Fundamentals of Level Three Leadership

127. The Many Faces of Denial

Concept

Denial is the first step in the EKR model introduced in the last chapter. Sometimes people get stuck in denial. They wrestle with acknowledging reality. Jack Welch once asserted that his managers should “Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it were.”²⁶ Jim Collins’s version of this principle was “Confront the Brutal Facts.”²⁷ Clearly, lots of people can get bogged down in denying the reality changing around them.

My colleague, Alec Horniman, once noted that there are many kinds of denial.

1. One can deny the message, the data, the information. “That’s not correct!” or “That information is spurious.”

2. If one is forced by time or some other means to acknowledge the accuracy of the information, ...