“Facts are always better than dreams. Facts provide accurate perspective of your current reality. A leader absolutely cannot make a series of good decisions without first confronting the brutal facts!”
Mark Cundiff – Learning to Lead – provides a synthesis of what Jim Collins and his team of university-level researchers published in the acclaimed business-book, “Good to Great.”
Here’s part of what Cundiff shared:
“Leadership does not begin with just a vision. It begins with getting people to confront the brutal facts and act on the implications.
The real question is ‘How do you manage in such a way as to not demotivate people. And one of the single most demotivating actions you can do is to hold out false hopes, soon to be swept away by events.
Spending time and energy trying to ‘motivate’ people is a waste of time and effort. The right people will be motivated – the key is not to ‘de-motivate’ them. One of the primary ways to de-motivate people is to ignore the brutal facts of reality.
How do you create an environment where truth is heard?
Four basic practices so people can be heard
- Lead with questions not answers. To gain understanding, not as manipulation or as a way to blame or put down others.
- What’s on your mind?
- Can you help me understand?
- What should we be worried about?
- Engage in dialogue and debate, not coercion.
- Conduct autopsies, without blame.
This should only be to search for understanding and learning.
Not just better information, but better information that cannot be ignored
- Build ‘red flag’ mechanisms.
Having unwavering faith while confronting brutal facts!
3 Categories of people who had suffered serious adversity
- Those who became permanently dispirited by the event.
- Those who got their life back to normal.
- Those who used the experience as a defining event to make them stronger.
This is called the hardiness factor.
People act most while on the edge of a precipice.
The Stockdale Paradox
Leaders must never confuse having faith that you will prevail in the end (which you can never lose) with the discipline to conform.
Leaders must retain faith that you will prevail in the end AND at the same time confront the most brutal facts of your current reality.
The key elements of greatness are deceptively simple and straightforward. The good to great leaders were able to strip away much of the noise and clutter allowing the organization to just focus on the few key things that would have the greatest impact.”
Reviewing Nettlesome November’s hot Association topic
There are – and always will be – those who fail to understand why truth matters.
Some truths are exhilarating, while others are painful. When pain exists in the body, it’s a sign something’s wrong. Ignore the pain at your own risk.
When pain is ignored in an organization or industry, that pain is ignored at the risk or cost of what otherwise could be great accomplishments.
All clients and thousands of regular readers of the Masthead and my other articles know, we are pro-MH in a big way. MHProNews and MHLivingNews.com are living proof of our team’s strong desire to advance MH. We routinely spotlight Opportunities. We must also candidly share threats and challenges. That’s how you confront the cold, hard, brutal facts.
What the Jim Collins Good to Great principles noted above underscore is that solutions call for reality checks.
Back to Cundiff’s summary, three more thought provokers:
- “Charismatic leaders can actually impede the confronting of the brutal facts due to the power of their personality casting a large shadow over the organization.
- Once leaders allows themselves to become the primary reality people worry about rather than the actual reality being the primary reality, you have a recipe for mediocrity, or perhaps even worse.
- In order to combat this tendency Winston Churchill created a Statistical Office, with the primary function of feeding him continuously and completely unfiltered the most brutal facts of reality.”
Some are upset when we spotlight reality, which we are doing this month by quoting others, real MHPros. The Jim Collins study demonstrates that not confronting reality is an error in thinking. Or as RV MH Hall of Famer Jim Clayton put it, you have to have data – the cold, hard facts – in order to make good decisions.
You advance precisely by understanding – and then fixing – what is.
Please answer this question: who in MH Trade Publishing has done the most in recent years to promote within the industry and to the general public a more positive understanding or vision of MH? Or who has shared more pro-association articles, including those about MHI or MHARR?
Perspective. Reality Checks. We must tap into positive energy while confronting the negative energy that exists. That’s how you get real POWER!
It is only be shining the light on the cold, hard facts that we’ll break out of mediocrity and rise to the greatness MH deserves.
You can see the read-hot, quote-laced Masthead blog and 10 linked articles on the association topic, along with the even hotter Don Glisson Jr exclusive interview among the 22 total new Featured Articles, linked here. “We Provide, You Decide.” © ##
(2 Programing Notes – A) There will be a fresh topic in this weekend’s Masthead Blog. B) Click the image above for a message to Congress about HUD).
