The Call for Candour at Work

A couple of tips:

Candour's much to be admired. But our social upbringing teaches us the need of a little opacity, argues Stefan Stern in the FT.

He's considering the merits of a new book, "Beyond Bullsh*t" by Samuel Culbert, a professor of management at the University of California in Los Angeles, which advocates a return to plain honesty in the workplace.

"Bullsh*t (sic) has become the etiquette of choice in corporate communications," claims Culbert. "Even people who disdain deception find themselves involved in it. They feel compelled to bullsh*t at work."

We crave straight talk, but we get deception and obfuscation and sometimes "self-serving verbiage" .

This can be frustrating at best, and dangerous when it results in widespread deception on the scale of Parmalat or Enron.

But are we programmed to BS? Studies suggest we learn to fib as toddlers. We have countless words for lies, say Ronald A Howard and Clinton D Korver in "Ethics for the Real World" -- doctor, dupe, dress up, embellish, varnish -- as well as countless ways to deceive (gesture, euphemism, even silence.)

It's not just the wrong 'uns that are given to BS, either: compromise, say Howard and Korver, comes as a result of "pressure from competitors, regulators, managers and others."

"Opacity begins at home," Stern quotes from an essay in "Transparency", another call for candour by influential leadership thinkers Warren Bennis, Daniel Goleman and Patricia Ward Biederman.

Within our families, we learn to distinguish between what can be aired openly and what cannot -- what playwright Henrik Ibsen called 'vital lies', family secrets and unspoken issues that, say the authors, "rarely get better on their own". (Is this where the phrase 'home truths' comes from?)

We naturally bring this tendency to keep quiet about certain things to work. Social conditioning may even train us to be downright reticent about sharing our views on someone's behaviour.

Yet "there's no greater contribution to operational effectiveness and success than conversations in which people with conflicting viewpoints discuss their differences forthrightly," argues Culbert.

Managers have a responsibility to advise, guide and sometimes upbraid their team members so that people know how they are doing all the time, not just on the occasion of their appraisal (or when they are being fired).

So Culbert counsels candour, but only when someone is prepared to receive it. That means getting to know people a bit before diving in with hard-hitting truths, and being open to hearing their views. Getting to know people may mean small talk, possibly a bit of finessing -- or BS, argues Stern.

Culbert also suggests that you frame your views as exactly that -- your opinion. But doesn't this fudge things a bit and take you back to square one?

Second tip, to Bryony Gordon in the Sunday Telegraph, who defends her right to have "frolleagues" -- the Web 2.0 name for colleagues who become your friends online (and off).

She picks up on a LinkedIn spokeswoman's view that we should keep professional and social lives separate. Having work colleagues join your Facebook (or LinkedIn) circle can apparently lead to behaviour that is "completely in appropriate for a work environment".

Gordon's having none of it. As she observes, people spend around 47 years at work -- a long time to be without friends, or frolleagues.

But I see where LinkedIn's coming from -- another story this week by Lucy Kellaway relates how a drunken night out ended in an intern filing a complaint and a lawyer getting fired -- a reminder of how important it is to ensure your friendship's reciprocated.

Then there's the question of how easy it is to tell the unvarnished truth to a frolleague.