They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth.
- Plato
Q: What do you do about the fact that people don't like to hear the truth? Something about the truth comes up for me and... I'm not a shy person, so I usually like to point out the obvious but people just don't want to hear it. So what do you do about that aspect?
A: Trust you to have the good, difficult questions! Now I think this is a critical question because actually hearing the truth is really hard. I don't think that people just don't like to hear it. They don't like to admit to having liked hearing it. Let me kind of unpack this sentence.
Most of us will eventually learn from somebody having told us the truth. It's just hard at that time. Now what that means is you might be left behind as the person... and it might take five or ten years before they come back and say - you know, when you said that, that was great. You changed my life. But for those five or ten years, I just don't want to see you anywhere in the room where I'm at. And that's the danger of being the first one to ask the question - if you get into that.
But actually funnily enough, people who will hear the truth will come to accept it and will get a lot of value from it. So the question is more - for me, where do you get the resilience to be the one to tell the truth all the time? If you are giving so much of yourself away, then who is filling you back up, so you have got more to give, and that's the real challenge. And it says a lot more about your subordinates and the people who work alongside you. Just to make sure because the other thing that some of us do is that we are quite deluded about our ability to see the truth.
I mean, I think I'm right most of the time. Because that's in my genes, right? [That he's French] I'm right! So sometimes it takes somebody to say - Look! You think you're helping but actually you're not helping because that's not quite the way it is... I think it's this ability to grow and learn.
So, the last thing I want to say and then I'll leave that - when you tell the truth, give somebody hope. Because the other thing that we all need is we all need something that we can work on.
Okay! Emmanuel [gesturing to self], George Clooney [compares himself to], right? Now, give me hope! Explain to me how I can get there! Diet might be a start. Plastic surgery might be the only one. Give me a plan. But help me out! Don't just leave me in this limbo that says - Look, Emmanuel, you are not like George Clooney! Which I genuinely think I am, I mean, at least the mirror tells me I am, most mornings!
But it's that. It's about how can we get that engagement so that we get some hope and we can work with the truth.
- Emmanuel Gobillot, Leading@Google
