Say the Hard Thing

Every Monday, the best coaches I ever had put on the film from Saturday and graded it in front of the room. The film does not lie. If you got beat on a play, there it is, forty times in slow motion, your man in the backfield.

For a long time I thought that was the coach being hard on me. It took me years to see it was the opposite. A coach who grades you honestly, play by play, in front of everyone, is telling you he believes you can be more than you were on Saturday. The coaches who stopped correcting me were not the kind ones. They were the ones who had quietly given up on me.

The easiest thing in the world is to tell a person what he wants to hear. It makes you well liked and it costs you nothing today. It also says one of two things: either you do not think he can handle the truth, or you do not care enough to spend the discomfort it takes to tell him.

It has never been easier to avoid that discomfort. Ask a machine whether your idea is any good and it will usually tell you it is brilliant. Agreement is cheap now, and the supply is endless. What is rare, and getting rarer, is a person who will look you in the eye and tell you the thing you did not want to hear, because he is for you.

I see the stakes of this most clearly in the trades. I work alongside a team that invests in and backs mission-critical, blue-collar trades businesses, and the best operators I meet run their crews the same way. A journeyman who lets an apprentice's sloppy work slide is not being nice to him. He is setting the kid up to fail an inspection, or to get somebody hurt on a job where the margin for error is zero. The foreman who stops the work and makes him do it again is the one serving him. The correction is the care.

Flattery looks like kindness, but it points the other way. It is not generosity. It is a way of protecting how people see you, and it serves the one handing it out, not the one getting it. A leader who only tells his people what they want to hear is not leading them. He is managing them, and he is ranking his own comfort above their growth.

Leadership is service. Telling someone a truth he does not want to hear is one of the hardest forms of service there is, because the whole cost lands on you, in the room, right now. It would be easier to smile and let it go. You say it anyway, because the easy thing is for you and the hard thing is for him.

Here is what turns correction into service instead of just criticism. After you say the hard thing, you stay. You help him fix it. You are still there next Monday when the film is bad again. Criticism delivers its verdict and walks away. A rope-holder says the hard thing and then holds on.

If you are for someone, you owe him the truth. The flattery is for you. The truth is for him.