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Success Secrets
Notes from a street-smart executive
By Mark H. McCormack
A lot of businesspeople have problem with candor. Perhaps that's because so many of us put a premium on secrecy.
In a sales situation, we tend to highlight our product or service's virtues rather than its liabilities. In a negotiation, we take pride in disclosing information only when it's to our advantage. In managing people, we prefer to give them only as much information as we feel they need.
Of course, that's not always bad. We all face situations in which being less than candid is the most prudent course of action. A car salesperson, for example, is not necessarily obliged to tell a customer the model he's admiring in the showroom is rated fourth in its class in gas mileage. That's not candor; it's a poor job of selling. Why send them to the competition?
When in doubt, I am a very upfront person. If I've done something wrong, I admit it. If I'm mad, I say so. If I'm disappointed, I let people know it. This sort of candor is not only good therapy for my conscience and spirit, but I've also noticed it has a cleansing effect on messy situations.
The best time to employ this sort of candor is when you've made a mistake. People who are in a jam generally have two options. They can try to obscure the situation, or they can open up and tell the truth. Candor is the better option.
Then there are the more subtle forms of candor - where the situation requires you to charm people, rather than intimidate or bludgeon them with your honesty. I owe this piece of advice to my good friend, Gordon Forbes, who played Davis Cup tennis for South Africa in the 1950s and '60s. At the end of his amateur career, Forbes found a "real" job selling industrial lighting fixtures in Johannesburg.
Forbes started out with very small orders, but one day he was asked to bid on a huge contract to supply all the interior lighting for a mining project. He spend days writing the proposal.
"Can you give us any reason why this corporation should favor your fittings instead of those offered by your competitors?" an engineer asked.
Forbes was dumbfounded and speechless. His mind raced. Then he remembered the Australian tennis player Roy Emerson, who had adopted the endearing affectation of doing everything "with feeling." If Emerson hit a great passing shot, it had been hit "with feeling."
With this in mind, Forbes stared down the engineers and said, "Gentlemen, have you taken into account the fact that each one of our light fittings will be delivered to you with feeling?"
The room broke up wih laughter. Forbes won the contract, and parlayed the sale into the largest lighting company in the Southern hemisphere.
Humor is perhaps the best type of candor, because it not only delivers a message, it also makes everyone feel good about hearing it. Humor unsticks a lot of sticky situations.
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Mark H. McCormack, author of What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School, is chairman and CEO of International Sports Management Group, a sports management company.
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