You have enemies? Good. That means
that you have stood up for something,
sometime in your life.
Winston Churchill
There are few virtues American business doesn't possess, and few mistakes we've ever avoided. Somewhere in the nineties it became fashionable to double-clutch the facts to deflect reality. More and more, it seems, we can't draw a line without blurring it.
Social scientists are unable to explain why. Political correctness is high-fashion while attempts to explain away the growing trend toward situational truth and mitigating speech rule the day. Much caterwauling over "PC" fails to peel back the current fascination for temporizing, in lieu of blunt force reality. In business, this fad has long since become a trend, and it's doing no one any discernable good. In the interest of avoiding conflict, hurting someone's feelings, preserving our own good-standing through glossed over problem-sets and solutions, we're steadily dumbing-down our careers and the organizations we serve. Then there are the parents and teachers, hovering over the kids at Camp Self-Esteem-A-Lot, decrying too much emphasis on "winning," with Kool Aid and cookies for the losing side, just for showing up. When my little league team lost, my father put it succinctly: "You need to play better next time. You're capable of it."
Volumes have been written about the changing standards of the nineties and two-thousands. Asked in research questionnaires, attitudes about truth-telling, lying and situational ethics, rapidly growing groups across demographic and gender-specific data tables essentially respond, "It's okay to lie, everybody does it." Today, daily communication is rife with mitigating speech used as a sort of code that deflects sharp-edged meaning and offers a percentage of semantic license; just enough to leave a crack in the truth so that sender and receiver have an exit. The new era of temporizing then, is a technique plotted mid-point between meat-on-the-grill candor, and outright misrepresentation.
Someday this side-trip of political correctness with a detour through situational sophistry may simply be scrapbooked as counterculture; a somewhat altered state stored in the closet of American sociology. For now, however, we can't get through a day absent a press conference, a C-Span look-in, or a staff meeting in the conference room without hearing someone round off reality with a temporizing comment or an obtuse answer. Giving us all the benefit of the doubt, we may assume we practice the art-of-the-indirect so as to make things better; ease off on the tension curve, escape the day without turmoil. However admirable, at best it's the height of naïveté, at worst, social interaction at its nadir. It will come to no good end.
We can no more avoid conflict than a pee wee football team can avoid scraped knees or hurt feelings. Life is hard. It's even harder when we avoid plain and unvarnished truth: in business, in friendship, in families. Deferring reality guarantees greater injury later on.
When a colleague needs redirection, a player needs coaching, a subordinate needs discipline, or a child needs an object lesson, the best way is the straightest way. If we start every communication with an aim toward avoiding conflict or political fall-out, we'll never get back on the path to productive communication. And on those occasions when we might go too far with straight-from-the-shoulder bluntness, we can always fall back on a device known as "the apology." Eating one's words will never lead to terminal indigestion. Failing to say them, might.
