A community of truth is created when people are genuinely interested in seeing and exploring together. They do not try to manipulate each other. They do not immediately judge, saying, âThatâs stupidâ or âThatâs right.â Instead, they pause to consider what the meaning of the statement is to the person who just uttered it.
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Spinning the truth is one of the most common ways leaders erode trust. I canât say this clearly enough: donât do this. Your people are not stupid. When you try to spin them, they see it, and it makes you look like a fraud. Speak plainly, without trying to make bad situations seem good, and your employees will learn you tell the truth.
Wisdom is a social skill practiced within a relationship or a system of relationships. Wisdom is practiced when people come together to form what Parker Palmer called a âcommunity of truth.â A community of truth can be as simple as a classroomâa teacher and students investigating some problem together. It can be two people at a table in a coffee shop, noodling over some problem.
This is a crucial step in connecting with others through curiosity: communicating your new understanding back to them. This is where a lot of the magic happens, where the connection between people becomes solid, visible, and meaningful. Hearing an accurate understanding of our own experience coming from another person, articulated in their words, can be thrilling, especially when weâre feeling alienated in a social setting. Suddenly someone is seeing us as we are, and that experience momentarily breaches the barrier that we feel between us and the world. To be seen is an amazing thing.
Itâs easy to take comfort in the fact that other people agree with us. As legendary investor Warren Buffett pointed out, though, âThe fact that other people agree or disagree with you makes you neither right nor wrong. You will be right if your facts and reasoning are correct.â
The people executing established practices say they want new ideas, but they donât want the bad ones. And because they so want to avoid the bad ones, they never deviate enough to find good ones.
Second, these efforts should involve the participation of as many people as possible. When people feel they havenât been heard they tend not to trust. But when their input is a regular, normalized part of how a setting functions, theyâre better able to trust it even when they disagree.