From Honeymoon to Breakdown: Parallels Between Love and Leadership

Communication is the delicate balance of silence and words for the benefit of motivation. If you take the truth and clarity out of the business, you might as well vacuum every ounce of healthy energy out of the people involved in it.

Think about the last bad relationship you were in. Maybe you’re in one right now. You know the kind: It starts out great ––the honeymoon stage Staring into each other’s eyes, flowers, constant talking, and sharing the world with each other. She’s so great or he’s so amazing. You find yourself saying, “I think this is it.” There’s an excitement that speaks of new beginnings. Both of you love everything about each other. Everything you would normally find annoying turns to complete adoration. You’re in love. You can’t keep your hands off each other. The sex is great and happens all the time. Constant “PDA” and “TMI” annoy the hell out of your friends. Yes, this is the real thing.

Then you start finding out some things that make you go, “Hmmm.” For one, he told you he was an owner of a business. It turns out he only works for the business as a sales rep. When you ask him why he told you he owned the business, he simply says, “I am the owner of the business–– my part of the business. Good sales reps manage their portion of the business like it’s their own. That makes me an owner.” You’re thinking, No, that makes you a liar. Then there was that little weekend trip he took with friends. You accidently found a picture that showed him getting a little too close with one of his friends. When you ask him about the picture, his response is, “We’re just friends. I had a little too much to drink. It’s no big deal.” You say, “Like hell it’s not. I thought we were exclusive.” He says, “We never actually had the exclusive conversation.” So now, even though you should run, you have the exclusive conversation.

Time goes on and you still can’t get the image of the picture you saw out of your mind. You’re obsessed. You start asking all of your friends about it. “Should I leave, should I stay, should I leave, should I stay?” Your friends are yelling, “Run, Forrest, run!” You stay. Bad decision.

More time goes by and everything seems to be going great. You’ve seen no more incriminating pictures and you’ve justified the little lie about being a business owner. Your partner, on the other hand is becoming increasingly annoyed with the fact that you don’t turn off the lights when you leave a room, you leave the water running when you brush your teeth, you don’t throw out the carton when you take the last soda, and you don’t, well, think the way he does. If you did, life would be perfect. You’re annoyed with the fact that he seems to pick on you all the time–– nag, nag, nag.

It now feels as though you’ve been together longer than you actually have. The lies are still festering in your head. You begin to question everything he says, because you’re not sure if he’s ever telling you the whole story; you’ve discovered a few more “nuances” to what he’s told you. He has become increasingly annoyed with the fact that you’re not acting exactly the way he wants you to, and you’re still annoyed with his constant nagging, the exaggerated truths, and the arguments. When you call out his exaggerations you’re met with, “I just didn’t want to make you mad, rock the boat. You’ve been working so hard, I didn’t want to distract you with the little details that didn’t really pertain to you anyway.” You’re thinking, WHAT?? And the sex… well, what sex? Even when you do have sex it’s blah because neither of you can let go of the thoughts in your head. Resentment and irritability grow. Your 500 texts per day go down to one or two, simple out of feeling obligated to send a text or respond to one. One thing leads to another, and BAM! The relationship is over. Dead.

You spend another five months trying to shake off the bad residue of green energic slime that resulted from staying way too long in a seriously bad situation. Now lal you can think is, Thank God I got out when I did. Hasta la vista, baby!

You’re either laughing or crying at the end of the example. Most people in the world have been in a bad relationship at one point or another. And most people feel as though they’re in a bad relationship with the business they work for, and they feel stuck in the relationship because of the money, status, and insecurity. Being part of a business that lacks truth and clarity does the same thing to our energy as a bad relationship: It sucks our good energy dry, fills us with toxic energy, and lessens our confidence and drive.

The relationship in the example came to its death for the same reason many businesses die–– deceit, manipulation, and lies, followed by unsaid expectation that fuel frustration, confusion,  and doubt. Just as in a personal relationship, if business leaders don’t tell the truth and provide clarity to the people working in the business, the business leaders are choosing to end the relationship Or even worse, the business relationship becomes filled with abuse, negativity, lack of love, and depression. It turns into the type of relationship that causes everyone on the outside to ask, “Why did she stay in the relationship so long? How could she take it? Didn’t she know she could have left and actually experienced a good life? I’m glad I’m not her. How sad.”

So what is truth, exactly? The word truth seems to cause just as much of a debated in business as the word ethics. It has as much power as the word religion. And it seems to have turned into a choice among some business leaders, who make their decision to tell the truth based on the amount of impact the truth has on the stock market. If we tell the truth and there’s a chance our stock will go up, “Yes, let’s do it.” If we tell the truth and there’s a chance our stock will go down, “Let’s position the message to make sure it doesn’t appear as though we’ve lied.”

Okay, let’s take it back to the relationship example. Remember the party in the relationship who said he was an owner of a business, when in actuality the business had only asked him to treat his piece of the business as thought it was his own? That person decided not to share the whole story, and therefore decided to lie in an effort to look better in the eyes of the stakeholder (the person he was in a relationship with). Inevitably, the stock went down and the relationship ended. This personal relationship is no different from a business that makes telling the truth contingent on the stock market.

Truth only exists when the whole story is revealed. In a relationship, if you choose to not provide the whole story, regardless of the situation, you can’t sit back and watch hurt, resentment, and anger brew within each person while the relationship falls apart around them. A business is no different. If leaders choose to tell the truth based on how much money the company will or will not make, and if leaders choose not to disclose the whole story, then everyone in the business can sit back and watch hurt, resentment, and anger brew while the business falls apart around them. Enron is just one example of that reality. If the business is withholding information, it’s not providing the whole story. Truth, in its purse definition, is the whole story. If business leaders are purposefully not providing the whole story, well then, the business is being downright deceitful and manipulative.

In comparing a business to a human body, truth and clarity are the breath of the business that moves through the channel of communication. If the communication channel has an airway blockage of manipulation or confusion, the business becomes suffocating to everyone, and no one has the lung capacity to move the business forward. On the flip side, if the inhale is filled with healthy energy fuel with truth and clarity, there’s nothing your business can’t accomplish––every part of your business becomes filled with vitality.

When a business chooses not to disclose the whole story, it’s choosing to block the energy channel of communication––the channel that fuels and purifies the whole energy ecosystem of your business. The channel of communication life-giving, and goes far beyond the department or position your business calls “internal communications.”

*This is an excerpt from Fuel Your Business by Gina Soleil.