 Almost everyone agrees that honesty is important. But have you considered what it means to be intellectually honest? Welcome back and congratulations on taking one more step for becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. We're continuing our theme this month of courageous leadership and today we're talking about the courage to be honest. Honesty is one of the most important themes we hear about when we talk about values and leaky leadership traits and almost everyone agrees that telling the truth is important to good leadership. What often gets lost in the mix is the idea of intellectual honesty and that's what we're going to talk about today. You may not have heard of intellectual honesty before and it's mainly used in a problem solving sense, but there are direct connections to the way we think and act as leaders to intellectual honesty. Some key ideas behind intellectual honesty are not letting our beliefs interfere with seeing the truth, including all the facts and information in our decisions, even if they contradict our position, presenting facts to others without bias or presenting misleading information to promote one idea over another, and giving credit to others for their work when it's due. For example, I got some of the information about these ideas from the Wikipedia page about intellectual honesty. You can see what they say there about intellectual honesty for yourself, as well as find other references about intellectual honesty. So we can see there's a subtle but important distinction between simply telling the truth and being intellectually honest with ourselves and others. One of the most difficult parts about being intellectually honest is separating our strongly held beliefs from our decision-making process. And it's not that having strong beliefs is a bad thing, but sometimes our strong beliefs can bias our judgment to the point where we won't accept the facts about a given problem or situation, and this can lead to us making a decision that doesn't solve the problem or maybe even makes the problem worse. We can take steps to avoid these biases by distinguishing between our interests and our positions. Put simply, our interest in this case might be finding an effective solution to the problem, or our position might be to find a solution that aligns with our values. Focusing on our interests instead of our positions can keep our minds open to other facts as they come in, even if they don't support our position. Another practical step we can take is consulting with other people we trust, peers, mentors, or even members of our own team who have a different perspective or additional information to bring light on the problem. Taking the time to listen to these people without refuting the facts or criticizing their position can help us uncover any biases of our own that we may have. In good to great, Jim Collins talks about how the leaders of companies that consistently outperform their competitors are willing to confront the brutal facts. See what I did there? I gave credit where credit was due. Intellectual honesty requires that we accept all the facts in a given situation whether we like them or not. And not just accept them but incorporate them into our decision-making process and be honest with others about those facts, even if it means we might not get the outcome we prefer. This is also extremely difficult, but fortunately Jim Collins gives us some tips and good to grade on practical actions we can take to help us confront the brutal facts. First, we've got a lead with questions, not answers. It's tempting as leaders to be decisive and handle an issue quickly, but if the situation isn't time critical, gathering relevant facts can only help the process. Engage in dialogue and debate, not coercion. Actively listen to what others are saying about the problem without trying to force our own ideas. Conduct autopsies without blame. Very important when correcting a problem that's already occurred. Seeking to assign blame before getting the facts can lead team members to hold back critical information because they're afraid of being judged or punished. Once all the facts are in, it's time to decide if honest mistakes were made or if misconduct has occurred and we can proceed appropriately. Finally, we need to build red flag mechanisms. This is a key part of the process where we allow and encourage team members to come forward with the most critical pieces of information without judgment or repercussions. We need to treat these red flags as showstoppers for our effort and must address them before coming to a solution. For this reason we need to make sure our team members know that these are very serious and should only call out a red flag in the most urgent or critical situations. Exercising courageous leadership often requires us to look at the bigger picture and take a more long-term view than our own little corner of the world. In order to keep this focus we need to be intellectually honest with ourselves and others and this may mean accepting some facts that don't conform to our desires and beliefs. This can be one of the most difficult things we do as leaders because it requires time, patience and focus and we often feel like there's not enough of those to go around for all the things we need to do but with the help of other people we trust and the tips we learned today we can all take a step towards becoming intellectually honest courageous leaders. 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