I was facilitating a client meeting not long ago. As always, we had a lot of content to review and discuss. Some folks wanted to move ahead quickly and I tried to move the discussion from point A to point B to stay on track. One fellow got pretty upset and felt like we should spend more time discussing. And to be honest, he got a bit hostile in his zeal to communicate those feelings. It was uncomfortable. Not just for me. There was a sense of discomfort in the room.
We found a way through it and this fellow apologized to me.
But as I thought about it more, I was happy that we all had some moments of discomfort. This company – like so many others – has expressed an intention to create a culture of greater candor. It occurred to me that the benefits of candor can only accrue to those who are willing to endure the inevitable moments of discomfort that candor can engender. People will not always agree. They will not always be in good spirits. And people are people. Sometimes conversations will get heated. Sometimes they may venture into mild hostility – even in professional environments. This is OK. In fact, it is vital. Because the only way you can avoid this is to dehumanize the work environment. Make it clear that conflict and discomfort are to be avoided. People will start liberally slathering caveats over everything they say. They will sand down the rough edges of their ideas to make them more comfortable for everyone. They will avoid words that can possibly interpreted as negative in some way. And over time, you will find that the environment is anything but candid. People will all blandly agree with each other because they aren’t really ever saying anything with meaning.
I think the desire to avoid personal discomfort is the greatest impediment to greatness (and innovation which is one form of greatness). You must be willing to endure discomfort if you wish to be great. You must be willing to be questioned – even ridiculed. You must be willing to fail. Yes, I said fail. Often people forget that risk has two outcomes – success and failure. You must be prepared to accept failures.
But there’s a bigger point here. The bad is not really bad. And failure is not really failure. My personal discomfort when facilitating that client meeting was definitely uncomfortable. But I learned from it. It opened me up to new insights. Sure, we can learn from good experiences as well. But I think that it is often the negative experiences that have the most to teach us. We must not only accept these, we must embrace them with the knowledge that over the course of our lives we will live lives so much richer for having opened ourselves up to experiences that might be uncomfortable.
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I want to be that person who, in the midst of that uncomfortable moment, is able to speak to it appropriately and channel its power to push the group forward into a place of truth, not fear. In organizations, there is nothing more corrosive than a culture of fear pulsing beneath a ‘collaborative’ veneer.
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