Help People Speak Truth to Power – Coaching for Leaders

Megan Reitz: Speak Up

Megan Reitz is Professor of Leadership and Dialogue at Hult International Business School where she speaks, researches, consults and supervises on the intersection of leadership, change, dialogue and mindfulness. She is on the Thinkers50 ranking of global business thinkers and is ranked in HR Magazine’s Most Influential Thinkers listing. She has written Dialogue in Organizations and Mind Time.

She is a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review and her research has recently featured in Forbes, on the BBC, in TEDx talks, and in numerous academic and practice-based journals. Her latest research on employee activism was nominated for the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award. Her most recent book with John Higgins is titled Speak Up: Say What Needs to Be Said and Hear What Needs to Be Heard*.

Many leaders consider what they need to do in order to speak truth to others, but rarely focus on how to make it easier for people to speak to them. In this conversation, Megan and I explore what leaders can do in order to hear what needs to be heard. We share several tactics that will make it easier for others to surface what you need to hear.

Key Points

Speaking up and listening up go hand in hand. Power always affects what gets said and what gets heard.
A key checkpoint is whether or not you really value the opinion of others.
Where you have conversations can make a massive difference on how comfortable the other party is in surfacing an important message for you to hear.
Leaders who have margin in their daily schedules create space for the right moment to hear truth.
Proactively invite challenge and debate through specific invitations. One example: “What do you know that I need to know, but will never be told?”