[00:00:10] Hi, welcome back to Reflect Forward. I'm your host, Kerry Siggins, and I am so glad you are here today. Today, my guest is Ron Carucci, and we had a glitch in the first part of this podcast. So it didn't record the first few minutes as we talked about who he is and about his company. And then we get into a great conversation on feedback. And because he is so busy, I didn't want to ask him to re-record
[00:00:36] for me. So I'm just going to give you a little bit of a rundown of who he is and about his book, which he wrote a couple of years ago. And then we will jump into the interview where the recording actually picked up. So Ron Carucci is the co-founder and managing partner at Navaland, which is a company that works with CEOs and executives who are pursuing transformational change for their organizations, their leadership teams, and their industries. He has a 30-year
[00:01:03] track record of tackling really tough challenges in business from startups to Fortune 10 companies, to nonprofits, to head of states, to turnarounds, anything and everything he has done. He started the company. They just celebrated their 20th year anniversary in 2024. And he started it after working in the consulting world and getting tired of it and wanting to go do his own thing. So he and a
[00:01:27] couple of friends started Navaland and have grown it now to be a fantastic consulting company that does amazing things. He's written, I think, 10 books, he said. His number one bestseller was called Rising to Power. And his most recently released book is called To Be Honest, Lead with Power, Truth, Justice, and Purpose, where they did a 10-year study on what makes organizations honest or dishonest.
[00:01:53] There's all kinds of ways to tell if people are going to do the right thing in an organization or if they're not. And that talks about who you are as an organization, how you have accountability within the organization, how you have governance, what are the processes, what are those cross-functional relationships? Do people have good relationships within the team? This really affects honesty, justice, and purpose within the company. And he did a great job of explaining all of this in the
[00:02:19] first part of the interview. But unfortunately, we don't have that. So go buy his book if you really want to dig into what makes an organization honest, what makes a leader honest, and how you address these issues around accountability, around doing the right thing, around having this identity of we are an organization who does the right thing, who shows up with integrity, and how you build those relationships so that people aren't working in silos and having this all-or-nothing mentality,
[00:02:47] or somebody has to win and somebody has to lose, which never is healthy for an organization. So that's a little bit about him. Go check out his book. I'll include it in the show notes. But the meat of what we talked about is feedback because I'm writing a book on feedback. That's my second book. I'm finishing up and I wanted to interview him because I was so fascinated by his research around honest organizations and transparent organizations. Feedback is a critical
[00:03:15] piece of having a transparent and accountable company to being a transparent and accountable leader. You have to be able to give feedback and accept feedback. And you've got to create a culture of feedback where it's safe for feedback to go in all different directions, whether that's peer-to-peer, manager-to-employee, employee-to-manager, if you want to really build a healthy organization. And so I really wanted to pick his brain around feedback.
[00:03:39] So we're going to jump in where he and I started talking about feedback and how you as a leader can give better feedback or you as a peer can give better feedback to your peers and how to really look at this as a personal responsibility to help people grow, help people develop. And it's part of your responsibility of leading a company, even if you have conflict aversion or as he calls it, an origin story that makes you fearful for giving feedback because you don't want to disrupt
[00:04:08] harmony or for whatever reason it is. So we're going to just jump into that portion of the interview. So hang tight and we'll jump into the interview. How do you help leaders start to tackle some of these systemic issues? Well, good word. First of all, acknowledging that they're systemic. They're not isolated symptoms. But the second thing is, it starts small. Go into your next team
[00:04:34] meeting, take the mission statement off the wall, put it on the table and say, hey, where am I not living up to this? Where are we not living up to these values as a team? If the company following our team around with a video camera all day and put it on silent, could that video be used to train people in these principles? Or would it be a training program on how not to do these? Ask simple questions. In your next meeting, who's doing the most of the talking? Who's not talking at all? Do you
[00:05:01] have biases about the choices you're making? Do you already know the outcome you want? Are you controlling the narrative? Do you ask people to push back on you? You say, hey, you know what? Where am I crazy here? What am I not thinking about here? Who's your they? Who's the person you know in the other department that you have to collaborate and cooperate with, with whom you're creating some competitive value that you can't stand? Go away the white flag and say, hey, we can do better.
[00:05:27] Just take steps. Do your people really feel valued? Your people come to work every day with two questions in their mind. Do I matter? And do I belong? Your job is to make sure they never doubt that the answer to other question is yes. Because when they do doubt that, they go about the counterfeits looking like they matter and looking like they belong. And we've all seen that movie and it's ugly. Do your people understand when you talk about their work? Do they feel valued? Do they feel
[00:05:55] appreciated? Simple test. Next time somebody comes to you handing in the report or finishing the deadline or wrapped up project. Say, you know what? Tell me the story. How'd you do it? And listen to how they tell you where they struggled, what they learned, how they broke through and watch them come alive. Just ask for the story. It's the simplest way to dignify somebody's work. These are not hard things, Carrie. Just make them normal to do them. Yeah. I think a lot of leaders want to put their head in the sand, right? They don't necessarily want
[00:06:21] to acknowledge this because it's painful or whatever issues they have. I don't want to deal with this or I want to stick my head in the sand because I have confidence issues or self-esteem issues. And so they're afraid to ask these questions. What advice do you have for people who maybe are resistant to like digging in and really starting to ask those kinds of questions from their employees? Well, ask yourself what the alternative is. Right. You are flying an airplane without radar.
[00:06:48] Without calibration, you are making up a story in your head that tells you one thing that may not naturality. Probably the greatest nerve the book hit of all the tickets is the self-honesty one. That's the hardest form of honesty. It's the place you have to start. So many leaders are walking around uncalibrated because they're living in origin stories that they haven't interrogated, right? They have narratives from their past that are narrating the world around them inaccurately.
[00:07:15] They don't like me. They're going to find me out. I'm better than them and they don't see it. Whatever the narrative is, it has an origin story. It has a tale to it that you learned. It's learned behavior. And if you're not willing to unlearn that behavior, you're going to keep creating an alternative universe to the reality around you and people are going to see you without a touch. And so if leaning into some of those issues feels hard, feels pointless, feels soft, feels unhelpful,
[00:07:43] consider the alternative of what catastrophe awaits you down the road, what newspaper headline you don't want to be in, what scandal might emerge, what disaster is brewing. Because there are petri dishes all over your organization in which the fungus of those four things is growing. You have to ask yourself, are you going to outrun that fungus? And if you're telling yourself, I'm different, you have put yourself in the most perilous place you can.
[00:08:09] I think that's a great segue into feedback because the further up you go in an organization, the less likely you are to get feedback. So I think that's a big piece of it is that so many leaders are isolated from feedback because people are scared to give it to them. So they can create this little bubble or echo chamber of, well, I haven't heard anything bad, so everything must be fine. And that's just such a false dichotomy because people just aren't telling you what they think. I tell my clients all the time, if you don't have somebody coming into your office two or three times a
[00:08:37] week saying something that makes you uncomfortable, you can be very confident your leadership sucks. Because they're telling somebody, you are the story around dinner tables every night. If you don't know what stories are being told, then you should get it on the conversation. So how can leaders encourage people to give them more feedback and be honest and forthcoming? Well, part of it is to make sure that you've made the environment psychologically safe enough to give
[00:09:05] you feedback. You've made your invitations genuine. You've asked for pushback. You've modeled having your mind changed. You've modeled changing behavior that you got feedback on. You've taken feedback to heart. You've apologized when you've made a mistake. A very basic set of principles that set a table that says he cares about what I think. And so he's made it safe enough. I have an obligation to help him be better by giving feedback as well, graciously and kindly. I tell leaders all the time, this is the
[00:09:33] point that Gary loves to repeat after me. If you withhold information from somebody that could make them better because it makes you more comfortable, you have put yourself ahead of others and you're not doing your job. People need to know when they can be better. And if you think that it's not kind or they're having a bad day, I don't want to hurt their feelings, whatever story you're telling yourself, you're just a chicken. And it's not kind. It's cruel and cowardly to withhold information. So you have to model it. And you also have to show the kindness and vulnerability and courage
[00:10:02] to receive that information, be grateful for it, and then show them that you take it seriously and you act upon it. And then ask for people to watch and say, hey, I'm trying this new thing. Let me know when it works and let me know when it doesn't. I agree. So how can leaders normalize a culture of feedback? Because so many people are scared to give it. But when you do have a culture of feedback, really great things happen. Great companies have been built on feedback cultures. So how can leaders go and normalize this more, whether it's
[00:10:31] manager to employee, employee to manager, peer to peer? Start by asking, you know, at the end of every meeting, let people know, hey, I want our time together to be really productive and important and meaningful for us all. Let's set a baseline. What is it we want these meetings to accomplish? What about them is boring? And set a baseline for some team norms. When we're together, here's how we want to be. And then pull those norms out at the end of every meeting and say, how did we do? Which one could we do? So you start with a group
[00:10:59] thing. And then ask, which one am I not modeling? Which one of these could I do better at? I do a call called speed dating, where I do round robins, 15, 20 minute rounds and put people in pairs. And the question is, what's something I did that helps you as a colleague? What's something I could do better to help be a better colleague to you? And what's something I do that you see me get my best? And we do three, four rounds of that. And in speed dating rounds, you're exchanging information and making it very
[00:11:24] normal to say, hey, we talk about each other to each other, not about each other. Yeah. The thing that really kills it is collusion. So when I go to my boss and I say, what the hell's up with Susan in it? She's being a real jerk. And I ask the boss go, oh, how? And you indulge it, right? Now you've said that collusion is the way we exchange information about each other. And I have to be the messenger to Susan. I tell every leader, the minute somebody comes to you to talk about somebody else,
[00:11:52] you can either do it the kind way and say, I'm going to give you a choice. I will coach you through this conversation. You will go right to Susan and have it, or I will tell Susan we have it. Or you can skip that part and say, hold on. Hey, Susan, come on in here. Bill, I have something to say. I want you to hear them. And I have to do that last time the person comes to them. But you have to send a signal that says, I am not the messenger. I am a priest. I'm not the person who's going to make it better for you. If your issue is with Susan, don't talk to me.
[00:12:20] One of my superpowers is getting people to tell me things because I know how to ask really good questions. And I care deeply about relationships and people know that. So people tell me things that they, you know, they came in here and they were not going to tell me that. And the next thing you know, they are. And early in my days, as I was maturing as a leader, I would go and triangulate. It would be like, okay, we got to go fix this problem. It was all with good intentions of trying to fix problems. But then I realized that people would come to me because they would know that I would go
[00:12:49] give that person feedback instead of them in the way to be helpful. And I had to stop that triangulation. And so I made a rule, no triangulation. If you tell me something, there is an expectation that you are going to go and tell that person something and I'm not going to do it for you. And that was something that I really had to learn as I was a young leader of like, you can't triangulate. You can't be that person who goes and solves other people's problems for them,
[00:13:15] especially when it comes to peer-to-peer relationships. And if you have any need at all as a leader to feel important or to feel indispensable or to feel included or to feel like, actually trust me by telling me this, then you're going to overindulge that need in a way that's going to hurt your team. Yeah, I totally agree. Okay. So let's talk a little bit more about how to give feedback. So you're working on creating a psychological safety. How can leaders go in and give feedback effectively to their employees?
[00:13:44] Direct with examples, insert love, remove judgment. No long windups. That's the big one. You probably had a bad day and maybe it's me. I don't know. And by the time you get to the point, the person is so anxiety triggered, they can't hear anything you said. I tell leaders when it's a tough message, 30 seconds. The first 30 seconds have to be, we've had a couple of conversations about your deadline missing. And this last deadline was a real problem. I need to understand how it's ever going to happen again. Just get it out. How can I be helpful? The anxious leader does most of
[00:14:14] the talking. You want them doing the talking, not you. Say your concerns, say your point, let them talk and help solve their own problem. And you support that solution. Ultimatums don't work. There have to be consequences, but so many leaders assume that accountability and hard feedback are opposing forces to care and kindness. No, they have the same thing. The absence of accountability is the absence of kindness. It's not kind to withhold hard feedback or soft pedal it or pull your punches.
[00:14:39] It's mean. And you have to see kindness and accountability as the same thing, not opposing things. And let people know you're on their side. People can take tough feedback, especially younger generations. They want it. You can hit them hard and they're like, okay, how do I do better? I just spent this last weekend coaching entrepreneurs in training who are currently incarcerated, but will be coming back from incarceration in the next two years. Talk about people who can take
[00:15:05] tough feedback. I mean, there's like a sharp kink pitch, 60 entrepreneurs in training, incarcerated, and 30 coaches. And man, you have to make sure that they're ready and they can't get enough because life has been hard to them. And I've said so many times, I wish I had CEOs with the kind of thick skin you have. They could just take it before their egos crumble. But you have to be committed and recognize that offering people information that can help them be better and also offering people
[00:15:33] information that reinforces things they're brilliant at, that makes them know you see them for who they are and that you see their genius. It is critical information to driving performance. It's like saying, I'm going to drive my car. I know there's no oil in the engine, but I don't care. But feedback is the glue that keeps a team together. It keeps trust present. It makes people know that you're not talking about them in ways that you're not telling to their face. And it builds their
[00:15:58] confidence that they can improve. Why organizations spend so much time avoiding it, squelching it, not doing it, it's beyond me. Yeah, I know. It's not easy. I mean, there's all kinds of reasons with conflict avoidance, but you're right. You're a leader. Guess what? That's part of your job. So you have to figure out how to get good at it. And I fully get the discomfort if you've not been trained that way or you have an origin story that says, don't disrupt anybody. Don't displease
[00:16:27] anybody. Keep harmony at all costs because you grew up in a very dysfunctional, violent family. I get all the origin stories that create that avoidance. And the story that says, I want to be Santa Claus and I'm going to purchase the regard of my team by being nice to them and being the benevolent daddy. Yeah. Yeah. Seen it all. We know enough about those origin stories to know that they never end well. No. That avoidance has an invoice coming to it with a lot of interest on it. So that's foreseeable.
[00:16:54] It's no longer a mystery of how this is going to go if I keep withholding information from people to indulge my own comfort. Do you think you're going to be the exception? Yeah. No. I love it. So let's go back to what you had said earlier about when you're giving feedback, if you're doing most of the talking, you're doing it wrong. I talk a lot about that in this book that I'm writing around how important it is to stay in dialogue. How do you recommend that you stay in dialogue? How do you get your employee or your peer to talk to you after you've given feedback?
[00:17:22] Ask questions. Help me understand how we got here. Maybe there's something I'm missing. What were the conditions that I'm not seeing? Maybe it was you. Maybe you gave poor direction or were clear on the deadlines or your expectations were not specific enough. Find that out. No performance shortfall is typically one-sided. If you're a leader, you probably had something to do with it. Start there. How would you wish I had gone differently? What can we do to make sure this doesn't happen again? What support do you need from me? There's lots of ways to draw them out
[00:17:51] to build their confidence because if you give them the answer, it's your answer. You want them coming up with the solutions and then asking for your support in that solution so that they walk out of your office thinking about their own behavior. If they leave your office thinking about your behavior, all the things you said, they're not thinking about how they can change. They're thinking about what a jerk you were or wasn't that bad. So many times I've had leaders prepare to go give some really tough messages to some really senior executive and I'll check in with both. I'll check
[00:18:19] in with a person who got the feedback and I'll hear, yeah, he wasn't that upset. Give me some thoughts to think about, but it was pretty good. And I'll talk to the executive going, I was really hard on him. I pushed him hard. He is clear now what I expect. Like what, what meeting were you in? All the time that happens because to you, you felt the weight of delivering and you sort of projected that onto them and assume they felt the same weight. But meanwhile, it was all babble and
[00:18:44] gobbledygook and some slip in of a, Hey, if you wouldn't mind getting on time, I really appreciate it. Thanks. Yeah. That's the whole clarity piece. Clarity is so important, especially if you are conflict avoidant, uncomfortable giving feedback, a people pleaser, whatever the or Jordan story is preparing yourself so that you are direct and clear. So that person does walk out going, okay, I understand is so incredibly important. And I think a lot of people don't prepare properly. They
[00:19:12] just are like, okay, I'm going to dive in and get it over with. Sometimes if it's a really high risk maneuver conversation, you know, it's to a board member, it's to a division president, you can't afford to lose. We're going to role play. You're going to write the message out. You're going to memorize it. You're going to deliver it to me first, and I'm going to tell you how to do it better. So by the time you're actually having the conversation, you prepared yourself really well. They're not going to be words that came out of your mouth for the first time. You're going to have said them well. You're going to have calmed yourself. If you dysregulate,
[00:19:41] you're going to learn how to regulate, do the necessary breathing you need to do to not look panicked or anxious or avoidant. The minute you signal to somebody that you're uncomfortable, you do one or two things. You make them really uncomfortable or you make them empowered. You go, oh, you need to tell me this. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that I do when I know I'm going to deliver hard feedback, I look at it as how do we give this person advice? How does it come across more as advice rather than a reprimand? You know, I think that does help you
[00:20:11] stay in dialogue a little bit better too, because people of course have the choice rather accept the feedback or not. You have the responsibility as a leader to give it, but they get to choose to, accept it or not. And that's part of the framing of like, hey, I want to give you some advice in this situation, especially if it's a relationship-based thing. Like, I'm going to give you some advice on how this is being perceived. It's also really important to let the person calibrate first. So let's say they did a presentation and shit the bed. Yeah. We're going to say, how did you feel it went? What was your intention? What were you thinking
[00:20:40] it would go? And they'll probably then send some gaps and tell me more and see how far off your perception they are. But at least it gives you a place to cut in. And when I tell you, I was really nervous. I probably should have gone over the slides a few more times. I wasn't expecting the questions to come in the middle of the presentation. Got it. That's all great observations. Let me tell you what I saw as a result of those things. And let's talk about how we can make
[00:21:07] you go better. But at least you've given them a chance to own the assessment. Because if they're thinking, I crushed it. Tell me why? What about it? Do you think you felt you crushed it? You have to figure out what story they're telling themselves and what data they collected. People were smiling and nodding. Nobody asked any hard questions. I felt confident. All vanity metrics that tell you nothing. But at least you know what they're calibrating against in comparison to what you actually saw and
[00:21:36] what people really experienced. And I love that because then you could modify how you're going to handle something, right? Because if you come in hard and there's a gap between how they perceive their performance and what actually happens, you could really do some damage if you have not really understood where they're coming from first and then modify yourself to be able to say, okay, well, I appreciate that you saw those things. But so I think that's a really important thing, right? The worst one carries when you come in hard when they're already feeling like crap.
[00:22:04] Yeah. They're hiding it, but deep inside they know they completely blew it. And you come in and just hammer them on top of that. Yeah. But if they're already feeling remorse and guilt and shame and all the things, you have what you need. Pain point of commitment saying, okay, I can see why you feel that way. I was there. You didn't go as you wanted. Let's talk about how to use the pain for good. Let's not waste the crisis and waste the skin knee here. How do we do better? Yeah. But if you don't know where
[00:22:34] you told yourself a story that they don't care, they were careless, they didn't prepare enough, or they lack self-awareness, whatever it is you've told yourself that could be completely biased and untrue, you will do more harm than good. And then they will walk away thinking about your behavior, not their own. Yeah. And our job as leaders, at least I believe, is how people unleash their own potential and to really be their best. And if you are not giving, delivering feedback in a way that is helpful and direct and kind, you put the love in it, then how are you helping them be their very
[00:23:03] best? And that is our job as leaders. Right. And if it's more about making yourself feel good or making yourself feel like you're in charge, you know, whatever your ego needs, you can have your comfort. You can have your ego needs. You can have your sense of importance. You can have your sense of I told them. That's fine. You can have it. You can have change performance, commitment, ditch improvement, double down efforts. You can have both. So just know that if you walk into the meeting, wanting them to know how disappointed you are, you'll have that. You won't have them
[00:23:33] committed to change. Yeah. I love it. This has been awesome. Okay. So let's start to wrap things up here. So if people wanted to come after hearing all of this and work with Nevalent, what would they do? What kind of projects do you like to take on? What's your favorite kind of thing to dive into? Because I know you do lots of different things. Well, so you can come to Nevalent, N-A-V-A-L-E-N-T.com. You can learn a lot about us there. If you want to know more about the research, you can go to tobehonest.net. We videoed all the interviews with the heroes. So you get to hear the behind
[00:24:00] the scenes stories they told me. It's a whole TV series. It's like a news magazine show we did called Moments of Truth. There's some videos, all the research, a bunch of articles there. So you can learn more there. And final quote me on LinkedIn. And if you have an executive coaching need where you're just got promoted to your first C-suite job, you have a team that's not working well, you have an organization that's in disarray and you can't quite figure out why. Those are the reasons to call. I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on and sharing all of this knowledge
[00:24:28] with us. It has been a fascinating conversation and I hope I get to meet you in person someday. I mean, we're our kindred souls in so many ways. Well, I appreciate the time and good luck with the book. It's great to have your voice in the world and I'm sure that your readers are going to really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Hang tight, everybody. I'll be right back. All right, everyone. I hope that you enjoyed that shortened version. It was so much knowledge that
[00:24:56] I wanted to share it with all with you because I think it's a really powerful conversation that we had. So please go check him out. I'll include all of the places that you can find him in the show notes. And I really appreciate it. And if you think this episode could help somebody who maybe isn't great at giving feedback, please share it with them. And if you'd like this podcast, please share it with your network. Please subscribe to it on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform. Write a review. It's always so helpful. Thanks so much. I'll see you next week.