Chad Silverstein stopped being the team's emotional dump truck after learning from A Failure of Nerve to force direct confrontation instead of absorbing coworkers' complaints. Leaders need the backbone for hard conversations and to pass accountability where it belongs.
Chapters
I remember when Chet gave me the book A Failure of Nerve. I don't know why it was such a hard book for me to read. I just couldn't get through it. Just some of those books just do that to me. I don't know. I'm not a big reader, and I do read a lot, but I'm very picky with what I read, and that just didn't speak to me. But I remember the concepts that he taught me in practice did. And there's definitely one I want to share with you, and that is that I used to kind of play the office shrink. I used to solve everyone's problems. I was good at solving problems. I liked to help people. So people would come to my office and they'd be upset about a conflict they'd had with other people in the office. And Chet, you know, he couldn't believe that I had a box of tissues on my desk because people used to sit and cry and, like, you know, dealing with some hard stuff, but, like, you know, like, why am I dealing with it? And I thought I was doing the right thing, but I realized that it was taking up a lot of time, and it wasn't my job. And so he taught me this concept of past attention, where it belongs. And I'm. You know. He said, you're not the dump truck in your office where people are going to dump all their problems on you. So he asked me if I wanted to solve this problem, and I said yes. And he told me, the next time someone walks in your office, put your hand up and say stop. And say, have you told the person what you're about to tell me? And when they say no, call the person in your office and make them tell that person what they're going to say right in front of you. There's no way I'm doing that. He said, well, if you want to stop, this will be acutely painful, but they'll never do it ever again. So I could see that. And instead of choosing the acute pain that it probably would work, I did it my way. And I think Chet would laugh at that today, because he probably remembers this, but I had a meeting with my company, and I played out a scenario and told everyone, here's the deal. When you guys come into my office and you're gonna complain about someone else at the office, which, by the way, this whole thing was my fault because I enabled all this to begin with. But. But I wanted to put a stop to it. And I told him, I'm gonna ask you if you've talked to the person that you had a problem with, and if you say no, I'm calling them in. And that day forward changed everything. Nobody came in my office talking about people and dumping their problems on me. And, you know, so that was a concept I think Chet learned from the failure of nerve. I think he calls it the triangle of conflict or something like that from the book. And there's something to be said about passing attention where it belongs and having that failure of nerve, too, and having a backbone to be able to stand up and do the hard stuff. And most leaders don't have that. And I think it's going to require that if you're going to lead anything. It's one thing if you lead yourself. It's another thing if you're going to try to influence others. But you have to be able to have the hard conversations. You've got to be able to make the decisions to have certain disciplines that are going to be painful to maybe inject into your system or to apply them when things come up. But if you want to have an incredible culture, if you're running a culture, leading a team, then you need to be hardcore about how you're going to do that. And there may not be a right or wrong way, and there may be a lot of nuances to how you can do it, but you have to be relentless on being able to be tough and tender, but tough when you need to be tough. And that sometimes has to be a learned behavior for some people. So the question is, do you have a failure of nerve? Are you a dump truck? Do you take on too much tension, or do you pass it to where it belongs?
