes the conversation easy, by no means.
00:26:45.723 --> 00:26:48.541
You are right to be worried about these things.
00:26:48.541 --> 00:26:49.464
It's not in your head.
