Ep 742 | When in Doubt, Disclose

Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Early in my business career, I was given a pretty good piece of advice that didn't seem as powerful as it played out to be. At that time when I had first heard it, but it's really guided a number of my most challenging decisions over the past 15 or 20 or so years. The simple statement was, "When in doubt, disclose." That's it. When in doubt, disclose. It's just a rule that I am married to. I don't necessarily want to say I wasn't married to it early on. I just maybe wasn't aware. And, and whenever I'm facing a challenging decision, I always ask myself, am I actually disclosing to the fullest? Let me, let me better explain. I think that a lot of leadership problems don't come from, from bad intentions by that leader. I think they come from making some poor decisions specifically around the truth, oftentimes delaying the truth. So, I want to talk about why this disclosure, you know, disclosing, when in doubt, disclose, especially when it's uncomfortable, is maybe one of the most underrated leadership skills that's out there. So, let me take you back to a story for me in 2013 when my real estate sales team was frankly on the brink of running out of money. See, I had run a very specific model for 5, 6 years at that time. The real estate market had pivoted, but my model did not pivot with it. And I looked up one day with very little revenue coming in and about 4 months of cash reserves that I definitely was going to be burning through. There just wasn't enough revenue in sight, and there was no guarantee that anything was going to turn around for me. Yes, you know, I believed in myself and I believed in the team and I thought we could solve some things, but there was a real truth or a real possibility that it may not go the right direction. And I remember sitting with, with, with a choice. And the choice was around how much I share with the team. Do I, do I soften, you know, what's going on? Do I protect people from, from the fear that came along with it? Do I, do I sugarcoat the reality so our morale didn't dip? That's the instinct I think most leaders have. And I totally get it because that was exactly where I was at. It feels responsible to maybe sugarcoat some things. It's also really, really dangerous because the truth doesn't disappear just because you delay it. It, it almost always ends up showing up later. And when it does show up later, it's louder, it's messier, there's usually greater consequences. So going back to that situation, instead of kicking the can and protecting people, or, you know, what I thought was protecting people, I instead disclosed. I was really direct with what was going on, but I was calm. I didn't make it into some catastrophe, but I also didn't minimize it either. I told my team members where we were. I told them what we didn't know. I told them what could possibly happen if we don't get this thing turned around. And then I gave them, you know, guidance in terms of what I thought we needed to do. What surprised me wasn't fear. What I actually saw out of people was, was ownership. And, you know, I'll end the story there. I'll give you the conclusion. I mean, things did turn around and it was freaking hard. It was really hard. But I'm so glad in retrospect that I didn't try to, you know, soften it all because it was a real, real situation. Now, let's be honest about why disclosure is so hard. I think leaders avoid it because they don't want to look incompetent. They're afraid of losing trust. They worry that people will panic, or they think that optimism equals leadership. But here's the truth. I think that most people learn the hard way. People don't lose trust when things are hard. They lose trust when they feel managed instead of respected. And nothing, in my opinion, creates that, that sort of scenario faster than finding something out later. Think about a time where you found out something later than you believe it should have been disclosed. People say things like, well, you knew what was going on and you didn't say anything, or this wasn't new, it was hidden, you were hiding it from us. And that's when people disengage, not because the situation was bad, but because the truth was not disclosed. The truth was being withheld. Now, here's what I've learned disclosure actually does. It eliminates future landmines. When you disclose early, you remove the power of, of later discovery. There's no scenario where you're going to hear, well, why didn't you tell us? Or this changes everything. Or we wouldn't have made that decision. See, the hard conversation is being had. It's just being had at the very start. And it happens once, not over and over and over again. I also think that in terms of benefits of disclosure, as hard as it may be, it shifts people from emotion, like, let's get it out of the way, to problem solving, because fear tends to thrive in moments of uncertainty. Disclosure, on the other hand, replaces imagination with action, with reality. When people know the truth, while it may be difficult to hear at the start, they stop guessing. They start, you know, they stop trying to fill in the blanks. They start asking better questions. And teams will move from this kind of state of anxiety to action. Now, everyone's going to move on their own timeframe, but you're getting into action much sooner with much less risk, as hard as it may be to disclose up front. I also think that disclosure is a signal. In other words, it says, "Hey team, I trust you with the truth. Hey team, I see you as capable. I see that you're not here to be protected, that you're here to contribute, and we're going to solve this together." And I think that changes the dynamic. You, you start leading partners, you start leading people with, with a stake in the outcome. Now, disclosure does not mean dumping raw emotion on people. It doesn't mean oversharing every thought that you're having. It certainly doesn't mean panicking, you know, publicly. I think disclosure is, is clear, it's measured, it's responsible, it's, it's anchored in reality, it's direct. You can absolutely disclose without being dramatic, and you can be transparent without also being reckless. I think that that calm, you know, approach and that calm truth is always going to beat out, you know, this spun-up optimism. So here's the principle I live by now. If you're debating whether to say something, that's usually your answer. When in doubt, disclose. Because the cost of early honesty, as hard as it is to pull this off, the cost of early, early honesty is almost always lower than the cost of delaying the truth. In leadership, trust compounds faster than optimism ever will. And side note, in your personal relationships, all of this holds true. In personal relationships, probably a conversation for another day, but a lot of times we, we, we're not as direct as we know we should be, and it almost always bites us in the butt down the road. So when in doubt, disclose. This lesson saved my business once. It saved many a mistake for me over the past 15 years, and it saved a lot of relationships since. That's all I have for you today, the No Days Off Podcast. Thank you so much for listening, and remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.