234. Need to Know: Lead With Transparency, Character, and Silence

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: Effective leaders, effective communicators, focus on clarity, context, and character. My name's Matt Abrahams and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. Today I am grateful to speak to General Stanley McChrystal. General McChrystal is a retired four star general, former commander of US and international forces in Afghanistan, and a renowned expert on leadership. He is best known for revolutionizing counter-terrorism operations and building cohesive teams in complex environments. He's a highly successful author with books like Team of Teams and his latest, On Character: Choices That Define a Life. Welcome, I have been excited for this conversation for a long time. Thank you.

[00:00:54] General Stanley McChrystal: Well, Matt, thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to it as well.

[00:00:57] Matt Abrahams: Excellent. Shall we get started?

[00:00:59] General Stanley McChrystal: Please.

[00:01:00] Matt Abrahams: General McChrystal, I'm a huge admirer of your book Team of Teams, and in it you talk about shared consciousness and shared information. What is it that leaders can do to build that shared consciousness, especially in an environment where we're drowning in emails and Slacks? How can we actually come together around a shared point of view? 

[00:01:21] General Stanley McChrystal: The first thing about sharing information that I found later in my military career is we had natural silos vertically, and then we also had the hierarchy creates other boundaries for the flow of information. So information in structures, bureaucracies, think pyramid shaped hierarchies, tend to follow carefully prescribed routes up and down and whatnot, and not across as easily unless it is encouraged and in fact demanded. And so what I found was first, you need to change the mindset. In the old days in, in the military, you never got in trouble for information you didn't share to someone. But you could be criticized if you shared some information that you didn't have approval from your boss or your chain of command. So we tried to flip that on its head and say that you are responsible for informing other people of things that they need to know.

[00:02:17] And then you say, how do I know what they need to know? And the answer is, you never really do. So the default needs to be to share and then overshare. In fact, I, I said something when I took over the Counter-terrorist Force, which was a complex community of different organizations, the goal is to have everyone know everything, all the time. Now, that's impossible, clearly. But the concept of shared consciousness is we all have a common contextual understanding of what the situation is, what we are trying to do, and then people can make decisions without going and get approval for everything they're gonna do because they have the context, they're informed. And so the biggest thing I found was first change the rules of information sharing, and then more slowly change the culture of information sharing. 

[00:03:12] Matt Abrahams: So context is critical. And also the approach, being that the idea is get all the information to everybody and not worry about the potential negative ramifications of that information.

[00:03:23] General Stanley McChrystal: The idea that information is power, you don't want to share information 'cause someone knows that you won't be quite as important. So it becomes very important to break down those hesitations in sharing information. And then there's the last one, which I really see more in civilian business. We don't want to scare the children, so we don't want to tell 'em that revenue's down or that there are headwinds in the marketplace. The reality is when we leave a vacuum in our teams, they fill it with the darkest ideas available because there are all sorts of information sources out there, many of which are very flawed. So you have to not try to prevent information, you have to compete with information that they're already receiving.

[00:04:08] Matt Abrahams: That's a really powerful point, that if you're not communicating, people will find and fill that vacuum on their own, and it might be much worse than what the reality is. I'm curious, I totally appreciate and understand changing the mindset and approach. Were there certain things that you've implemented or have seen implemented that really help reinforce it? It's one thing for the leader to say, share everything so we all have the same information. But a lot of people inherently might not do that. So is it role modeling? Is it rewarding when it's done well? How do you actually get people to do that?

[00:04:38] General Stanley McChrystal: I could mention several. The first of course is role models, senior leaders. They've gotta be as transparent as they can. We like to look up at the sphinx like CEO, who only pronounces something occasionally, but I found it's better to over communicate. The second is you've gotta set up processes and technologies which allow that. And so nowadays with information technology as omnipresent as it is we can usually reach everybody almost at any time. We need to leverage that. 

[00:05:10] Matt Abrahams: So it's really about people, process, and tools are the ways that you actually affect that change. Thank you. You have often worked in very diverse situations with military, government, international partners, and local populations. All of these have very different goals, communication styles, and cultural norms. How do you adapt to ensure clarity and build trust, especially when you are in very ambiguous and uncertain times? 

[00:05:38] General Stanley McChrystal: Yeah, Matt, first you have to start out by recognizing it. I remember, and I've described this, I'd be in Afghanistan and I'd be meeting with Pashtun elders with a different language than I spoke, a different religion, a different culture. So when I sat with them and talked, it was just absolutely obvious that we had a cultural divide in communicating, and so we were very careful about how we communicated. Then I would meet with people from the US Department of State, for example. They speak English, we have a shared culture, a shared religion, all of those things. But actually the cultural divide was huge. And I could be speaking military and thinking that it is being heard with the same kind of understanding that I hope it will, and that wasn't the case. And then vice versa. And sometimes just titles or uniforms or difference in organizations can create this, but we don't seem sensitive to that. And so we walk out of the room and we say, Matt's just, he's stupid. He's got a bad attitude. He doesn't listen. When in fact that comes at it from a completely different direction than I do, and we need to appreciate that. 

[00:06:50] Matt Abrahams: I have certainly been called stupid and unprepared in many situations, but the point you are making is very clear that we have to first appreciate and understand the differences. And sometimes those cultural differences aren't just the things you see on the outside, how somebody looks or where somebody is located. Those cultural differences can be within the same organization. You and your colleagues in the State Department are part of the US government. So really important to recognize it and then adjust your communication, for sure. All leaders have to give difficult news and challenging information. Maybe it's a failed project, a change in strategy, or even negative feedback. How do you approach giving bad news or challenging news? Is there a structure you use? A way of going about it that you have found helps you to be more successful?

[00:07:37] General Stanley McChrystal: I think the first is you've gotta communicate it as clearly and as quickly as you are capable of doing. There is no real advantage in trying to make it seem not as serious as it is or to sugarcoat it. And so I think you start by saying, okay, I've got some very serious information to pass. Here it is. Now the other thing though, occasionally a leader will do that and then wanna walk out of the room. Drop the bombshell and wanna walk outta the room. Context is very important because if a CEO walks into the company and says, everyone's pay is gonna be cut fifty percent, life's hard, and walks out, you get one response from everybody. If the CEO goes, okay, lemme be upfront. Everyone's pay is being cut. Here's why. Here's the context, here's the rationale. Here's what we're trying to do with it.

[00:08:31] Now you gotta avoid the temptation to say, and you know it's gonna be okay, if you're not sure it's gonna be okay. But you can communicate things like, I am committed to this team. We will work through this. If we think back to COVID-19, when it first started, the great thing was uncertainty. And so we had to all communicate with our teammates who are now geographically distributed, and many of 'em are sitting in their apartments or at their kitchen table. They don't know if they're still gonna have a job. They don't know how to interact. And so we can communicate, Hey, this is serious. We don't know exactly how it's gonna play out, but here's what you can count on. I'm gonna be committed for your welfare. Promise those things that are within your power to promise. 

[00:09:15] Matt Abrahams: So it sounds to me like three things are really important. One is clarity, being very clear and direct. Second is understanding and appreciating the context and sticking in that context. And then what I also heard you talking about was connection, really connecting to the people, not just dropping it and running, but connecting the information and the next steps to the individuals. And I think those three steps of clarity, context, and connection are really important for any communication, let alone that's challenging. I'd like to follow up on this COVID situation that you mentioned, because that fundamentally changed the way we communicated. We were all remote and distanced. How have you dealt with leading and communicating when you're doing it through a screen, when not everybody is in the same room. What best practices do you employ to help you be effective and continue to connect and build trust with those you're leading? 

[00:10:08] General Stanley McChrystal: Yeah. Let me start, Matt, I actually had a head start on this because in the Counter-terrorist Force starting in 2003, my force was spread across seventy-six bases in twenty-seven countries, and we were just at the beginning of secure video teleconferencing. And so that's how we communicated essentially all the time. Now, I learned a number of things. I learned first that it's not nearly as effective as we wanna believe it is. It's not like being in the room. And so, the first is you try to build up, whenever you have the opportunity, relationships, usually in person, that you can then build and communicate later.

[00:10:50] So if you and I had a real close personal relationship, we could then do virtual things at a much higher level of effectiveness than if we didn't know each other. So you're building upon a foundation. The next thing is communication, particularly between different ranks in an organization, can be fraught. So for example, I would communicate with very junior people and I was a commanding general. And they would come on the screen and clearly they are terrified because they've never spoken to someone that senior before. And I tried to first say, hello, Susan, how are you? And in many cases they go, how does he know my name?

[00:11:29] The answer is, I had a cheat sheet because I knew that was important to do that. And then when they communicated at the end of their communication, I would always ask a question, even if I knew the answer. And that was for two things. It was to communicate to them that what they are doing is important and listening, and to give them another opportunity to demonstrate their expertise. Because you're building their confidence and you're trying to build this relationship as you go. I would never sit there just quietly and go, thank you. We're okay. Because if you're a young person and you brief Matt Abraham's, and then at the end of it you just go, thanks, I have no idea whether you're thinking, thanks, that was terrible, or, thanks, that was great.

[00:12:13] So you have to exaggerate your positivity. You have to be very careful about your negativity because I found that if I am multitasking, if you're briefing me and you spent a lot of time and I'm down looking at my computer or I'm talking to the person next to me, one, it's disrespectful and it's embarrassing to you. And two, it just, it makes you not want to communicate and so it becomes really difficult. And finally, if you got bad news to communicate, that's gotta be done very carefully because if you've got a group of people and someone does something and you sort of take 'em on. It's not like in a room where at the end of the meeting you can walk to the end of the table and put your hand on their shoulder and go to the coffee maker or something like that.

[00:13:01] They are going to literally stew in what they think was your negative impression. And so it becomes very important. And then the last thing, in big groups, you even have to watch your facial expressions 'cause somebody's briefing you and I used to take my glasses off and go like this, and the chat rooms would light up and they'd say, what's bothering the old man? Well, sometimes I just had to wipe my face off, but I became sensitive to the fact that without being in the room, they are relying on fewer cues, and so they over-index on those.

[00:13:37] So I think we've all gotta make a real conscious effort to understand that virtual is not the same. And a lot of people say, no, we're a virtual society now. We don't need to be in person. My counter to that is we found out during COVID that remote education for our children doesn't work very well. And you say, well, that's kids. No, that's all of us. We ought to pay attention to that because if it didn't work, hasn't worked in education, why do we want to tell ourselves we're as effective, remotely working as we want to believe we are?

[00:14:12] Matt Abrahams: That last point is a really important one because if you think about it, you have teachers who have been trained in ways to communicate and to connect, and if they can't make it work, how can we expect those of us who don't have that training to be able to do it. So several things there that you said are really important. I'm gonna start with the nonverbal presence. When we have fewer cues, we really pay attention to them and we have to make sure that we do things as simple as looking at the camera when we're talking to people, reminding ourselves that what we do signals information, not just what we say. The fact that you would go out of your way to build connection and comfort is really important because when we don't have that preexisting relationship, it really is mandatory that we actually try to connect. And I love that you would not only connect with the person by identifying their name. But at the end, you would check in with them through asking a question. Others paraphrase or summarize. There's a lot you can do to signal that you're interested and that you heard the person. And being virtual really forces us to do that. So thank you for those best practices.

[00:15:14] In your latest book, On Character, which I love and think is really important, especially in this day and time. You argue that character is iterative. It's built through a succession of choices and actions. How can individuals leverage their everyday action and communication as tools for their own personal development of their character?

[00:15:35] General Stanley McChrystal: Yeah. I feel very strongly about that, Matt, and thanks for the kind words. We start something, think of a diet you start, or you quit smoking, or you make some other promise to yourself, I am going to do something differently than the way I've done it that's gonna make me a better person in some ways. As you do those things, typically the longer you go, the more reason you have not to break the strength. If you've been on your diet for two days, you can break it and you don't feel that bad. If you've been on it for two months, you say, I don't wanna break this because I really feel good.

[00:16:08] On character the same way applies. Some of them are just simply habits. I am going to be honest, and you might say, no, wait a minute. I'm an honest person. I don't have to remind myself. We do have to remind ourselves. We have to remind ourselves what we mean by integrity, how honest we intend to be in every interaction, and we have to hold ourselves to that. How we treat people, the respect we show for people, the grace we give to people. Again, it's something where we have to establish a clear standard and says, my standard for dealing with this kind of people in this kind of situation is this, and I am not gonna violate it.

[00:16:50] Now, you will find you get tired or irritable and you might, but that can't reset the standard. What you've gotta do is you say, my standard is this. I didn't do that. I'm gonna, that's a mistake. I will try not to do that again. But we have a series of things that become almost like the rules of civility that George Washington made so famous when he wrote 'em down when he was a young man, and some of 'em are very basic, but they were just reminders to him. There's certain things you do and don't do. We need the same for ourselves.

[00:17:24] Matt Abrahams: Absolutely. And you highlight something that you talk about, this say, do gap, how you have to commit to something and then you actually have to show it and demonstrate it. Before we end, I like to ask everybody three questions. One I create just for you and the other two I've been asking people for as long as we've been doing this show. Are you up for that?

[00:17:43] General Stanley McChrystal: Sure.

[00:17:44] Matt Abrahams: Alright. I've done a fair amount of work with the US military and intelligence agencies, and they're known for very structured communication with briefings. For those of us who are outside the military, what are one or two valuable communication skills that you learned that help you be successful in the things that you did?

[00:18:03] General Stanley McChrystal: The first is to be very clear. You know, we'd call it bottom line, up front. Say what you're trying to communicate, don't obfuscate it, and a bunch of other data. Just say, X is X, and that's what I think. The second is, understand that there is a hierarchical pressure for a certain outcome. Sometimes people have a briefing because they want to get a certain answer, and you've gotta understand that that's not your role.

[00:18:30] Matt Abrahams: So managing and maybe even pushing back against those conformity pressures is really important. And again, clarity, and make sure that what you're saying is upfront, not buried in the details.

[00:18:40] General Stanley McChrystal: That's right.

[00:18:41] Matt Abrahams: Question number two, and I'll be very curious to hear your answer. Who is a communicator that you admire and why?

[00:18:47] General Stanley McChrystal: There are a number of very effective communicators. If you go back to someone like Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln, they had a very measured cadence in communicating with the American people, and they always tied it to values and general goals. And so like Franklin Roosevelt at the beginning of his first term, you know, depths of the depression, he's trying to communicate hope, he's trying to communicate action, he's trying to communicate we are all in this together. And so I find when I read and listen to the old recordings of that, a real sense of he knew what he was trying to accomplish with communication. He wasn't just communicating for the joy of it. And so I admire people with that kind of discipline. 

[00:19:33] Matt Abrahams: So it's the discipline, the focus, and attaching it to bigger values, and not surprising for somebody who has studied and thought a lot about character. Our final question, what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? I can almost be sure that clarity is going to be part of that. 

[00:19:52] General Stanley McChrystal: Yeah, it's gotta be timely and it's gotta be genuine because at some point, whether or not we believe what we're communicating matters, we may get out and think we can disassemble in front of a bunch of people and they'll buy it, but over time it comes back. So if you don't believe it, it is problematic to stand up there and say it. 

[00:20:13] Matt Abrahams: Clarity, timeliness, and genuine and authenticity really important. Well, thank you General McChrystal for your time and for your insight and for the good work you are doing around character and character building. Clearly in our time that's very important. I appreciate the learnings and the lessons. 

[00:20:32] General Stanley McChrystal: You're kind to have me, Matt. Thank you.

[00:20:37] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about high-stakes leadership under pressure, listen to episode 155 with Susan Rice or Episode 161 with Jen Psaki. This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With special thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok. And check out fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Please consider our premium offering for extended Deep Thinks episodes, Ask Matt Anythings, and much more, at fastersmarter.io/premium.