Can you handle the truth? Three ways for leaders to stop missing essential information from across their organisation
 
Strategy + Business
 
In Sydney Finkelstein’s classic study of corporate collapses, 'Why Smart Executives Fail', the evidence that business leaders would have needed to avoid failure was available to them in every one of the cases that the author and his team examined. But leaders overlooked or ignored the warnings.
 
To make sure your feedback loops don’t become blocked or distorted, here are three key actions you can take. 

1. Focus on clarity. Although things might seem well-defined to the few at the top, they can quickly become fuzzy as they’re translated down and across the organisation, and beyond, to strategic partners and other key stakeholders.
2. Banish the “HPPO.” There’s a natural tendency to defer to the highest-paid person’s opinion (HPPO). By focusing instead on the alignment between intentions and outcomes you de-emphasise individual heroics or shortcomings and emphasise your organisation’s system design and resourcing.
3. Destigmatise mistakes. Recast “trial and error” as “trial and learn.”

Leading requires the willingness to hear the truth, the discipline to encourage communication from all directions, and the courage to face the facts.
 
Read more here.

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