It's Not Rude to Be Direct

In fairness, both of these guys grew up and lived most of their lives in the Midwest, and this kind of direct, seemingly harsh communication is considered unmannerly and New Yorky. Where does this dopey idea come from, anyway? This difference in ability to provide direct, unfiltered feedback is why the restaurants in New York are better than the ones in Kansas. This is the Manhattan effect. The inherent advantage a restaurateur in New York has is that if he serves a bad meal, or serves it too slowly, he is going to hear about it right then and there. Real-time feedback is crucial to addressing the customer's complaint and fixing the problem before the next customer comes through the door. The ability to measure things begets new behaviours.

The restaurateur in Kansas, on the other hand, is at a huge disadvantage. When served a bad meal in Kansas, the customer is far more likely to tell the waiter that the meal was "fine", quietly pay the bill and never come back. The only indication to the restaurant that there might be a problem with the food is that they are going broke. This is the bad attitude and lack of empathy that the silent individual can inflict.

Even restaurants that succeed, such as this purportedly great steak house in Durango, will never be as good — or as successful — as they could be. That there must be some genuinely good restaurants in Kansas is a testament to those individual owners' talent and self-critical natures, and their ability to attract the handful of diners in their geography willing to engage them with critical feedback (probably transplants from the East).

In an effort to keep them from stabbing me with their steak knives, I tried to explain this thinking to my two corn-fed friends and relate it to how we might have all done things better in our jobs had we the benefit of receiving and giving more direct real-time feedback. "My feedback," I said, "just might save these guys from going out of business." To which one of the guys said: "What if you don't care if they go out of business?"

This might be the most insightful thing I've heard him say in 20 years. Silence as an argument carried out by other means. The revenge of the passive-aggressive. How many businesses have been lost, how many careers have been damaged, because feedback was not forthcoming? Was it not forthcoming because of malevolence or a belief that it would not be well-received?

Depending on the nature of your business or geography or whatever, it might be pretty tough to get meaningful feedback from your customers, but your managers and employees are a different story. If you're not getting meaningful feedback from them, there's no point in spending a lot of time wondering why. The reason is you.

Being lucky enough to get real-time feedback doesn't mean much without some measure of receptivity to the negative message. I imagine that the owner of a successful restaurant in New York probably has to have a pretty thick skin. I'm not sure whether this is something you have to be born with or something you can learn. I certainly could have used a thicker skin when I was an active CIO. Even though I knew better, I still had a tendency to take negative news pretty hard. I had a terrific career, but there's little doubt that I could have done some things better.

To all of my ex-teammates who might have been afraid to knock on my door because of the way they thought I might receive negative news, I'm sorry for that, and I wish I had it to do over. I suppose it doesn't do any good to close the barn door after the horses have got out, but you might as well.

For most of the IT leaders reading this column, you're in luck. It's not too late.

Jerry Gregoire is the former CIO of Dell Computer and the beverage division of PepsiCo