Foreword

One Saturday at the kitchen table, one of my early leadership mentors sat down with me, and what he said changed me for good. I’d been having difficulties understanding why I kept getting into relational conflicts that seemed to go from bad to worse, from calm to chaos, and from what I saw as logic to what I and others experienced as shame. He had watched me work, he’d seen me in my most beloved relationships, he had witnessed me on the continuum from my best to my worst. I knew he loved me and cared for me, and as I look back on that time, I remember how fortified I was with regard to others. I wanted to ward off all circumstances in which someone might speak of my faults. When it came to my own weaknesses, I was a fortress. I let no one in. Thankfully he had the courage to speak to me anyway.

He started with grace, describing how he valued our relationship, highlighting a few personal traits he saw as my strengths. He then spoke of his own weaknesses in a way that was both sincere and authentically transparent. Then he asked if I’d be willing to hear a few observations he’d made of the ways I handled conflict. I said yes, and as he proceeded I thought I’d hear him out fully and try to respond well. However, when he said, “When you get into conflict with others, you get extremely defensive,” my face flushed and I felt a pit in my stomach. “No, I don’t,” I said.

Incredibly, despite the obvious hypocrisy of my response, I truly believed I was not defensive, and even more, I was willing to defend my truth to the grave! Unfortunately, sometimes what we call our own truths are actually false, and often they keep us from living a more whole, free, loving, and discerning life.

Do you remember a time in your life when a necessary, if uncomfortable, conversation changed you? If you do or if you don’t, Permission to Speak Freely, the new book by cutting-edge leadership consultants Doug Crandall and Matt Kincaid, can help you generate the highest levels of personal and collective leadership: leadership that encourages the individual, the organization, the community, the family, and the nation to speak what needs to be spoken.

I grew up in Montana, land of one hundred mountain ranges. For a moment, picture walking along a high mountain plateau in the Beartooth Range along the southern border of Montana. Peaks rise over twelve thousand feet. But on the plateau below the tree line, the land contains multitudes: wildflowers like glacier lily and shooting star, animals like wolverine and what research biologists call Ursus arctos horribilis, the grizzly bear, humpbacked and powerful. Mountain swifts play the wind as if caught in an aerial symphony. At the summit, the land appears to kiss the sky. Here, all is visible for hundreds of miles, undulations of mountain ranges, valleys of great depth, rivers like silver ore running west to the Pacific and east to the Gulf. If you stay through the darkness, dawn is a new creation, spilling over the mountains, turning your face gold. In leadership, as in personal life, some understandings are this crystalline, this capable of helping us transcend ourselves, find humility, and live a more true existence. In Permission to Speak Freely, Matt and Doug give us a new vista and greater vision. They help us weather some of the most entangled and dangerous landscapes of humanity. By not only listening deeply, but encouraging those around us to speak freely, leaders can create organizations and communities that transcend the status quo and lead us into a future that is inspired, profound, and beautiful.

Give this book a transformative read. Let this book transform you.

See this book transform those around you with a new vision, far-reaching and filled with the kind of legitimate power that creates rather than degrades, and sees us through the darkness to the light of a new dawn.

Shann Ray Ferch, PhD

Professor, Leadership Studies

Gonzaga University

Author, Forgiveness and Power in the Age of

Atrocity: Servant Leadership as a Way of Life, and

American Masculine: Stories