Objective Truth

Working With Objective Truth™

Introduction

Emotions are a major pitfall in any leadership and transformations scenario. These negative emotions are called opinions. Every human being has an mental operations model based on their paradigms and experiences that is expressed as an opinion.

How Opinions Become “Truth”

When two human beings communicate it is commonly assumed that they are having a clear, objective and neutral conversation based on facts. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most people are totally unaware that they sense of reality is actually based on a battery of emotional opinions gathered over a lifetime of successes and failures. These are all deeply personal beliefs held on just about any subject, all of them held to be perfectly true by each single individual and oftentimes backed up by no more than a hunch or hear say (see the famous ‘urban legends’ held to be true by many people and influencing their decisions about a wide variety of subjects.

A Recipe For Communications Breakdown 2 Opinions Collide

In any given communications scenario run without the application of Objective Truth ™ technologies we will find 2 or more people looking to solve a problem based on their deeply subjective views of the world. Both parties ‘know’ that they are ‘right’ and that the other party is ‘wrong’.

If both parties are at a comparable social/business level such a conversation can lead to a spirited exchange of opinions or even to a fight. Such a conversation may not always lead to a satisfying solution, yet both parties can clearly define their opinion to each other, this at least leads to some form of clarity.

The true danger for any organization starts when a manager starts communicating with a team which feels it is not empowered to speak back. In other words the teams rationale is: ‘Ok, just go ahead, tell us what you want to tell us… we know this is just your opinion and you are the boss and whatever you say is whatever you say, we’ll see how much of what you say means anything to us…’

In other words, the team has just listened to the manager’s opinion without ‘resistance’ because it is useless to try to dissuade the boss from his opinion which does not fit with the opinion of the majority of the team member.

Creating Objective Truth™

Lets take a simple case study to establish the difference between forcing people to do something based on role power and achieving high buy in levels of the team based on Objective Truth™.

Being on time: Most all professional people agree that being on time is a minimal prerequisite to be able to do business.

Yet a substantial minority of people in any given corporate situation manage to be late. Being late has become sort of a lesser sin in which the latecomer is never really held to a higher standard of punctuality, just in case I might be late one day.

Some managers get seriously put off by such a lax attitude and decide to get their teams to comply with the simplest of all corporate rules: be on time… period! These managers will achieve punctuality through sheer application of will power. And they will achieve something else: massive emotional re-action, the majority of employees will extrapolate this manager’s ‘strictness’ and ‘intransigence’ into other areas of his job and become resentful of a wide variety of activities associated with selfsame manager. The net result of such a power-driven implementation can be a large amount of insidiously silent resistance to the manager.

Removing Resistance and Creating Total Buy-In

We have implemented a total punctuality drive with little or no resistance through many major MNCs with a simple exercise of Objective Truth:

Call the team in question together and implement the following 7 step plan:

  1. Ask each single team member for their age (yes, ladies included!)
  2. It becomes objectively true that they are all legally adult
  3. Ask each single team member to rate themselves as professional from 0-10 (0 = lousy – 10 = outstanding)
  4. Predictably most team members will choose a number above 5, this means they are all categorized as ‘above average’
  5. Establish Objective Truth™: ask the team what the first sign for professional behavior is when two people have a meeting… the objectively true answer is: being on time!
  6. You have just gotten your team’s complete and objective agreement that being on time is a basic, non-negotiable part of professional behavior!
  7. Now you can establish a clear set of rules to manage ‘being on time’:
    • We all agree to be on time
    • If anyone knows they will be late for a good reason they must make the other meeting members aware of it
    • If a person comes late without prior information to the other participants this person will have to pay a penalty ($50 fore charity, sing a song, etc)

This simple exercise contains all major moving parts of creating Objective Truth™ and total buy-in from a team. Most all contentious situations can be de-fused by using Objective Truth™ technologies.

Article written by: Roger Konopasek Author, International Speaker, Trainer and Transformational Leadership Catalyst."

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