In England, if somebody says to you, oh, that's very nice there, can often made, you have got absolutely appalling taste. And it really can't stand what you've done. But there's no way I'm going to tell you to your face and embarrass you and breach all the other mannerism protocols that we have around us. And doing something like that meant that my wife got so frustrated and mostly sometimes hated her mother in law, my mom for something like 15 years, because they did not have clear communication. Why can my mum not say, yeah, that sucks. It's so ugly.

Why did you ever choose that? and Why didn't my wife actually say, hey, mother in law? What do you really think, to be honest for once, and so that's a big problem. He could see the problem there in just a non word. environment. Now a lot of the time in startups, you get a similar problem because people aren't don't have like guts to tell somebody, they're doing something wrong.

So, for example, I work for a startup number of years ago, it was backed by Y Combinator. We were growing very, very quickly. And I'd been brought on I think, is one of the first senior management hires. And pretty much every month, I went, bang, bang, bang, and I hit my targets. I delivered what was needed to be delivered. And then came to my performance review.

And I just got absolutely average and they said, Yeah, Dennis, you're doing very well. You're doing very well. A few weeks later, they said right socket. Aha. And there, they've been very little communication. I still have no idea what it was that people off the icoc rock, there is no good communication that allowed me to course correct, despite hitting all the targets, getting everything done.

So that's not a sob story from my part. That's saying, Okay, if something's going wrong, why don't you as the entrepreneur have the guts to be blunt and clear, and very direct insight, this is what's wrong, or this is what's right. Or this is what I'm, I need to be done. So another example. I was working with an entrepreneur a few weeks ago, and and he said to me, Dennis, I gotta measure you on three three levels. Yeah.

On a competence on you. Energy and on your loyalty. He says, okay, when you launch it, I'm not 100% sure, I think you're about 80%. That. And he was he was actually spot on because I got big concerns about the business model. I said, Yeah, that's right.

I'm not 100% loyal, because I'm really worried about this thing. And I haven't had the guts to come to you and say that, and I've been keeping it inside me. And it's been affecting my work. Energy. I was 100%. And then it was on commission, which it is I hate where you, you do this, you do this really fast and do that really fast.

But the quality is always shining. cautiously, really shy, I'm just doing a very first draft, just find out whether I'm going in the right direction or not, rather than spending a lot of time doing doing the work. Okay. So his point of view, my point of view, and in all of those cases, we had something that was very direct, very clear, and in a different organization would have left me and him with Very bruised egos. But because we were directly open and honest, we were then able to step up the performance of what we were doing very, very quickly. Whereas in the first example that I gave you, where I never got the feedback, were they the CEO, sorry, was totally unclear and was not prepared to say what he felt or what he thought was going wrong.

Yeah, it was, I think they lost me there was a big gap. And there is then lots of problem. Plus, yeah, I was really unhappy because I thought, Well, yeah, so as a CEO, yeah, it might feel super uncomfortable to be being clear and blunt and say this sucks. Or not. It's I was just totally wrong. You need to change it because you think I've got to keep the team on board.

I got the team to be unhappy. But the reality is, is when you aren't clear when you focus on saying the nice thing or that looks very nice. There. Yeah, that saps morale that kills productivity far faster than being blunt and clear about what it is that you want and what the company needs. So get your balls up and do it say the hard things when they need to be said and say them, don't delay. It's better to get it out then things can be corrected, rather than sort of guy going for a long time and things are under the table is that leads to policy, to gossip, to backstabbing, and then you've got a bad culture, that sort of Absolutely.

How is it? Okay, if you're really blunt, naturally, figure out what is the best way to get that across. One good way is school pi. could also be called district sunrise. If you're from a corporate, but praise people first find something to praise them, then give them an area of improvement. And then say this is where Okay, I'm going to encourage you to do more salt They go away, feeling good that you care about them.

Show people that you care. Don't get people shit, be blunt, but show people that you're being blunt because you care about them. Because you care about the company because you care about the customer. That is the way that you're going to be able to deliver a huge amount of success through better communications.