Speaking Truth to ... Donald Trump
Speaking truth to power is supposed to be a key civil service skill but it is never (as far as I am aware) actually taught on any training programme. I tried to address this failure a couple of years ago when I published a short and hopefully entertaining paperback which sought to explain why it is difficult to speak frankly to those who have power over us.
It investigates why powerful people are not like the rest of us, why decision makers may have different motivations to their staff, and whether it is easier to speak truth to power in the public or private sectors. It then goes on, most importantly, to offer a toolkit of nine ways in which you might get your CEO or minister to listen to you.
You will not be surprised to learn that Donald Trump features a couple of times - and not in a good way. It strikes me, therefore, that now might be a good time to draw the book to wider attention.
I am also slightly embarrassed that I feature the book as Part 3 of my current draft of How to Succeed in the Senior Civil Service but it is the only part that cannot currently be downloaded for free.
The combination of these two factors have persuaded me to arrange for you to be able to buy the book for only £2.99 +p&p from now and until the end of April. Its price will then revert to £7.99. You can buy it from Amazon here or direct from the publisher here.
Here are some extracts, including something about working with Donald Trump, to give you a feel for what is in the book:
Introduction: some won’t talk - and others won’t listen
On Wednesday 16 September 1992, the British government was forced to withdraw from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). It was the final defeat in an ongoing battle which had already helped throw the British economy into recession in the early 1990s. Chaos ensued and at one point on ‘Black Wednesday’, the base interest rate reached an eye-watering 15%. The cost of the saga was later estimated to have cost the economy more than £3 billion.
A post-mortem by the Treasury concluded that a contributing factor to the disaster was the failure of senior civil servants to give advice they feared ministers would find unacceptable. They did not, or could not, ‘speak truth to power’.
You might find that extraordinary. After all, isn’t that what advisors are for? To advise? But history and literature are littered with examples which show not only how difficult it can be to speak (and be heard), but how disastrous the results can be. Could the Iraq War have been avoided if legal opinion had reached (and penetrated) the ears of the ministers involved?
This is by no means a problem confined to Whitehall’s corridors of power. We can (and must) ask ourselves similar questions in the private sector. For example, would the Royal Bank of Scotland have announced the largest annual loss in UK corporate history had someone successfully challenged Fred ‘The Shred’ Goodwin?
The truth is that it is difficult to speak frankly to people in power. And, even if you do, that’s not enough – you have to speak in a way that ensures you are heard.
Advice falls on deaf ears unless it takes into account a range of factors about the person the ears are attached to, and their place in the world. To be effective you need to understand their character, their aspirations, and the constraints within which they operate.
No one likes truly honest feedback
Most powerful people claim to invite fearless, honest advice but (a) this is nonsense and (b) it seldom happens. Why? Tim Harford summarises the problem very nicely in his book Adapt:
There is a limit to how much honest feedback most leaders really want to hear; and, because we know this, most of us sugar-coat our opinions whenever we speak to a powerful person. In a deep hierarchy, that process is repeated many times, until the truth is utterly concealed inside a thick layer of sweet-talk. There is some evidence that the more ambitious a person is, the more he will choose to be a yes-man - and with good reason because yes-men tend to be rewarded.
Even when leaders and managers genuinely want honest feedback, they may not receive it. At every stage in a plan, junior managers or petty bureaucrats must tell their superiors what resources they need and what they propose to do with them. There are a number of plausible lies they might choose to tell, including over-promising in the hope of winning influence as go-getters, or stressing the impossibility of a task and the vast resources needed to deliver success, in the hope of providing a pleasant surprise. Actually, telling the unvarnished truth is unlikely to be the best strategy in a bureaucratic hierarchy. Even if someone does tell the truth, how is the senior decision-maker to separate the honest opinion from some cynical protestation?
The resulting filtering can have devastating effects in a steep hierarchy: What starts out as bad news becomes happier and happier as it travels up the ranks -- because after each boss hears the news from his or her subordinates, he or she makes it sound a bit less bad before passing it up the chain.
Donald Trump
Newly appointed advisers to powerful people are often advised to keep their ears open and their mouth shut until they’ve earned their trust. But this can be dangerous.
Former FBI Director James Comey had some experience in the matter:
“I have some [observations] from four months of working close to Mr. Trump and many more months of watching him shape others.
Amoral leaders have a way of revealing the character of those around them. Sometimes what they reveal is inspiring. For example, James Mattis, the former secretary of defense, resigned over principle, a concept so alien to Mr. Trump that it took days for the president to realize what had happened, before he could start lying about the man.
But more often, proximity to an amoral leader reveals something depressing. I think that’s at least part of what we’ve seen with [others]. Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump and that adds up to something they will never recover from. It takes character like Mr. Mattis’s to avoid the damage, because Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites.
It starts with your sitting silent while he lies, both in public and private, making you complicit by your silence. In meetings with him, his assertions about what “everyone thinks” and what is “obviously true” wash over you, unchallenged, as they did at our private dinner on Jan. 27, 2017, because he’s the president and he rarely stops talking. As a result, Mr. Trump pulls all of those present into a silent circle of assent.
Speaking rapid-fire with no spot for others to jump into the conversation, Mr. Trump makes everyone a co-conspirator to his preferred set of facts, or delusions. I have felt it — this president building with his words a web of alternative reality and busily wrapping it around all of us in the room.
I must have agreed that he had the largest inauguration crowd in history because I didn’t challenge that. Everyone must agree that he has been treated very unfairly. The web building never stops.
From the private circle of assent, it moves to public displays of personal fealty at places like cabinet meetings. While the entire world is watching, you do what everyone else around the table does — you talk about how amazing the leader is and what an honor it is to be associated with him.
Sure, you notice that Mr. Mattis never actually praises the president, always speaking instead of the honor of representing the men and women of our military. But he’s a special case, right? Former Marine general and all. No way the rest of us could get away with that. So you praise, while the world watches, and the web gets tighter.
Next comes Mr. Trump attacking institutions and values you hold dear — things you have always said must be protected and which you criticized past leaders for not supporting strongly enough. Yet you are silent. Because, after all, what are you supposed to say? He’s the president of the United States.
You feel this happening. It bothers you, at least to some extent. But his outrageous conduct convinces you that you simply must stay, to preserve and protect the people and institutions and values you hold dear. Along with Republican members of Congress, you tell yourself you are too important for this nation to lose, especially now.
You can’t say this out loud — maybe not even to your family — but in a time of emergency, with the nation led by a deeply unethical person, this will be your contribution, your personal sacrifice for America. You are smarter than Donald Trump, and you are playing a long game for your country, so you can pull it off where lesser leaders have failed and gotten fired by tweet.
Of course, to stay, you must be seen as on his team, so you make further compromises. You use his language, praise his leadership, tout his commitment to values.
And then you are lost. He has eaten your soul.”
Just a reminder:- There’s lots more good stuff in the book and you can buy it for only £2.99 +p&p from now and until the end of April. Its price will then revert to £7.99. You can buy it from Amazon here or direct from the publisher here.
Martin Stanley