Episode 32 | Creating a Culture of Candour: Lessons in Truth Telling with Dominic Thurbon
Trina Sunday talks with Dominic Thurbon about truthful leadership in organisations
Trina Sunday: Do you ever look around in your organisation and think that you’re surrounded by a bunch of liars? Well, some of my clients have and, um, there’s been a lot of conversation around truth telling lately and the culture in our organisations and how not telling the truth, AKA lying, is getting the way of our organisations being successful. So I’m talking with Dominic Thurbon about truthful leadership, truth telling in our organisations and what we need to do to bring back the candour. Welcome to Reimagining HR with Trina Sunday, the rule breaking podcast where we challenge our thinking and our, current people practises. This podcast is for time poor HR teams and business leaders who are feeling the burn, lacking laughs and not feeling the love. I’m Trina, your host and I’m here to cut through the bs, explore different ways of thinking and create high impact HR functions because happier, healthier organisations are better for our people and our bottom line. So if you are keen to flip traditional HR on its head, hit the follow or subscribe button so you’re the first to know when new episodes drop. I’m here to help and also to shake things up. So let’s get started. Thanks for joining me.
Dominic Thurbon talks to Trina about truth telling in organisations
I’m joined by Dominic Thurbon today. He’s got over, 17 years of experience as a senior exec, a successful entrepreneur, he’s internationally engaged as a speaker, he’s writing, he’s doing all the things that help leaders to do business behaviour change in the face of disruption. He’s now doing that through his business Alchemy Labs and he started his first company at 23. He’s built and sold two of them overachiever. One, a professional services firm and the other an AI enabled tech company. So he’s going to teach me lots of things I’m sure at a later stage. He spent five years as partner at EY and has authored and led research on bestsellers published in over 15 countries. And we’re talking topics as diverse as generational and behavioural change. We’re talking strategy, purpose driven leadership, the future of work, all of that stuff that affects us in the work that we do in our organisations. He’s got global clients and is about to release his next book next year, the Truthful Leader. And I’m really excited to talk to him about truth telling in our organisation. So welcome Dom, thanks for joining me.
Dominic Thurbon: Thank you for having me, Trina. It is a real treat to be here.
Trina Sunday: Talk about all those liars out there, shall we?
Karakin Karakin started his business at 23 working in generational change
Um, great start.
Dominic Thurbon: Let’s do it.
Trina Sunday: Let’s just talk about all the liars. But, um, you’ve obviously seen a lot, right, in leadership, business, consulting, adulting, I’m sure. Tell us a little bit about you and your story and how truth kind of became a thing for you. Talk us through it. Set the scene for me.
Dominic Thurbon: As you mentioned, I started my business just Journey comparatively quite young, I think, at 23. The true story, if we’re going to truth, is I was unemployed because I quit my job as a karaoke host to watch the World cup and found myself at a sort of a loose end on, the streets of King street in Sydney early one morning. But a friend who then went on to be a colleague and collaborator who I worked with for many years, Peter Sheehan. and I started a business together working in the kind of generational change space. He was a social researcher. I had a political science research background and we were helping companies attract, engage and retain young staff. And then that grew into a kind of a behavioural change consultancy that looked at the broader questions of change and transformation. And so the science and the art of change, whether it be generational, sociological, organisational leadership, had been the middle of the bullseye from the very start of our first business, which was called Change Labs, later Karakin’s Group, that was the professional services firm you mentioned. And so we would do work all around the world helping organisations do behaviour change. We would also work in communities on behalf of organisations where we would go out and deliver programmes in communities as part of their community investment for them. And an AI company spun out of that, that was looking at mental health and using AI tools to measure and monitor and intervene with the mental health of at risk kids in school environments. But across all of that work, when we were dealing with these questions of why organisations transform, or more interestingly, why organisations fail to transform, the recurring pattern that over the course of the last 18 to 24 months just really began to capture my imagination was at the middle of so many of our problems with change and therefore really our problems in achieving outcomes both organizationally and individually, because there’s very few outcomes that don’t require some level of change.
You write about the importance of telling the truth in your new book
Trina Sunday: Yeah.
Dominic Thurbon: So many of the problems seemed to have at the heart of them the inability or the unwillingness or inability of people to tell the truth. Over the course of writing the book, that’s taken on a number of layers. When I refer to telling the truth, I mean telling the truth about a variety of different things in a variety of different ways, but it just became an obsession. And then I think honestly, the US electoral politics kind of sharpened the focus of mine on this crisis of honesty and this increasing absence, I think, from daily life of a norm and expectation that people’s default position will be to tell the truth and that there are repercussions for not telling the truth seems to be evaporating as a norm. And the more clients I was working with, the more I was like, man, if people can’t fix this, we can’t fix all the other stuff. It really is ground zero for achieving the things we care about. So, yeah, from this career and background in change and transformation, I think the focus has sharpened in the last year and in the process of writing the book on this question of why don’t people tell the truth? Why does that get in the way? And how can you make truth happen individually and organizationally so powerful?
Trina Sunday: Because, at the end of the day, right, trust underpins everything we’re trying to do in organisations and not being honest and, not telling the truth erodes trust. But the reality is, right, lying seems to help a lot of people to become really successful. And we could draw on some political observations in that.
If lying is making people successful, how sustainable is that
But so what is it in there from the work that you’ve done? Like, if lying is making people be successful, how sustainable is that?
Dominic Thurbon: Yeah, it’s a wonderful question and it’s often in these conversations the first question which is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Isn’t lying really successful?
Trina Sunday: Yeah, it works, man, it works. Yeah, it’s like a strategy. Lie, lie, lie and you will get what you want.
Dominic Thurbon: Yeah, we could just lie our way to greatness.
Trina Sunday: Yeah. Why don’t we talk me through it?
Dominic Thurbon: Well, and the data, well, the data certainly seems to suggest that plenty of people are, or at least are trying to, I mean, to frame that up quickly. And I know this isn’t a direct answer to a question, but just to frame that up quickly as kind of ground zero, I do think you can empirically observe that it is not just a feeling we’ve got. It is true to say that lying, or at least the norm of telling the truth, seems to be evaporating. The accc, actually this is quite cool data. The ACCC just did a study of social media influencers and they found that 81% of their studied social media influencers would fall foul of like a triple C regulations around misleading communication. So. Wow, you know, four out of every five social media influencers are basically not meeting liars. Liars, yeah. Or at least are not telling the truth adequately. M. But then you know, we’ve seen Vanguard cop a $13 million fine for making misleading claims about greenwashing. We’ve had calls and woollies before the ACCC being sued for misleading claims. We’ve got in the. The PolitiFact fact checking of the last presidential election found that between the candidates less than 3% of statements in the last election were rated as fully true. 3, 3%. About 30% were rated as out and out false. so the PolitiFact fact checking rates. This is so good. They rate the truthiness of statements on a scale of truth at one end to pants on fire at the other end. Which is brilliant.
Trina Sunday: That’s the best scale I’ve ever heard of.
Dominic Thurbon: Oh yeah.
Trina Sunday: Where are you on a scale of like truth to pants on fire?
Dominic Thurbon: Yeah. And the answer was 19% of the statements were pants on fire. So one in, one in five statements were pants on fire. And it leaves about half statement somewhere in the space of like it’s kind of true. Ish. But you’ve got about half either 49% either false or pants on fire. So it is. And we know from MIT data that lies tend to spread twice as quickly as true statements on social media and they get shared about five times more frequently.
Trina Sunday: Why is that?
Dominic Thurbon: That’s a, It’s a very good question. I think it’s to do generally with the framing of it. I think there’s a bit of correlation here in that statements that are untrue, um, are ah, generally also being shared with quite a lot of emotional content. Like they’re triggering anger or annoyance or frustration that are very good at getting people engaged.
Trina Sunday: Yeah.
Dominic Thurbon: Mhm. So weirdly the algorithm like optimise because it optimises for engagement, it optimises for emotional content which means it optimises bike quality for untrue stuff which is usually probiotic. But so, so to your initial question, I do think there are a lot of people and organisations effectively trying to lie their way to success and it’s worth noting that the person who scored 3% of true statements of the last election won. So it is tempting to reach the conclusion that lying is really effective. And I think there is a way of looking at the world where that can seem like it’s true. But I would argue that that’s a kind of a too narrower view of what we mean by successful and certainly what we should care about. But I don’t want to just rant on about it.
Trina Sunday: Tell me more. Okay, tell me more around kind of if you’re lying, your Way to success. And this, I guess, is probably at the core of the sustainability thing. It’s kind of, you know, surely that’s only going to get you so far. Like, what does the evidence tell us about how long term or how broad, you know, the success can look like if you’ve lied your way there?
Dominic Thurbon: Yeah. The wonderfully framed question. If anyone’s watching the video version of this, you’ll see me frantically nodding away in the background. So the way that I think we put it in the research is lying can seem effective provided you look at a short enough timescale and a narrow enough criteria for what you mean by successful. Okay. so you use a really practical example. Take the last US political election. Now, this is not a political point, so this is not a partisan point. These are just reciting the fact. So it’s tempting to go, the winning candidate lied a lot and won, so it was successful. And so if your definition of success is getting someone elected, sure. In that case, lying correlated. But if you then go, how did that go for the next three months since inauguration? A global economy tanking, a share market having record falls, Hundreds if not thousands of people being illegally, deported to offshore prisons. A complete breakdown in kind of federal and state institutions. Oh, and by the way, a whole bunch of the people who were lied to now being economically worse off, even though they thought they were going to be better off, all of a sudden it doesn’t look quite as successful. And so I think the way we put it is you have to be very careful not to confuse something being locally successful. You know, lying worked to get me promoted because I lied on my cv. Lying worked to get me elected with something being globally successful. I was then good at that thing. The thing then worked. So, to use the CV example, lying can be effective to get you into a position, but you can’t lie away to being good at it.
Trina Sunday: Yeah.
Dominic Thurbon: So in the one sentence, pithy way would say it is that any system or, process that is built on lies is completely unsustainable. Sooner or later, the truth just catches up. Sometimes it can take a frustratingly long time for that to happen, and it can be pretty painful. But sooner or later, the truth catches up. And so, yes, I can see why in certain circumstances some people might feel, you know, lots of people lie, clearly. Well, all of us lie.
Trina Sunday: What? On video, I’m like, recoiling in horror. What do you mean? Did you just call me a liar?
Dominic Thurbon: Sorry, let me rephrase that. Everyone else lies except for you, Trina.
Trina Sunday: No, not True.
Dominic Thurbon: Well, neither of us would lie.
Trina Sunday: Yeah, no, never.
Kim: Scott, there’s a scale for truthiness in sales
But there’s a scale for this, right? And you use the word truthiness. I think it was earlier. And I’m like, I want to lean into that because it’s kind of, you know, especially IMAX marketing as well. And then I’m in the business of selling behaviour change. We have a similar business, but we approach it from very different perspectives. But it’s kind of you’re selling an idea, you’re trying to get people on board, you’re trying to tap into the what’s in it for me? Where is the scale of like spin, for example, or embellishment through to like liar, liar, pants on fire, you’re just an outright crook. Like, what does that look like when you talk about truth telling? How do you frame that?
Dominic Thurbon: I’ll put a link in the show notes to an article specifically about this. So you’re right, I’m also a salesperson and I know you and I both have businesses to run and we both sell product and obviously it’s a hard case, the academic sense, like people would go, yeah, yeah, but surely the truth works everywhere except sales. So here’s how I think of the scale of truthiness. This is the Don Thurbon slippery scale of truthiness. I’m here for it, working from most true to least true. It goes truth, then it goes positioning, then it goes spin, then it goes lies. And I think you have this kind of four category analogue scale where you have this grey middle of a version of the truth that preserves all the things we know are true, but might hold a few things back, but for reasons that are in the interests of the listener. So it might be for brevity, it might be the way we teach science to younger kids where we knowingly teach simplified and inaccurate versions of things, because it preserves all the things that are true, but it’s a much simpler way of understanding it and it’s done in service of the audience. I would call that positioning. If you’re selectively editing, holding back details, you’re not lying, but you are not being complete with the truth. Or you’re emphasising things in certain ways to knowingly lead people to a conclusion that is in opposition with the facts. I would call that spin. So that’s like I’m not preserving the truth and I’m hoping that you don’t get to the truth either. That’s spin. And if you’re just outright making stuff up, that’s lying. And so I actually think there is quite a lot of Space in the middle for salespeople to selectively emphasise things, provided they still do their best to work in service of the person that they’re selling to. So, like, I will never sell something that I don’t think is in the interest of the person buying it. I simply won’t.
Trina Sunday: Yeah, same. Um, yeah.
Dominic Thurbon: And a lot of great salespeople share that trait, right? Like, they know that one of the most powerful tools in sales, we always used to say when we were teaching consultants to sell, our golden rule was, first things first, give good advice. M. Right. Just make that your ground zero thing. Give good advice. And if you give good advice, firstly, clients will love you for it. And secondly, it will give you which side of the truth spectrum you need to fall on. Right? Like, if you’re just going to give good advice, you will find yourself gravitating towards that. And in my experience, buyers love it because they feel like they’re not, people know when they’re being taken for a ride.
Trina Sunday: Yeah.
Dominic Thurbon: And. Yeah, and then you get the downstream problem, right, of, that even if the spin is successful locally in helping you make a sale, as soon as you develop a reputation for being someone who’s full of shit, as soon as you sell people a lemon, if it’s a consulting service, as soon as you then have to deliver on what you’ve sold, you’re digging your own grave. So I think I totally understand that, like, radical candour, where all you do is tell the full unabridged truth with no tactical, is, like, right out at one end of the spectrum and there is a book called Radical Candidates.
Trina Sunday: Is it Kim Scott?
Dominic Thurbon: yeah, I believe it is Kim Scott, yeah.
Trina Sunday: Is it?
Dominic Thurbon: I thought so. That name’s very familiar.
Trina Sunday: Anyway, I could have that wrong. I’ll correct myself in the show notes, but it is a book and a concept I’ve looked at because I’ve had people talk to me about brutal candour and radical candour and I’ve had some, like, self reflection around. My God, what is this? And for me, though, I think it’s been an interesting reflection because what makes it radical to some people is because they are so far from truth telling that they find straight talk really different. Or maybe they’re surrounded by people that do not talk straight with them. And I’m known for being a straight shooter. It’s part of what’s in my brand. It’s the feedback that comes through on every bloody feedback form. You know, Trin’s such a straight shooter. I know where I stand, but it’s because I. To your point, I think it’s probably positioning in terms of how you break it down. But I think what flips it from positioning to spin as well is intent. And so I think, to your point, if the intent is to help. And this is where. When I have consultants that are, asking me, how do you do it, though? The sales bit’s a bit icky. And I’m like, well, only if you’re thinking about it as sales. I just have conversations with people and share with them how I think I can help them.
Dominic Thurbon: Yeah.
Trina Sunday: And 100%, if that is sales to you, well, you do. You boo. But, like, I’m just like, hey, here’s what I do. Here’s the problem I hear you have. Here’s where I think I can help. Like, if you want it, you want it. If you don’t, you don’t, and you move on. But spinning it is something that then when you have to deliver your reputation, as you say, once that’s global and you broaden that audience and you broaden kind of the impact that it has, you’re going to come unstuck. Um, right.
Dominic Thurbon: Yeah.
Trina Sunday: But I think CAND is also a bad thing.
Dominic Thurbon: Right.
Trina Sunday: It’s how we evolve, it’s how we improve, it’s how we innovate. But at the core of it is the definition is about being honest and telling the truth. Right?
Dominic Thurbon: Absolutely. Yeah. And I agree very much with the way you invoke intent as being a core part of that.
Tact is finding the right time, place and style to deliver truth
I think on the candour point, the other side of it, that I think it’s important to invoke because there’s no doubt. And I know, given the incredible work you do with HR professionals and CEOs and senior leaders, I would be willing to place a very large monetary bet that you will have had this experience as well, which is I’ve definitely met leaders where I’m a straight talker is their excuse of being a dickhead, where you sit at the other side of a client. Like, I don’t know. We’ve done this in a coaching situation where they’re like, yeah, but I’m just telling it straight. And it’s like, yeah, you’re also being a knob.
Trina Sunday: Yeah.
Dominic Thurbon: Because I think the other side is stylistic. Right. Which is finding the way to be a straight talker in ways that preserves the emotional experience of the people around you, especially when there’s positional hierarchy involved. When, you know, walking into the room as a senior person, your words carry. You can not just ruin someone’s day. You can completely destroy someone psychologically by, ah, stylistically delivering truth badly. Did you ever watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
Trina Sunday: Yes, I did. Everyone. Um, yes, I did.
Dominic Thurbon: Hell yeah. So the character Cordelia has one of my favourite quotes where someone says that wasn’t very tactful. And she says tact is when you just don’t say true stuff. Which I love as a quote. But it’s like, yeah, tact is actually not. I hate to call bullshit on Cordelia, but tact is not, not just saying true stuff. Tact is finding the right time, place and style to deliver, truth in the way that it has the most constructive impact. You can be unconstructive in two ways. Right? I know, I’m m. Well, I’m truly on your turf here, not mine. But you know, you can be unconstructive in two ways. You can either have the complete absence of truth and just gild the lily and not have the hard conversation, or you can swing the pendulum right through having the hard conversation to having like the abrasive conversation or the rude conversation that is done unconstructively. And I think there is a stylistic skill set in being able to. This is going to sound like a really self serving story, but at an environment just towards the end of my time at EY where I had to make a couple of people redundant. And I think it was genuinely one of the proudest moments of my career when I got an email from someone who’d just been made redundant the day after before they like cleared their stuff and left to just say, hey, I hope you don’t mind me saying, but I’ve never felt so supported in a hard conversation in my life. And I just wanted to thank you for the way that that was done. And I was literally telling this guy to like clear out his desk.
Trina Sunday: Yeah.
Dominic Thurbon: And because. And it’s just like you.
Trina Sunday: That is everything.
Dominic Thurbon: Yeah.
Trina Sunday: Like that is everything because that’s holding the human at the core of it. Right. And you can tell the truth, but you don’t have to rip people apart. And that’s where the word brutal, like if someone calls it brutal, candour.
Dominic Thurbon: Yeah.
Trina Sunday: Well, that’s problematic, right. Because brutality is not a cool thing. I’ve never heard anyone talk about anything being brutal, being like awesome. And that’s the part that’s the problem. It’s not the candour, it’s the brutality of how it’s delivered to your point around. Stylistically.
Dominic Thurbon: Yeah.
Trina Sunday: And you know, it’s Kind of truth telling without emotional intelligence. Right. Like we’ve got a responsibility to tell the truth, but responsibly.
Dominic Thurbon: Yeah, 100%.
What is truthful leadership and why does that matter more than ever
Trina Sunday: What is truthful leadership to you then? Like, and why does that matter more than ever? Like, talk me through what truthful leadership looks like.
Dominic Thurbon: It’s a wonderful question and I would love, as someone literally writing a book called the Truthful Leader to have like a really good pithy one sentence answer to this. But unfortunately that particular middle of the bullseye is still evolving up between here and print. But definitely, yeah, unfortunately I only have a slightly longer answer rather than a short answer to that.
Trina Sunday: And that’s okay. That’s why we gotta buy the book.
Dominic Thurbon: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I could tell her the answer, but unfortunately you have to buy the book.
The Truthful Leader is a person who places a high enough premium on truth
So to me, the Truthful Leader is a person who places a high enough premium on the truth. Not just the truth is the endpoint, but the truth as the process of the truth. Seeking the facts, doing their best to understand what’s really going on, seeking independent all the things you have to do to arrive at the truth. So not just the truth as an outcome, but the truth as a process of arriving at it as well. A leader who places a high enough premium on the truth as both a process and an outcome that they’re able to have all of their daily interactions, from the conversations they have to the decisions that they make, to the systems and the processes that they implement, to the way they work with clients to have all of their daily actions preserve what we know to be true. Right? And so I think of the truth on three levels, right? So truth about ourselves, and in particular truth about the impact that we have on the people around us. And by self here I mean ourselves as a person and ourselves as a business. So truth about ourselves, the impact that we have on the world around us, truth about what I would call our sector, like, so in enterprise sense that’s like the business that we’re in and the impact that we as an industry, as a sector have on the world. And then truths about systems, right? So at the level of the way our society functions, the way our, business as a system functions. True. So on this kind of spectrum, from the very most personal thing of like, wow, I think I just had a really bad impact on someone with the conversation I had with a more, geez, I think I don’t know what I’m doing or that sort of truth all the way through to man. Is it possible that the configuration of a business system being optimised purely to give profit and nothing else might be creating impacts downstream that are not optimal.
Trina Sunday: Yeah.
Dominic Thurbon: And so truthful leader is the leader who is able to, in all their daily actions, put, preserve what we know to be true about all of those things.
Trina Sunday: And it can be massive. It’s one of those things where it’s a principle. If you show up to everything you do with truth being at the core, then you’re generally going to come out better than someone that’s, you know, liar, liar, pants on fire, you know, that scale, that’s the best thing ever.
What is it that holds people and I guess organisations back from being honest
What is it that holds people and I guess organisations to your point about systems back from being honest? Like obviously we talked about the fact that lying can get you some success but in the short term, locally in a more insular way. And then as things get traction it kind of unravels a bit. But like what is stopping people from being truthful?
Dominic Thurbon: There’s really good research on this and I think that I’m looking to expand some of that out in some novel ways with the research I’m doing for the book as well. But I would say generally the reasons people aren’t truthful or the things that get in the way fall into kind of three categories. Number one, self interest, without a shadow of a doubt. And I’m really loathe to label it as selfishness or greed because the truth is that biologically and evolutionarily there is a very, very strong self interest drive that people can’t escape.
Trina Sunday: Survival.
Dominic Thurbon: Survival, yeah. And so without a doubt the number one reason people lie is because it’s in their self interest. In fact, there was a great University of Massachusetts thing that found the single most common reason people lie on a day to day basis is to avoid other people. So that’s like the. Oh yeah, yes, totally. Right. That’s like, oh, sorry, I’ve got something.
Trina Sunday: On I don’t want to say. Yeah, yeah, I’m totally busy that day. I haven’t told you what day it is. Oh, um. Shit.
Dominic Thurbon: Right, yeah, yeah. Ah, yeah. Oh, when is that again? No, no, yeah, yep, yep.
Trina Sunday: Still busy.
Dominic Thurbon: Yeah, yeah. Interestingly, by the way, that research, the second most common reason people said that they lied was for the purposes of practical jokes. And I’m like, that’s not a lie, that’s not in the spirit of this thing. yeah. So the number one reason was that and I would say that’s a really good safe illustration of self interest. It’s like, I actually don’t want to go out tonight, I’m lying For my own benefit. And obviously you get, you know, fudging on CVs, lying to win an election, CEOs lying because they think it will improve their position and standing with the board.
Trina Sunday: Yeah.
Dominic Thurbon: So definitely because it’s in our self interest. I think the second reason people lie, though, is the complete opposite, which is the genuine belief that it’s in the interests of other people. So people, for instance, in a performance setting, feeling like, man, if I really gave my honest feedback on this, it’s really going to upset or hurt this person. And so I’m going to white lie or I’m going to temper my feedback. What they might characterise as a lie of service. And we could talk for hours about that because I think the very, very clear sort of analysis of that would show that it is almost never in the interests of someone to lie to them.
Trina Sunday: It is a disservice, a hundred percent disservice. And it’s unkind because you are essentially continuing someone being set up to fail.
Dominic Thurbon: Yeah.
Trina Sunday: And no one feels good when that is what is happening in their workplace.
Dominic Thurbon: Yeah.
Trina Sunday: Does not feel good. You are not helping someone to be thriving and smashing it by not giving them the feedback that they need to make adjustments to be doing great work. It’s just not cool.
Dominic Thurbon: Yeah, definitely. And ironically to that point, I think the middle one, because there’s three of these things. So this middle one of lying out of a perceived being of service to other people, I think it’s best viewed as a capability gap. I would stop saying, I think it’s in the interests of this person for me to lie to them and start saying, I don’t have the skills to deliver this true thing in a way that is good for them. Cause you can fix that. Right?
Trina Sunday: You can just learn the words a hundred percent.
Dominic Thurbon: Learn a really simple sentence you can use every time. Like, I’m really aware that this feedback might be hard to hear and it’s absolutely not my intention to upset you, but I think it’s really important for you to hear it. My feedback is this. You have at that point fully discharged your obligations to be responsible for someone else’s feelings.
Trina Sunday: Yeah.
Dominic Thurbon: And then you get all that coaching around, like it’s actually okay. It’s not a sign that you’ve done the wrong thing. If someone is upset by feedback, it’s a cue to analyse. But sometimes feedback is upsetting and that’s just a normal part of the processing response and they’ll thank you for it later. So, number one, out of self interest, Number two, they lie out of kind of this delusion that it’s in the interest of other people. And then number three is quite simple, which is fear. They’re worried about the implications that the truth might have. And you see this in a lot of organisations where there’s not a requisite level of psychological safety in order to do it. Actually a really quick story about that. I can’t remember if you and I have talked offline about this before. So this will either blow your mind or you will have heard this before, but it will be so familiar to your work trainer. I was delivering a two day workshop for the top 60 leaders at a big utilities company and the seven senior execs were in the room, but so were the next like 53 people. And over the course of the day, as they often do, like in the briefings, the really senior people are like, just so you know, coming into this, our second level, we have a lot of problems with people speaking up. You know, like it’s often the executive speaking. And obviously I’ve got a talk track for that in my head. Cause I’m like, I’ve never met a group where you just happen to have 53 introverts. Like if no one’s willing to talk up, maybe there’s something going on. But anyway, they were like, they’re not going to talk how much. And so this became a theme of the conversation. And then finally on the second day, a, person at the second level of leadership like takes the mic. There’s been a lot of talk over the last two days about like getting us to speak up. I guess I’ve just been sitting here wanting to find a way to say that me speaking up has been coming at tremendous personal cost. Because last time I spoke up in this group, two people literally called me a bitch. Now it killed me that I looked across the room at one of the senior executives and they were on their phone during, this part of the thing which made me lose my fricking mind. But I was like, that’s such a beautiful articulation of a culture where the senior execs were like, but we want our people to speak up, we want them to tell the truth. And then people are literally saying, yeah, but I’m really scared of the consequences if I do. And so I do think the way that we align incentives, the way that we align cultures can really push people one way or the other towards or away from saying difficult, true things. And so between those three things are kind of the lens of self interest. The lens of being in service of others and this lens of, like, the fear that can be attached to.
How do we create a culture where people feel safe to tell the truth
But if I say the true thing, what about X, Y, Z explains, I think the overwhelming majority of the daily struggle with the truth that most people have.
Trina Sunday: And it’s most behaviour responses typically, though, as well, isn’t it, like. I mean, it’s always situational, but it’s that fear and that response where you are behaving in a way to meet an insecurity need as opposed to being confident and strong enough, you know, standing in your own truth and to give less fucks, really, to be able to go, yeah, no, this is who I am and this is because I truly intrinsically believe X. So in a constructive culture, you would, you know, be able to share that. But if consequences and the retribution that comes from truth telling is such that there is a consequence, that’s too much. People are trading that off every blessed day. Right.
Dominic Thurbon: Yeah.
Trina Sunday: Like, if I go this far, it’s not like everyone’s choosing to turn up as a liar, but it feels like every interaction we have in an organisation is a risk assessment around, what’s this going to cost me today?
Dominic Thurbon: So beautifully said.
Trina Sunday: And I think truth telling is a really big part of that. And the fear stuff really strikes because of the culture work I do. And you’re in behaviour change, so you would get that as well. And I’m reflecting kind of, how do we create the kind of culture where people feel safe to tell the truth? And, I mean, that’s a whole thing. Right. There’s a complexity to that. And you talked about systems, you talked about the players using those systems, you talked about the individuals driving their own kind of thing. But especially in hr, it’s kind of like, what’s the toolkit for truth telling inside our organisations? That’s, you know, And I think I read something that you’d written where it’s like, you know, it starts with asking better questions and I don’t know if you want to expand on, what are your thoughts. Right. How do we create that space and how do we give people the tools to be more truthful?
Dominic Thurbon: Yeah. By the way, that line you just used of. It feels like every conversation is a risk assessment. It’s such a wonderful line. I love that. Putting that in my kit bag to quote you on at some later date.
M: Truth is both the most important question and the hardest one
Yeah. It is both the most important question and the hardest one, of course, because it is the change question. And I think one of the reasons it’s particularly hard is because of the broader context of like we’re just seeming to be living in a world where there’s just less. I think Sam Harris said it beautifully where he said, I’ve quoted this at the start of an article somewhere. He basically said now like the problem is we now seem to live in a world where lying about the most important things at the largest scale is completely free of consequence.
M and I will say it’s extremely hard for individuals and teams and businesses to unilaterally decide that we will be an oasis where truth matters in a world that increasingly doesn’t give a shit. And so there is a certain and I do like I will lean into this in the truthful leader, even though I’m conscious that it makes me in the category like old man shouts at cloud. There is a we have to move on this as a society level of this conversation where we need to make truth matter again. And there’s going to be a lot of big levers we need to pull and one of them is going to have to be the way we, we regulate social media. And I do see social media as playing a causative role in this. The way that we’ve allowed advertising, supported business models to optimise algorithms to care about nothing other than amplifying what gets shared when we know that that will be bad for people.
Trina Sunday: Mhm.
Dominic Thurbon: And the only reason we’re worried about moving is this kind of neoliberal law. But like that’ll mean big tech companies make less money. It’s like yeah, they fucking will. But no one gave them the right to make as much money as humanly possible, regardless of the effect it has on people. And it is playing a causative role in the breakdown of our relationship to truth. So all that just by waying of saying like totally get that it’s hard. However, at the level of the business and the HR team and the toolkit, I think there’s a couple of things. So number one, without a shadow of a doubt, I think we need to, with tact, respect and positive intent, hold people to account for when they don’t tell the truth. So I think we need to all take a big old swig of courage and put on our big girl pants and be a bit like when we observe people just lying, actually call people on it. And I think that is a responsibility we can take at an individual level for being just that little bit that pushes back against the tidal wave going the other way. And if enough people do that, I think it will be meaningful. And that is really little things right like, so I, for instance, don’t share anything on social media anymore without checking first. I saw a really, really cool headline from a friend of mine the other day that was like, oh my God, it turns out AI works better when you’re polite to it. And my first instinct was, oh my God, that’s such a cool finding. How about that? I was about to share and I was like, let me check this. Turns out that’s not what the evidence says at all. Right, Right.
Trina Sunday: And so good to know. Let me write that down. Be mean to AI because it makes no difference. No.
Dominic Thurbon: Yeah, yeah. Quote Tom, um, Thurman, be rude to AI. Oh, so this is why it’s hard. Right? Because that takes five minutes instead of that taking 10 seconds.
Trina Sunday: Yeah.
Dominic Thurbon: But I do think us just developing these little habits of falling in love not with cynicism, but with scepticism and just be like, actually be like, it’s totally okay to, when someone tells you something to be like, oh, that’s interesting. Like where did that come from? What’s the source for that? And be super, super curious. But actually to place a premium ourselves as individuals on attempting to find the truth of something. So I think one, we can all just do our best to hold people to account. I think number two is particularly because so much lack of truth happens because of that capability gap of people don’t have the right words. I think we need to train people into how to have honest, hard conversations.
Trina Sunday: Yeah.
Dominic Thurbon: And I know this is something where you do a lot of amazing work about like this kind of literally, how do you have the direct, the honest, the straight shooter conversation? It’s much more your back than mine, but I do think there’s something in that. The third thing I think we can do at the level of the business, and I really recommend businesses do, is they look at the way their KPIs and incentives are set out and ask themselves the question, are we incentivizing people to be dishonest? The way that we set targets, the way that we build people’s KPIs, the way that we manage people, are, we creating an environment where there is a positive incentive to be dishonest? And that would almost certainly be inadvertent because no one’s going to have a lying KPI. But are we inadvertently creating that?
Trina Sunday: Could we, there could be something in that.
Dominic Thurbon: No, it’s. This thing is a bad idea.
Trina Sunday: Yeah, I’m going to be curious and lean into that later. Like, should we have an anti lying KPI? Anyway, sorry, continue.
Dominic Thurbon: You know what, the more you said that, the more I’m like, I like that idea. I do think those are, roughly the three kind of personal accountability for being curious and asking the question, giving people skills to make sure that capability isn’t an excuse. And then thirdly, doing a really good audit of is the way we’re setting up incentives, encouraging people to lie. Like, I worked for EY for five years, right? EY is an incredible organisation when it comes to, having systems in place to make sure that bullshit doesn’t make it through to clients. And it’s an audit firm, like, genuinely extraordinary. But inside the organisation it’s interesting. One of the challenges you always have in a big accounting firm is you have all these systems for people to account for time. And then we put a dollar value on everyone’s time and then we wonder why everyone’s timesheets are inaccurate. And it’s because every time they bill a dollar to a code, their manager’s margin looks bad. And it’s like you’re just incentivizing people to. That never reaches the client. By the way, this is an internal issue that just makes it really hard to accurately account for time. And it’s like, because your incentives are set up to encourage people to not tell the truth on their timesheets.
Trina Sunday: Yeah. It’s the incentive for the activity over the outcome. Right.
Dominic Thurbon: A hundred percent.
Trina Sunday: And I think that the lying is then a byproduct of where outcomes can not be landing. And especially when we look at them more globally, as you described earlier, rather than locally. I could talk about this all day. I think I’m, very conscious of listening, Simon. We may have to have a part two depending on what chat comes back from my listeners.
What does reimagining HR look like to you
But I’m curious, as we close it out, Dom, um, what does reimagining HR look like to you?
Dominic Thurbon: My number one master belief from all of my transformation work is that organisations don’t change, people do. I think that might have been Pete Fuder’s line originally. It’s very much one I’ve adopted as my mantra. And it’s held up in all the work I’ve done that organisations don’t change, people do. And particularly in the face of the AI transformation, we’re seeing where the data would suggest that the organisations getting the most value out of AI are spending twice as much on the people as they are on the technology would really reinforce the point that change is a human journey. And so my reimagining of HR is, I think the greatest disservice that HR has ever done to itself is inadvertently allow so many parts of the business to think of them as a compliance function. And that crept up, I think, on HR as a discipline. And now it’s really unfair that there are so many line of business leaders who see HR as some sort of compliance function. my reimagining of HR is this should be the single most important part of a business in driving the transformation that’s required over the next 10 years to reinvent business. That. That would be the reimagining. I think it should be the single biggest force for transformative change inside the business. I think that’s a big statement that’s going to have a lot of implications.
Trina Sunday: Massive. Love it. Game on.
Dominic Thurbon: But I think that’s it and I think we need it because more than 40% of CEOs say that that business will cease to exist if it doesn’t radically transform within the next 10 years. And so I think it’s gotta be the people part of the business that takes up the mantle and says we will become the most energetic leaders in the firm to make that happen. I think it’s an identity level shift and a shift to what it should be. That’s my thought.
Trina Sunday: Imagine that truth. talk. I love it. Thank you so much, Dom.
Dominic Thurbon: Thank you for having me. Pleasure.
Trina Sunday: Thanks for tuning in and leaning in to this week’s episode. As we look to reimagine how we show up for our people, organisations and community, reach out to us via our website @ reimaginehr.com.au with your HR horror stories or suggestions of people you’d love to hear from or topics you want to explore.
It’s all about people, purpose and impact and we are here for all of it.
Until next time, take care, team.
