One of my all-time favorite movie scenes is in A Few Good Men. It’s Jack Nicholson on the stand shouting, “You can’t handle the truth!”
It came up the other day when Bob Apollo and I were talking about truth, honesty, and trust in business, sales, and society (we tend to wander in our conversations.)
In the movie, Tom Cruise, as Lt Daniel Kaffee, is getting testimony from Nicholson’s character, Colonel Nathan Jessup. Kaffee’s question drove the response from Colonel Jessup.
When we hear him say, “You can’t handle the truth,” we begin to think he is starting to tell the ugly truth. But the reality is very different. Jessup isn’t a truth teller, but he has decided others can’t handle the truth. Having made that judgment, he withheld the real story from everyone else. His assessment was they couldn’t handle it.
It’s amazing how the same idea pervades so much of what we do. Leaders decide people can’t handle the reality of what’s happening with the business. Sellers decide management can’t handle the fact the forecasted deal is slipping. Sellers decide the customer can’t handle a direct assessment. Customers decide sellers can’t be trusted with what’s really happening.
When we withhold the truth, we are making a judgment on someone’s behalf.
We tell ourselves we aren’t lying, failing to recognize we are withholding. Withholding is presented as protection. The leader thinks the people can’t handle the bad news. The seller thinks the manager doesn’t want to hear the deal won’t make the forecast.
Customers withhold from sellers for the very same reason sellers do with their managers. They withhold explaining the real issues, bringing others into the conversation, because they know how the sellers will respond. The seller, likewise, withholds from the customer because they don’t want to display weaknesses in their solutions.
That withholding is also each of us protecting ourselves. We want to be perceived as the inspirational leader. We don’t want the manager to think we aren’t doing the work. We don’t want the customer to shut us down.
It isn’t that we can’t handle the truth, we can’t handle delivering or receiving it.
Let’s dig into this a little.
Much of what we think of as the “truth” in business is actually our current interpretation of reality. There are the facts: Revenue is $X, the customer said this, we missed the forecast. But we have our judgments of these. “The customer lost interest, the seller isn’t performing.”
Our judgments represent our understanding of the current reality, what we think is happening. As the circumstances change, as we learn more, our understanding will change.
Too often we become trapped by what we have already concluded. This certainty in our past assumptions prevents us from confronting today’s realities.
Whether we are managers, sellers, customers, we are stuck with what we have always believed, not acknowledging things have changed. What we believed to be the truth Is no longer true.
Stated differently, our certainty becomes the enemy of honesty.
As we look at this, withholding the truth is, most often, understandable. Perhaps I am idealistic, but I don’t believe many people maliciously withhold the truth or lie. Customers withhold information or even engagement because of their past experience with sellers. They are afraid of how a seller might pounce on that, push, and pitch their solutions.
Sellers withhold the bad news about a recent conversation, the status of a deal, what’s really happening in an account. They are worried about how they will be perceived by their managers. And, at the same time, managers may withhold what they think about what’s happening with the seller or the business.
We get in this loop of not wanting to share what’s happening because we don’t want to tell people what they need to hear. But we also don’t want to hear the truth because it represents a reality that differs from ours, suggesting we need to change our views.
We develop these withholding mechanisms that impact our ability to handle the truth. How a manager reacts the first time we present bad news determines whether we will ever present the truth again. How a seller reacts when the customer presents a very different point of view impacts every subsequent conversation.
As we look at these cycles, withholding creates the conditions that make more withholding standard practice.
Our drive for self-protection coupled with our tendency to avoid confrontation reinforces this. Perhaps out of politeness or fear, we fail to ask questions to better understand.
As we start to look at this and how we move forward in a productive way, being honest with ourselves is the core. If we are unwilling to acknowledge the reality of what we see, we aren’t honest with ourselves. And this snowballs, not just the situation, but everything we do. If we can’t be honest with ourselves, it means we can’t be honest with others.
How do we change this?
Being honest with ourselves is the starting point.
What does this really mean?
It means recognizing the judgments we’ve made may be wrong. The certainties we have held may no longer be true.
It requires curiosity to understand what we may have missed. Accountability for the judgments we’ve made. And the courage to change when what we learn demands it.
However, honesty with ourselves isn’t enough. We have to demonstrate that we can handle the truth from others.
This means recognizing they may be giving us valuable feedback that we couldn’t see for ourselves. It means recognizing we may have been wrong and accepting the consequences of these errors. It means people may be making incorrect judgments about us, but our reaction can’t be to make excuses or withhold, but engaging them in discussions to help each of us better understand the other’s perspectives.
As we become more honest with ourselves and demonstrate we can handle the truth from others; we give them the safety to be honest themselves.
None of this means we agree, but candor removes the discomfort we have with disagreement. We learn that we may see things differently, either through different experiences, different interpretations of the same situation, or interpreting the facts differently.
Candor enables us to safely challenge these. With others and with ourselves.
And in this process we exercise our judgment. We surface our own mental models or perspectives. We become aware of what we don’t know. We challenge our certainty. We change our minds when the evidence suggests it.
In doing this constantly, with ourselves, the people we work with, and our customers, something else happens.
Trust.
Trust isn’t the result of convincing people we tell the truth. It comes from constantly demonstrating that we can handle the truth.
Go back to that scene in A Few Good Men. Kaffee’s strategy is to provoke Jessup into telling the truth. Jessup admitted that he had ordered the Code Red.
Kaffee handled that truth well.
But it was Jessup who couldn’t handle the truth. His certainty and pride kept him from seeing what was happening in the courtroom.
In the end he couldn’t be honest with himself.
What truths have we decided others can’t handle?
Which one’s can we not handle ourselves?
Afterword: Again, this AI discussion is better than this post. Enjoy!
