Jason A. Belt

Avert your eyes

Seth is challenging us in this short post regarding: making a list of things we don’t want to look at. Many of us find comfort in avoiding any thought about these things.

As I have shared before, I love reading Seth’s Blog. In this post, Seth is challenging all of us to look at the things we normally try to avoid. He even goes as far as the idea of making a list of all the things we do not want to look at due to how frightening that list might be.

As a leader, I have felt this to my core. “Oh man, I wonder what our performance was on X metric last week” or “How bad was the final margin on that large project that just seemed to never normalize?”

I love the attitude Seth is bringing in this short post. Over the last few years, I have truly taken the stance of wanting to see the bad stuff quickly and making the data open and transparent to all on my team.

I have the pleasure of working with a company where we meet each week as an Operations team with the COO asking questions and all teams participating in an honest attempt to be transparent with one another. We talk about the bad stuff. We share, we listen, we laugh, we sigh, and more importantly, we are together looking at the things some people in other organizations are afraid to show to a large group for fear of embarrassment, punishment, or even vulnerability.

I look forward to this meeting each week for 2 reasons:

1. As a newer person on the team, it was the quickest way to learn what was broken and how my role and team could impact the other teams positively and negatively.
2. I love the conversations around the things that are “bad” or broken that we need to fix as this is a great opportunity for team growth, but also for rapid personal and professional growth.

As our COO says each meeting, we are seeing the relationships in the data and getting to the core understanding of how the business is working. We are addressing the hard stuff and making it better for the long term.

So, to Seth’s point, we are making lists of the things that normally would scare us, but in truth, once you get past the initial fear, the reality is so much better than the unknown. We can make reality better. We can influence the impact the scary things might have on the business. If we avoid them, then it is always hanging there with the impact unknown, lurking in the “shadows”. Averting your eyes only distracts from the chance to make an impact and the opportunities that bringing a team together and tackling something hard together offers.

I love the list of scary things and then seeing our teams cross them off one by one. Averting my eyes used to be something I was tempted by, but I see the value in looking at the scary things first and shining a light on them with my team.

What about you?

Does your organization make a list of scary things and tackle them together?