Fred Kofman - Authentic Communication: Transforming Difficult Conversations in the Workplace

Sounds True

Boulder CO 80306

2006, 2013, 2014 Fred Kofman

All rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be reproduced without written permission from the author and publisher.

SOUNDS TRUE is a trademark of Sounds True, Inc.

Published 2014

The chapters in this ebook are excerpted from Conscious Business: How to Build Value Through Values by Fred Kofman. Copyright 2013. Sounds True. 133-166.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

The Gift Outright from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. 1923, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company. 1951 by Robert Frost. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

478 words from All You Need Is Love and Other Lies About Marriage by John W. Jacobs, M.D. 2004 by John William Jacobs, M.D. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

A Ritual to Read to Each Other. 1960, 1998 by the estate of William Stafford. Reprinted from The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems with the permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota.

ISBN 978-1-62203-527-4

THE PAST TEN YEARS have seen an explosion of how-to management books. The only problem is that most how-to books arent very practical. Life is much too contingent, complex, and emergent ever to conform to a formula. Knowing what should be done and being able to do it are two different things. Consequently, it often seems that the more we learn about great companies, winning competitive strategies, or visionary-change leaders, the less we are actually able to build such organizations, effect such strategies, or be such leaders. Management know-about has vastly outpaced management know-how.

What is missing? Ironically, I believe that it is exactly what bestselling management books say makes the difference: the human dimensions of the enterprise. Yet such books rarely discuss how to cultivate and activate those human capabilities, which, after all, determine whether any significant change ever gets implemented. There is wide agreement on what needs to happen, but very little help for those who seek to make it happen.

I believe that what is missing, most fundamentally, is a deep understanding of what it means to develop an organization as a conscious human community. Fred Kofman argues that a conscious organization starts with what matters most to us: a commitment to achieving a vision that exceeds any individual capacities, a vision that connects people in a common effort with genuine meaning. Such commitment is grounded in people taking unconditional responsibility for their situation and for their ways of responding to it.

We then must choose what matters more to each of usknowing or learning. Real learning opens us to the fear of uncertainty and the embarrassment of incompetence, as well as the vulnerability of needing one another. We begin to see day-to-day work as a continual dance of learning with and from one another, where what we achieve rests on the quality of our conversationsbecause our working together centers on how we talk, relate, and commit to one another and to our aims. Ultimately, Fred argues, an enterprise flourishes or fails based on its technical and its emotional intelligence, integrity, and capacity to nurture success beyond success. More importantly, Fred shows in-depth what is needed to work together in building such capabilities. In effect, he offers a detailed map and an instruction manual for developing collective consciousness.

When I first met Fred, he was a young professor of accounting at MIT, a rather unusual professor of accounting. For example, he often started his classes by having his students listen to Beethoven, taking the same piece of music and playing it a half dozen times so that people could see that each time they heard something different. How could they keep hearing something new when the same music was played again and again? Because, they gradually came to realize, the music was not in the CD but in their listening.

This, Fred pointed out, was the first principle of accounting: the informations only value is in how it is interpreted through the mental models of the listener. Fred argued that the only justification for performance measurement was to enhance peoples capacities to produce outcomes they truly desired. If this was taken seriously, it followed logically that the truth was not in the numbers but in the meaning we made from them. Moreover, the distinction between accounting that led to learning and accounting that did not lay in the cultivation of the accountants and the managers they served. Was their real aim learning and improvement? Did they treat the data they collected as the truth, or were they open to continually challenging and improving the assumptions upon which such data was collected? Were they part of a larger human community learning how to shape its future, or were they merely keeping score of a game whose players they neither identified with nor cared about? Did the business have a larger purpose, and how could accounting contribute to this purpose?

Then, as now, Fred argued that the key to organizational excellence lay in transforming our practices of unilateral control into cultures of mutual learning. When people continually challenge and improve the data and assumptions upon which their map of reality is grounded, as opposed to treating their perspectives as the truth, tremendous productive energy is unleashed.

Needless to say, Freds course was not for everyone. Most students regarded it as a life-changing experience; thats probably why they selected him Sloan School Teacher of the Year. But every semester there would be at least one or two who would urge the deans to fire the lunatic who was teaching managerial cost accounting as a spiritual practice.

Nor is this book for everyone. If you are looking for a book to fix others, you are in the wrong place.

The inventor Buckminster Fuller used to be fond of saying, If you want to change how a person thinks, give up. You cannot change how another person thinks. Give them a tool the use of which will gradually lead them to think differently. Fred Kofman provides some of those tools. Now it is up to serious practitioners to use them.

We tend to see ourselves primarily

in the light of our intentions,

which are invisible to others,

while we see others mainly in the light of their actions,

which are visible to us.

J.G. BENNETT

You want the truth!?

You cant handle the truth!

JACK NICHOLSON, IN A FEW GOOD MEN

SHARON RAN THE HUMAN RESOURCES DEPARTMENT of a telecommunications company. Her boss, Patricia, proposed a change in the companys benefit policy that Sharon found unfair and a move certain to destroy employee morale. Sharon wanted to share her frank opinion about the new proposal without offending her boss. After much internal debate, she requested a meeting with Patricia, who didnt respond for a week. Finally, she invited Sharon to her office. What follows is a description of their conversation. The right-hand column reports the conversation as you might have heard it if youd been there. The left-hand column reveals what Sharon thought to herself but never told Patricia.