Ep: 112 Ron Carucci

Ron Carucci is co-founder and managing partner at Navalent, working with CEOs and executives pursuing transformational change for their organizations, leaders, and industries.  He has a thirty year track record helping some of the world’s most influential executives tackle challenges of strategy, organization and leadership. From start-ups to Fortune 10’s, turn-arounds to new markets and strategies, overhauling leadership and culture to re-designing for growth, he has worked in more than 25 countries on 4 continents. In addition to being a regular contributor to HBR and Forbes, and has been featured in Fortune, CEO Magazine, BusinessInsider, MSNBC, Inc, Business Week, Smart Business, and thought leaders.

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Show Notes:

• Ron’s biggest habit is one of perseverance and tenacity.
  • When you want something bad enough, you have to keep a picture of it in your mind.
• It’s so easy to get distracted from a goal.
• People don’t want to talk about honesty. They want to talk about purpose.
  • You can’t talk about purpose without honesty.
• Purpose-washing is when corporations engage in lots of good-looking PR, but have not engaged in honesty.
• Employees won’t feel purpose driven if they don’t believe and trust their company.
  • They have to feel honest.
• Ron lists 4 areas that predict if a regularly honest person will turn into a dishonest person:
  • Strategic clarity is when you are who you say you are. If what you’re saying and what you’re doing don’t match, you aren’t being honest.
    • If you aren’t strategically clear, people are 3x more likely to lie or withhold the truth.
  • Accountability. The way you count performance must seem fair to your people.
    • Without accountability, people are 4x more likely to lie or withhold the truth.
  • Decision making. The way that a company constructs choices must seem fair and transparent.
    • The employees of a company that lacks decision making are 3.5x more likely to lie or withhold the truth.
  • Rivalries. The classic teams of an organization must be on the same page. Different divisions must not feel there are dueling truths between them or this will cause unresolved conflict.
    • A company with rivalries is 6x more likely to have people lie or withhold the truth.
  • If all 4 of these conditions are present in negative ways within an organization, they compound to create an environment where employees are 12x more likely to lie or withhold the truth.
• If you’re a leader Ron has a simple standard for you:
  • If at least 2x a week somebody is not in your office telling you something that’s tough to hear, your leadership is inadeqaute.
    • You haven’t created the conditions under which people tell you what you need to hear.
• If you’re a leader, it’s your job to say the hard things.
• If you find out someone withheld information about a problem you faced, you should fire them for that.
• As a leader you must set expectations for your team. Let them be ruthlessly honest.
• Ask yourself: when’s the last time someone came and got in my face?
  • If it wasn’t recent, you probably have problems.
• What data are you relying on to tell you if your company is running?
  • If you’re just examining the face value statistics, you’re going to miss information.
• There are distractions hiding in plain sight.
• Ask yourself these questions:
  • About what are you saying that’s not a problem?
  • About what conditions are you absolutely certain?
    • This is where you need to check. When you’re absolutely sure is when there’s likely something wrong.
• If you don’t know what stories your employees are telling, you should assume the worst.
• If you haven’t created the best working conditions, then people are hiding from you.
• Start honesty anonymously. Have your employees write what they think on a blank piece of paper.

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Check out a free ebook from Ron on his webiste!!!

• navalent.com/transformation