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Understanding the Value of Secrets
Many leaders often struggle with the idea of keeping secrets. And I understand why. Because there’s a narrative in the social realm where leaders are supposed to be ethical and they’re supposed to be forward leaning and they’re supposed to be generous and they’re supposed to be transparent. You have to understand that all of that is really just messaging. It’s promises from books. It’s promises from public speakers. It’s promises that get shared over and over again on social media, but it’s not actually practical. Secrets are incredibly practical. They’ve been that way since ancient Egypt. People understand the value of secrets, especially in leadership because you have to keep certain secrets from your competitors. You also have to keep secrets from your current employees because you have to keep them focused and motivated on their individual task at hand instead of being focused on some distraction that they have no control over.
One of my favorite leadership conversations actually happened when I used to exercise with General Petraeus, who was a former director at CIA. And General Petraeus, for those of you who know him, had this reputation when he was in the army of being this incredibly decisive, strong, fierce leader that nobody could talk to because he would always keep himself cordoned off in a in a tent or a room separate from the troops. When I had a chance to meet General Petraeus when he was director of CIA, I specifically asked him about this question. Why it was that he let these myths about him persist. And he looked at me and he told me that the reason he let these myths persist is because there is power in the myth. That as the myth spreads, nobody ever really knows the truth, which allows him to keep the secrets he cares the most about. It all boiled down again, even at the senior levels of leadership, to understanding the economy of secrets. And the director of CIA understood that there were secrets he had to keep from all of his troops, all of his other employees because there was a power in the myth of letting them not know what they wanted to know.
Two Key Strategies
When you want to keep a secret, it’s actually much easier than you might expect. The first trick to keeping a secret is really just to limit how much you talk. And if you do talk, talk in questions. Don’t speak in terms of action. Don’t speak in terms of answers or dialogue or conversation. Because even by the way that you answer a question, you actually start to expose some of your secrets. The words that you use, the pace that you speak, the level of excitement that you share when you talk. These are all ways that you can share with other people interpersonal secrets about you. Your political beliefs, your religious beliefs, how much you care about your kids, how much you care about your job or your family. So it’s actually very easy to start to protect yourself simply by speaking less or by being the person who speaks in questions rather than the person who carries on a conversation.
Another way that you can keep your secrets is by understanding that when you have a conclusion that you reach in your mind, when you have a suspicion, when you have a curiosity, when you wonder if somebody is trustworthy, when you wonder if somebody is lying, instead of sharing that information with somebody else, you just keep it for yourself, and you allow time to continue to pass by, to give yourself more information, more time to assess, more observational information to reach a conclusion that’s actually meaningful. Because if you do catch someone lying, if you do catch someone embezzling, it’s much more valuable to you to share that information when you have a preponderance of evidence that can actually confirm your suspicion. Where what many of us do is we feel the need to share our suspicions immediately. We share our thoughts, our concerns, our issues right away because we think that there’s value to be gained by having other people give us their opinion. When in fact, the most valuable thing you can do is keep your secret to yourself and collect more information about it.