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Candor is One of Our Favorite Things

19 June 2012

Allison read Keith Ferrazzi’s one-page article on Candor, Criticism, and Teamwork from the January-February 2012 Harvard Business Review and was glad to learn three great tips for helping people have meaningful conversations in meetings and ultimately stronger relationships.

Tags: allison partners favorite, allison read, communication, courage, culture, leadership, meetings, teams, thoughtful candor

If you were to spend a little time gazing at our home page, you’d notice that the following words flash on your screen:  success, change, growth, action, balance, learn, experience, challenge, and candor. We think words matter and these are some of our favorites. I’ve been catching up on back issues of the Harvard Business Review and am glad I found out that Keith Ferrazzi wrote one of the most succinct and meaningful pieces on the importance of candor I’ve ever read.

Ferrazzi and his team have done the research to prove that candor matters. He writes, “The teams that scored the lowest on candor saw the poorest financial returns among those banks during the recent global economic crisis,” and “In our research at more than 50 large companies over the past three years, we identified ‘observable candor’ as the behavior that best predicts high-performing teams.” Now you may be thinking, “Well sure, but candor is pretty hard to come by!” Ferrazzi acknowledges that too and suggests three great tips to support meaningful and candid meetings:

  1. Break meetings into smaller groups;
  2. Designate a ‘Yoda;’
  3. Teach ‘caring criticism.’

As a lifelong Star Wars fan with a Yoda Pez Dispenser on my desk, I’ll confess that Ferrazzi sealed the deal for me when he brought the great Jedi Master into the conversation. I’m going to keep this post brief because I think you’d be better served if you actually read the article and HBR generously provides the full text here. Let me know what you think of his advice. I’ll definitely be passing the tips along to my clients and following Ferrazzi’s blog and Tweets.



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