[#corporate behaviour - 02] On the candor and courage of telling the truth.

Some recent crime news hit my sensitivity. It is a terrible and sad story of adult abuse on children and murder. The episode was followed by the entire Italian nation with collective mourning and rage.
When such news hits the headlines, I usually do not get into details because I feel much discomfort with the collective need to obsessively know about brutal information and express rage.
Certainly, being father of a five years old played some role in how I felt close to what happened.

There is a detail, in this story, that somehow made me reason a lot.
In the building where it all happened, the local community where many people probably knew or suspected, the truth remained veiled until the culprit's children told detectives what had been going on.
Two questions have come to my mind.

How could it be that so many adults held back such terrible suspects, creating a code of silence and implicitly protecting a criminal?
If years of education and life experience have led many adults to feel so fearful and powerless, what's wrong with our cultural model? What, in the end, restrains people from declaring truth?

The second point is about those young witnesses. When kids feel something is unfair, there is no educational or cultural compromise leading them not to tell the truth. When kids say something is wrong, they are right. They have no fear of declaring their pain.

When we know such violent events, the time spent on reading news, confronting with friends, meditating on meanings is some sort of ritual helping us to go beyond our stressed bad emotions. We tend to consider what happened just far away from our lives.

I was thinking about many episodes in my professional path but, more generally, in my life when I was witness of something that made me feel uncomfortable, that I considered unfair. Any time I did not find a proper way to raise my hand and say there was something wrong, someway I contributed to keep a group balance, but I colluded with some kind of bad leadership and committed violence to myself.

I have been taught that managers should be able to transform problems into opportunities and I sincerely believe that. But, what is the difference between creating value out of potential or concrete issues and hiding problems? If the CEO of a company, just to make an example, is exposed to a picture of the company he/she is supposed to lead that is artificially mitigated and sweetened by first and second lines in the name of a general, culturally standardised need to steadily propose a favourable image of what is going on, well, how will such CEO be able of properly use his/her managerial levers to act the best possible strategy?

Promoting honest confront on how things are going on, the right to tell the truth is not an option but a concrete need. Investing in spreading culture on how to properly communicate truth is a valid option.

DP