Say the Magic Words

You know the sentence. The one at the all-hands, when the numbers were fine and you added a line about them not being fine enough. The aside at the board dinner about a partner who wasn't there. The reply-all at 11:40 at night making a point that could have waited until morning. The people who report to you remember it; you may not, because it cost you nothing at the time. At the top of a company, what you say costs more than what anyone else says, because it gets repeated, and the bill arrives later from people who will never tell you what it was.

The mouth is a wayward buddy who gets you into trouble. He is the idiot who gets you in a bind. Most people can afford him. You can't: one remark at a time, the people who would have told you the quarter was going wrong learn to say yes instead.

What you say costs more at the top

Talk is supposed to be the cheap part. Deeds count, and words describe them afterward. That holds for almost everyone in a company, and it stops holding at the top, for a reason that has nothing to do with character. What the person at the top says gets repeated, because people are trying to work out what he meant, and repeating it to each other is how they do that. A remark from the middle of the org chart goes no further than the people who heard it. The same remark from the corner office is told at four dinners that week, and by the fourth telling it's policy.

Say you mention at dinner, to two people you trust, that the Dallas office might be worth a look next year. You meant the lease. By Thursday Dallas has heard it's closing, two people there have called a recruiter, and your number two is in your doorway asking what he missed. Ten words at a dinner made a week of work you didn't ask for, and the lease question still hasn't been asked.

Ben Horowitz, who ran Loudcloud and Opsware before he ran a venture firm, put the whole job in two words in The Hard Thing About Hard Things: "'Trust me.' That's what a CEO says every day to her employees." Trust is an account every sentence draws on. The careless ones draw hardest, and nobody sends a statement. The Dallas remark was a withdrawal. So was the reply-all.

Two kinds of withdrawal cost more than the rest. The first is the threat. Nassim Taleb, in The Bed of Procrustes: "A verbal threat is the most authentic certificate of impotence." A threat spoken is a threat you didn't have to make good, and everyone who heard it knows it. The person at the top who says what he'll do if the numbers don't move has just told everyone he can't make them move.

The second is the mouth as a mirror. Taleb's magnificent man believes half of what he hears and twice what he says. Proverbs has the same man, in the plural. They love the sound of their own voice. They want to be heard, but does not seem like they care if they are understood. That was written about fools 3,000 years ago. It fits a founder in year nine, or a managing partner nobody interrupts anymore, without much editing.

Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruits.

The people who stop talking

What the buddy says is the first cost, and it's the one you can sometimes see. The second is what he does over time to the people around you, and you don't see that one, because the people who would have told you are the ones who went quiet.

When the only people left can only say "yes."

Getting there doesn't take long. Cut people off in meetings and make an example of the one who brought bad news, and you've taught everyone who was there. Amy Edmondson, in The Fearless Organization, found that a do-it-my-way style silences everyone except the loudest voice or the largest office, and that the silence is deadly, because problems stop coming up. Nobody decided to stop telling you things. They noticed what happened to the last person who did.

The quiet is hard to catch, because it looks like agreement. The meeting that used to run long ends early, and the person who used to stay behind to say one more thing goes home on time.

Three remarks that feel honest

The remarks that teach people to go quiet feel like honesty while they're being made, which is how the buddy gets away with them. Three of them come up more than the rest.

The first is cruelty. The review that was a settling of accounts. The all-hands remark aimed at one person in a room of 200. Dan Allender: "Too many people have chosen to say terrible things to others under the banner of 'telling the truth.' This is not honesty but cruelty and thinly veiled vengeance." You called it candor, and candor has a good name.

The second is blame. Something went wrong, and the first sentence out of your mouth names who. When you blame someone, as Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen put it in Difficult Conversations, you offer them the role of the accused, and they do what accused people do: they defend themselves any way they can. The sentence was meant to fix something. It produced a defense, and a defense is the end of the conversation you needed.

The third is the joke. The remark that gets a laugh at someone's expense outlives the serious one beside it. The nickname you gave the plant that missed its number got a laugh in April and was still the plant's name in the budget meeting in October. The person it was about laughed too. He is now one of the people who won't bring you the next problem.

All three have the same tell. Afterward you feel honest, or funny, and the other person is quieter than before.

The people who speak for you

The mouth you were born with is one of two. A messenger is an extension of you. If they are a fool you are basically cutting off your own feet and then drinking the mess.

The CFO on the earnings call, the banker running the process, the number two at the plant, the press release, the partner who takes the meeting you couldn't make: each is your mouth somewhere you're not, and each gets repeated the way your own remarks do. The banker running the process is the clearest case: he tells 40 buyers in your name that the sellers are motivated, and you'll never hear which one of them repeated it to a competitor. Those seats get filled for loyalty, because loyalty is what a person at the top can see from where he sits, and the loyal messenger is the one most likely to say what you'd have said, wayward buddy included. The one who would have said it better, or not said it, was passed over for being difficult.

So the choice of who speaks for you is a choice about your own mouth, made in advance. It's the one place where the buddy can be governed before he speaks.

The hours when words are all you have

Silence is the buddy's other failure, and the harder one to see. Paul Kalanithi, a surgeon writing about his own dying in When Breath Becomes Air, said that when there's no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon's only tool. There are hours in running anything when words are all you have. The deal falls apart. The funeral. The hour after the layoff. The call to the founder you're not going to back. Silence isn't on offer in any of those, and a mouth trained only to win fails at exactly those hours, because nobody in them needs to be won over.

Cliches are scorned in writing, but when real life gets really hard and words fail, cliches become clutch. The one who spent his words winning arguments on the ordinary days has nothing in the account for those.

Keeping your mouth shut is half the job. The other half is knowing the hour when shutting it would be the folly.

Three habits

The people who govern the buddy have three habits.

The first is a question before the sentence: who will repeat this, and to whom? Whether it's true is a different question.

The second is a test for anything in writing: how it reads at the kitchen table of the person it's about, forwarded by someone who added no context. Most of the 11:40 ones don't survive it, and the ones that do are shorter than what you first typed.

The third is the hardest, because it comes when you're least ready. When someone brings you the thing you didn't want to hear, the first sentence out of your mouth decides whether anyone brings you the next one. It's usually a short "thank you," followed by a question.

You don't fire the wayward buddy. He's yours. You stop letting him drive.