Pleasantries: Why? Be Direct, It is Safer.

The one thing that you notice when having worked in different countries is that the social and professional conventions used in business are not the same in every workplace.  Body language is different in Africa and the USA etc etc.  Understanding this is a pretty basic skill and most professionals get it.  Well most of them ....  but that is another post for sometime in the future.

There is one thing that fascinates me about many people - their innate preference for avoiding the truth.  Is it because they just cannot express themselves, or are they just socially inept as managers (or maybe just introverts in disguise)?  Most of the time they seem simply not to want to either listen, or deliver the basic message - without all the disguises that are typically used and then described as just being polite. They then are baffled why messages get misinterpreted and things go off the rails.



This becomes extremely dangerous for organisations when business executives are making decisions and have got the wrong end of the stick.  In an environment where "saying it as it is" is interpreted as "negative", there is always the potential for some serious errors of judgement to slip through, and nine times out of ten, they will.

Based on experience, unless you create a culture where people can challenge (positively) and deliver the message without the dressings, teams will not operate at optimal efficiency levels, they will focus on the potential of sub-text messages and often miss the point entirely.

Mark Suster describes in a blog post, why calling it as it really is, is far more productive than keeping quiet.  It is worth a read - whether you agree or not, it should at least make you think a bit.

PS.  Being direct does not mean that you should be rude.  :-)