Episode 022: Speaking the Kind Truth

Welcome to the Fleet Success Show, a podcast dedicated to talking about the fundamentals, standards, and best practices that empower today's fleets to achieve fleet success. Let's get into the show.

Welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show. Hope everybody's doing all right. Joining us again, got Jeff Jenkins.

Hey, glad to be back.

Steve Salzgeber.

Good to be here again.

You guys missed me last week.

We did. We did last week.

We did.

You're off at the McLeod Show, so we're glad to have you back and bringing your spice of life to the show today. So, uh, so today we've got a fun little topic. As a reminder, you can always email us your suggestions, questions, thoughts. Think we get something totally wrong or you just totally disagree with us, we will be happy to ignore it. You can email us at podcast@rtafleet.com. I wonder if they'll hear that. Some of them might just like skip right past it. They're listening to me like 1.25 speed. What did he just say? He was going to ignore our comments?

Yes. Listen, Josh may ignore them. I won't.

That's right.

How's that?

Jeff's the kind listening ear.

But no, seriously, what a good segue.

Please do. Please do send those in. We'd love to hear from you guys. Hear any comments or feedback you've got for us as we do the show. So today, talking a little about intentional culture, one of the big pieces of intentional culture, and that is this concept called speaking the kind truth. You probably have heard this before. It's not exactly a new thing at all, but it's something we talk about a lot here at RTA since it ties directly into one of our core values, which is being SMART. When we bring people on board, we have this huge, you know, like I do basically an hour, 90-minute onboarding session with them. Talk about our core values, our mission, and one of the things I talk about is speaking the kind truth. It's something I expect all of our managers to do, and it's something that you as a manager, if you're a fleet manager, should be doing with your people as well. And the idea is that you need to be careful that you're not being a nice manager. Right, that you're not being nice, that you're being kind. We kind of set that up. The difference between being nice is when you're being nice, you're trying to make sure that the other person feels good. You want to give them all the good news, all the praise, but maybe you don't really want to tell them that really hard thing. The best example I have for this is maybe you're out with your best friend and you realize he's got like a little piece of spinach in his teeth. Teeth from lunch. But you don't want to say anything because you're like, oh man, he's like right in the middle, we're in the middle of this lunch meeting, he's talking to these clients, I don't want to embarrass him in front of everybody. And so you just don't say anything.

I like to use the example of the guy's fly is down.

That'll work too, right?

You want to tell him?

You don't want to be that guy like, hey, why are you looking at my fly? But the idea is that you want to make sure that when you're nice, you really are— you're trying to make sure that you're not going to hurt their feelings. And I'll tell you, that's actually BS. It's not about hurting their feelings. What it is, is you don't want to be the person to hurt their feelings. You want to make it about you, that you don't want to be seen as a jerk. And so a lot of us, we avoid hard conversations because we don't want to be a jerk.

I think it comes down to, you know, you try to be nice because you want to kind of be their friend. But in actuality, you're not their friend, you're their supervisor. And I think there's a subtle difference between that line that you have to draw there. And they expect you actually to be kind to them, but not their friend.

Well, and I think expect them— I don't know that they expect you to be kind to them. They do expect you to be cordial and professional. Civil, civil, yeah. Hopefully you're caring about your people. But I think what they're really expecting is if you've got a problem, you're gonna say something to them about it. And I would even go so far as to say you owe it to your people to speak the kind truth to them. You know, one of the things I, when I talk to some of the managers here, is when I hear that, hey, I'm having a problem with such-and-such employee and this is an issue, and you know, I'd walk through this whole thing and I'll hear, okay, well, tell me more, what's going on? Okay, everything you just told me, you need to go have a one-on-one with that person and tell them the exact same thing. They have to hear what you just said directly from you, and you can't pull a punch. I've had managers that pulled punches, and what ends up happening when they pull punches, they're again, they're trying to preserve that person's feelings, right? And so they're trying to, "Well, I don't want to hurt your feelings." Really, it's, "I don't want to be seen as a jerk because I hurt your feelings." What ends up happening is they become a jerk because we have to let them go when they're not living up to the standards, right? If you go home and tell your spouse more than you tell that direct employee, right? You go home and gripe and complain about, "Oh, you wouldn't believe all this stuff Steve did today, but I don't have the courage to say it to your face and help you." Because that's really why this is an unselfish act. If you're speaking the kind truth, it's unselfish, but if you're being nice, it's selfish. Yeah, because if I actually sat down with you and said, look, I want to help you out and I'm going to speak this— you're not going to like this, this is going to be an uncomfortable conversation, but I owe it to you to tell you because I don't think you know, right? And that is what speaking the kind truth is about, is about speaking with clear, caring candor to help somebody grow, mature, develop, and to hear a hard truth that maybe it wasn't easy for them to hear. Maybe it's something they've never known. Maybe it's something they've struggled with their entire life, but they have to know where you stand and what you're saying.

And I think a lot of it comes with a prerequisite is getting to know your employees too. That's why the one-on-ones are so important. That's why that interaction's so important. So when you get in a situation where you have that conflict and you have to speak the kind truth, they at least have some respect for you, right?

Because you've developed that rapport. You know they're coming at it from a good place.

Yes.

Right. You definitely don't want to do it to score points.

Yeah.

So yeah, and I also think too, like Josh, you said, you know, and don't pull any punches. Well, the moment you start to model that to where you're pulling the punches from what really needs to be addressed, people don't take it as a definitive, they take it as a suggestion.

Yeah.

So then you end up having that conversation all over again because the way you presented it was, well, it's not what you need to do or what you— what behavior you need to change. It's like, yeah, maybe you could kind of sort of do, you know. And so then you're going to have that discussion again down the road.

It's ambiguous.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you really are, you're just kicking the can down the road to have that discussion again, or not. Um, you know, because I have seen that too, where managers are so afraid to have that hard conversation that, you know, you do something and it makes them mad, and then you do it again because you have no idea, you're clueless, and, you know, it upsets them again, and it goes on and on, and that little thing turns into a really big thing until it gets to the point where the manager is just like, I can't anymore, and then they fire you. Well, it's— Patrick Lencioni says this, he says that termination or firing somebody is the last act of cowardice of a manager, right? And that's what usually has happened is that manager has failed to have those clear, caring, candid conversations, speaking the kind truth to the point that that employee If they've done it right, the employee will be inspired to leave. If you have to fire somebody, it's because you haven't been direct enough with that employee to inspire them to find something else to do. It's not always true. You know, sometimes employees just don't get it. You've been as clear and candid as you can, and they just don't understand. I have been in that situation. I get it. I keep saying that. It's probably very elitist of me, but the idea here is that Sometimes as we're having hard conversations, the receiving party doesn't necessarily understand all the time. Yep.

So the last company I worked at, they were very famous for kicking the can. The owner was the epitome of kicking the can. So when I go in, I'm looking around talking about changes and, you know, talking to people about how they can do stuff differently, try to get better. And then I would address it with the owner and Jack, bless his heart, He would always just be like, "Well, we can't lose them. We can't lose them. They're too valuable. They've been here for 15 years." Well, Jack, they're also the lowest performing person you have, right? They are rude to people. They're just not a good fit for what we want here. "Well, we can't lose them," right? So his company has gone down 60% from what it used to be because of the fact that he can't have those kind truth discussions with his people because it makes him uncomfortable. He's very non-confrontational. He doesn't want to address it. He'd much rather just let that problem slide and not deal with it at all, right? So, you know, you've got a company that was at 1,200 trucks at one point. Now it's less than 600. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that he's not willing to speak the kind truth to his employees that are there. Now, there's a lot of good people there. There's also people that are there that aren't very good and shouldn't be there. But his inability to have that confrontation with somebody and speak that kind truth has been a detriment to his own company.

Yeah, and that's what happens is when managers— because it takes a lot of courage. It takes courage to— Brené Brown calls it entering the danger, right? I think Patrick Lencioni says the same thing. He talks about enter the danger, drop your armor, be vulnerable, and take courage and say something that you know is going to make you look bad, right? That you may not be able to be friends with this person at the end of this conversation. You hope you can, but you're risking it, but you're risking it for them, right?

Yeah, but it's also how you have that conversation and how you dress it. If you come in and you're just a complete asshole, then obviously you're gonna affect that relationship and it's not gonna go. But if the premise is, hey, I'm trying to help you not only keep your job but to improve and to help develop you professionally and personally, if you frame it in that way and have those conversations, don't get personal, You're not going to lose that respect of that person. You're not going to damage that relationship. If they know that my number one concern is looking out for you and your well-being, it's hard to say, "Oh, Jeff's an asshole because he told me that I needed to do X." This reminds me of a conversation I had years ago with an employee that had hygiene problems, and every single coworker complained about him.

Like he never took a shower, never took a bath. He basically stunk. I had to have a conversation with him where I actually prepared for that and took a bar of soap with me for that conversation and had to tell him this kind truth. Look, you're a great guy, you do a good job, but you're offensive and you've really got to be a little bit more hygiene conscious. And that's the kind of a conversation supervisor doesn't expect to have to give. It took me a lot of courage to give that one. Yeah, over the time. I mean, because I mean, that was not something— he's a mechanic anyway, right? Yeah, so they're all dirty, right? But there's still, there's still a line there where you've got to— okay, still got to be presentable.

I can't tell you how many truck drivers we had to have that same conversation because they would walk into the office and it just permeates. And it doesn't matter who it is, even if it's a stranger, it's an uncomfortable conversation to be like, hey, uh, 'Can you go take a shower?' I mean, you know, something.

Like, how do you approach that subject?

Exactly.

It's a tough one. Well, and I think even beyond personal hygiene, I think that's a tough conversation to have when you start getting into things that are like character traits.

Yeah.

You know, when you get to things— and this is why Patrick Lencioni in Five Dysfunctions talks about you have to understand people's personalities because sometimes it's just the way they're wired. And you might be assuming that somebody's intent is one way, right? So you're coming in here like, 'Hey, I gotta have a hard conversation with you.' Well, it turns out that it's not a behavior problem or an attitude problem. It's just a personality difference, right? And so that's why you talked about you have to get to know your employees. You got to get to know your team. John Maxwell has a book called Five Levels of Leadership. This is one of the first books I ever read on leadership. And, you know, he talks about how a lot of leaders, you know, they get level 1 leadership, which is positional authority, and people respect you just because of the title that you have. What's your role in the organization? He says good leaders though realize that that's not enough. They actually have to grow their influence, and the next step they have to do is they have to focus on relationships. And it's all about the people, and you have to build the relationships where you have a caring relationship, you understand who they are, what's their story. Some leaders skip that step and they go straight to performance, performance, performance. I'm gonna drive you hard, I'm gonna run you till you break. And I don't really care about you as long as you're delivering the results. And so he puts these two together and he says, look, Level 2 leaders are on relationship, and then they move, they use the relationship to drive results instead of the other way around. What that allows them to do is they can have caring, candid conversations with people. He says if you are all candor, then it's just dysfunctional, you know, like it's just, it's abusive is what he calls it. He says, but if you're all caring, then it's dysfunctional because 'cause then your team ends up just taking advantage of you 'cause you are too nice. You're not willing to have a hard conversation and drive performance and drive them to achieve greatness. I've been watching The Last Dance again, you know, that documentary on Michael Jordan, right? Well, that guy really got after people, but he did it because, you know, what he was trying to achieve, right? And he'd been through all those years of losing to Detroit and finally understood what it took to be a championship team. And so he took those guys, you know, everybody that came into that locker room, he'd push them and push them and then, you know, get to the point. Maybe he wasn't a level 3 or level 4 leader, but he'd get to that point where he could have a really hard conversation with you and tell you, dude, you're not pulling your weight around here. You know, that's not what we're doing. That's not the Chicago way, right? And then one of the key things for you as listeners is, you know, defining your intentional culture And then you have to have really hard conversations when people fall outside the lines, right? When they start coloring outside the lines, you've got to address it, you got to talk about it. You owe it to them because the worst thing you could do is give them a pink slip and then be totally surprised by it. I think it's the absolute worst thing you could do as a manager is to let somebody go and have it be a complete shock to them. That means you've absolutely failed in your job as a manager if that happens.

Yeah, I remember when I first started in trucking, uh, at night, one of the first things Kevin said to me was, I'm gonna underpay you and overwork you for 5 years. Straight up, I'm gonna underpay you and overwork you for 5 years, but I promise you it'll be worth it in the end, right? They overworked me, they underpaid me, but you know what, outside of like learning from my mom, my work ethic, like, it just skyrocketed. After that work because it was balls-to-the-wall accountability ownership. And he had the conversation and they were very good about speaking the kind truth when you weren't performing. Now, sometimes it wasn't so kind. I got some stories of being yelled at, but I probably deserved all of them.

Knowing what I know about you, I don't doubt that.

But I guess one of the other things I wanted to say is one of the most important things, and you kind of alluded to this, Steve, when you talked about getting to know your people, One of the things that you're going to be able to do to help you speak the kind truth is give your people time.

Yep.

Right? That's really what's important. So if you don't have time to sit there and to train and develop your people, to speak those kind truths, to work with them, to get them to where you need to be, you're never going to have successful people working for you, under you. And I think that we all feel we're so busy a lot of times that we just don't have the time to have that training and development with individuals. And so we skip that. So I'm just going to bring you in, talk to you, and say, listen, this is what I need you to do to improve, blah blah blah blah, done, go on the way and do it. Well, you walk out and be like, okay, what was the point of that meeting? How do I do that, right? Why are you telling me this if you're not actually going to show me and spend the time with me? And a lot of people feel neglected and that they don't belong somewhere because they don't get that time to help train them.

Yep.

Yeah, I think I remember an old ad said, how do you spell love? T-I-M-E, right? Is it about time? Yeah. So one of the things that I've always liked saying is we talk about being clear, right? To be unclear is to be unkind. And I think this goes back to speaking the kind truth a little bit, is that sometimes you mentioned this, is that when you're ambiguous, you might leave that meeting coming away with a totally different message than what you as a manager had intended. And I've seen that. So one of the things I like to do to make sure that, okay, we've just had a hard conversation, I just want to make sure you totally understood what we said.

Have them repeat it back to you.

Well, I do that, but then I'll also send a recap in an email.

Me too.

Right? I just do a follow-up email. Hey, thanks for taking some time with me today. I just wanted to recap all the bullet points or the highlights of our conversation and what you agreed to do and what I agreed to do. And that way, yeah, it's in writing, But it's one of those things that sometimes I have found when I have an employee that I'm having a hard conversation with, they get like a part of their brain— I'm gonna say it's the amygdala, right? It kicks in into survival mode. When you start having a hard conversation as a manager, you have to realize the power and impact of your words. And when you come in with a little bit of that tone and like, hey, this is gonna be a hard conversation, their mind's already racing to, am I getting fired today?

Yup.

Am I— is my job in jeopardy? Right? So sometimes I like to, in the middle of the meeting, just FYI, I'll talk about how the tone's gonna be. Like, this is gonna be a hard conversation within the first 30 seconds, but nobody's getting fired today, right? Nobody's job's on the line yet. This is something that's been going on. We need to address it. Or, you know, like, you just have to set the stage too. But the idea is you need to get their amygdala shut down. Even with all that, sometimes though, they just can't hear what you're saying to them. And so I will send a follow-up email, "Hey, thanks again for taking that time." And when they see it in writing and the— once their prefrontal cortex takes advantage again, right, and gets back into control of every— of their rational, they can reread the email hours later and something will come, "Oh, I don't remember us talking about that." And I've had follow-up conversations from people who've come back, "Wait a minute, we didn't talk about—" I'm like, "Oh yeah, we did, and this is what we said, you remember?" And all of a sudden, they'll have them, "Oh yeah, that's right, that's right, okay." And that email serves as a way to just make sure we're all on the same page walking out of that meeting, and that you didn't focus on like the one thing I said instead of the 5 things I was trying to say.

It's actually a good idea to do that after all one-on-ones. So I've fallen away, I haven't really done that as much.

Yeah, me too.

Right? But I used to after every single one-on-one. I would bullet point the top 5 things that we talked about. So also when you have that hard conversation, it's not like, oh, he's just sending me an email to be a jerk, right? It's that cadence. We have a one-on-one, we have a discussion, I'm going to follow up with you. And then every week you've got your list of things you need to work on or what's going on as some sort of an update. Yeah.

Yeah, I agree. It also works with customers and not people you're having a hard time with. I know that's not part of the intentional culture per se, but I've always followed through and did an email after I had that hard conversation with the customer, for example. Because a lot of them are like your extended employee, and that always helps you bringing them back around if you have to do something to follow up. Yes.

You know, yeah, well, it's always a good reminder, right? Yeah. I mean, like Josh said, even when you're having a hard customer— the conversation with a customer, they don't always internalize all that. Yeah, they don't hear everything you said. So anytime you can follow up with just the written word, it's very good. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I think that'll kind of wrap it up for our topic today. This is one of my favorite ones. I tell all of our employees about it. We try to really drive it home with them. It's part of our core value of being smart, is just to make sure that you are— you really do owe it to your people, you owe it to your coworkers, to get to know them, to love them, and then from that place of love, to speak kind truths when they're not living up to the standards that they should be.

This is really the difference in intentional culture, I think. Yeah. I mean, I remember a CNN news piece a while back where mean bosses were successful bosses. You know, and I thought to myself, man, that's pretty sad that a mean boss is a successful boss in the workplace. I mean, I don't want— nobody wants to work for a really mean boss, right? No. I mean, and I have. I've worked for some pretty terrible bosses. So I mean, you really need to have that, this conversation. You need to discipline yourself to do that and not sit back and not confront people.

Well, but I think that's what happens, Steve, though, is that people are so afraid of being a mean boss that they don't have hard conversations. And I think we've kind of gotten to these two dichotomies where you're either all about performance and you're just driving towards performance, or it's all about dignity and you're just trying to preserve the peaceful harmony of your people. We have to find that middle ground, and that middle ground is speaking kind truth. You know, where you can have a good Harvard conversation around performance, but still feel good enough and caring enough that you can go out and have a barbecue with that guy later. We can't, you know, we can't say, "Well, I don't want to be mean, so I'm just going to be nice," and we can't be nice because we don't want to be mean. We have to still have courage to speak those kind truths instead of getting sucked into the dichotomy of mean versus nice.

Yeah, the one thing I would say is that when you do have these conversations, if you end the conversation on a positive Hey, you do this well, or I like this about you. That is going to go much further to where they don't walk out of here saying, that guy's a jerk, you know, I'm done or whatever else, because you've reinforced that there are things you appreciate about them. There are things that they do well.

Yeah, we used to call that the compliment sandwich. Yep. You know? Yeah. I think my only caveat against the compliment sandwich is make sure that there's more meat than bread. Well, yeah, absolutely. Because I've seen people do that where they're like, oh, you're amazing. Oh, by the way, this, you know, you came in late last week and that's not okay. But you know what? You're just a terrific employee. And they throw like one slice of meat in the sandwich and it's all fluff and puff, right? And you really have to get away from that. Make sure you get some meat in your conversation, but that it's not all bitter, right? That you've got some sweet, that you've got some love. And again, you're doing it from a place of caring candor.

Well, one final thing I would say is know where you are. I mean, I worked in the Northeast. It's a lot different than working in the South and the way people respond to the caring candor. You know, so you need to understand the people that you're talking to.

You don't understand their culture. Yeah, try doing that in the Northeast, right? They don't want the bread. No, man, give me the salami.

Give me all the meat. Exactly. Can't grow without protein. That's right. Yeah.

So, all right, uh, some other— you know, there's some awesome books on this topic too if you want to dive more into it. I really like, uh, you know, Getting Naked. Patrick Lencioni talks about this. It's not as— it's not as fruity as it sounds, but That's a great book on being vulnerable and being the idiot in the room kind of a thing, being willing to speak the kind truth. Brené Brown's Dare to Lead is a terrific book on being vulnerable and being open and honest with people. I liked The Motive from Patrick Lencioni, was a good one on this one too, about your job as a manager and why, you know, if you're not willing to enter the danger with your people, you probably shouldn't be a manager. Radical Candor from Kim Scott. She's an ex-Googler from Google, if you didn't catch that. Used to be one of their bigwigs over there. Talks all about how to have hard conversations and drive performance. And then Fierce Conversations is another great book on how to have hard conversations that are still solid. So any last thoughts from the two of you? No? I think we pretty much beat this one up. Perfect. Again, if you guys have any comments or requests for topics for us to cover, you can email us at podcast@rtafleet.com. And until next time, signing off from the Fleet Success Show.

Be kind, rewind. Bye.

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