We have seen a couple of examples of management’s “benevolent” censorship of true but negative messages. In addition, we have looked at the psychological mechanisms that lead employees, supervisors, managers, and executives to engage in personal and collective defensive routines. The question we still have to answer is precisely how modern corporate communications succeed in actually contributing to this censorship and these defensive routines.
They do so in two explicit ways. First, they create a bias against personal learning and commitment in the way they parcel out roles and responsibilities in every survey, dialogue, and conversation. Second, they open a door to defensive reasoning—and close one on individual self-awareness—in the way they continuously emphasize extrinsic as opposed to intrinsic motivation.
First, consider the way roles and responsibilities are assigned in manager-employee (or leader-subordinate) conversations, interviews, and surveys. There seem to be two rules. Rule number one is that employees are to be truthful and forthcoming about the world they work in, about norms, procedures, and the strengths and weaknesses of their superiors. All other aspects of their role in the life of the organization—their goals, feelings, failings, and conflicted motives—are taken for granted and remain unexamined. Rule number two is that top-level managers, who play an intensely scrutinized role in the life of the company, are to assume virtually all responsibility for employee well-being and organizational success. Employees must tell the truth as they see it; leaders must modify their own and the company’s behavior. In other words, employees educate, and managers act.
Take the case of Acme, a large, multinational energy company with 6,000 employees. Under increasing competitive pressure, the company was forced to downsize, and to no one’s surprise, morale was failing fast. To learn as much as possible about its own shortcomings and how to correct them, Acme management designed and conducted an employee survey with the help of experts, and 95% of employees responded. Of those responding, 75% agreed on five positive points:
• They were proud to work for Acme.
• Their job satisfaction was very high.
• They found their immediate supervisors fair and technically competent.
• They believed management was concerned for their welfare.
• They felt competent to perform their own jobs.
Some 65% of the respondents also indicated some concerns:
• They were skeptical about management’s capacity to take initiative, communicate candidly, and act effectively.
• They described Acme’s corporate culture as one of blame.
• They complained that managers, while espousing empowerment, were strongly attached to their own unilateral control.
The CEO read the first set of findings to mean that employees were basically satisfied and loyal. He saw the second set as a list of problems that he must make a serious effort to correct. And so the CEO replaced several top managers and arranged for the reeducation of the whole management team, including himself and his direct reports. He announced that Acme would no longer tolerate a culture of blame. He introduced training programs to make managers more forthright and better able to take initiative. And he promised to place greater emphasis on genuine empowerment.
The CEO’s logic went like this: My employees will identify the problems. I’ll fix them by creating a new vision, defining new practices and policies, and selecting a top management team genuinely committed to them. Change will inevitably follow.
I think most managers would call this a success story. If we dig deeper, however, we see a pattern I’ve observed hundreds of times. Underneath the CEO’s aggressive action, important issues have been bypassed, and the bypass has been covered up.
When the CEO took his new team on a five-day retreat to develop the new strategy and plan its implementation, he invited me to come along. In the course of the workshop, I asked each participant to write a simple case in a format I have found to be a powerful tool in predicting how executives will deal with difficult issues during implementation. The method also reveals contradictions between what the executives say and what they do and highlights their awareness of these discrepancies.
I asked each member of the team to write one or two sentences describing one important barrier to the new strategy and another three or four sentences telling how they would overcome that barrier. Then I asked them to split the rest of the page in half. On one side, they were to write an actual or imagined dialogue with a subordinate about the issue in question. On the other side, they were to note any unsaid or unsayable thoughts or feelings they might have about this conversation. I asked them to continue this script for several pages. When they were finished, the group as a whole discussed each case at some length, and we recorded the discussions. The ability to replay key sections made it easier for the participants to score themselves on candor, forthrightness, and the extent to which their comments and behavior encouraged genuine employee commitment—the three values that the CEO had directed the executives to foster.
All of the executives chose genuinely important issues around resistance to change. But all of them dealt with the resistance they expected from subordinates by easing in, covering up, and avoiding candor and plain speaking. They did so in the name of minimizing subordinates’ defensiveness and in hopes of getting them to buy into change. The implicit logic behind their scripts went something like this:
• Hide your fears about the other person’s likely resistance to change. Cover this fear with persistent positiveness. Pretend the two of you agree, especially when you know you don’t.
• Deal with resistant responses by stressing the problem rather than the resistance. Be positive. Keep this strategy a secret.
• If this approach doesn’t work, make it clear that you won’t take no for an answer. After all, you’re the boss.
Imagine this kind of logic applied to sensitive issues in hundreds of conversations with employees. It’s not hard to guess what the response will be, and it certainly isn’t buy-in.
What happened to candor, forthrightness, and commitment building? All the executives failed to walk their talk, and all were unaware of their own inconsistency. When I pointed out the gap between action and intention, most saw it at once. Most were surprised that they hadn’t seen it before. Most were quick to recognize inconsistency in others, but their lack of awareness with regard to their own inconsistency was systematic.
I know of only one way to get at these inconsistencies, and that is to focus on them. In the Acme case, the CEO managed to ignore the fact that the survey results didn’t compute: on the one hand, employees said they were proud to work for the company and described management as caring; on the other, they doubted management’s candor and competence. How could they hold both views? How could they be proud to work for a company whose managers were ineffective and inconsistent?
The CEO did not stop to explore any of these contradictions before embarking on corrective action. Had he done so, he might have discovered that the employees felt strong job satisfaction precisely because management never asked them to accept personal responsibility for Acme’s poor competitive performance. Employees could safely focus their skepticism on top management because they had learned to depend on top management for their welfare. They claimed to value empowerment when in reality they valued dependence. They claimed commitment to the company when in reality they were committed only to the principle that management should make all the tough decisions, guarantee their employment, and pay them fairly. This logic made sense to employees, but it was not the kind of commitment that management had in mind.
None of these issues was ever discussed with employees, and none was raised in the leadership workshops. No effort was made to explore the concept of loyalty that permitted, indeed encouraged, managers to think one thing and say another. No attempt was made to help employees understand the role they played in the “culture of blame” that they’d named in the survey as one of their chief concerns. Above all, no one tried to untangle the defensive logic that contributed so mightily to these inconsistencies and that so badly needed critical examination. In fact, when I asked the management team why they had not discussed these questions, one person told me, “Frankly, until you started asking these questions, it just didn’t occur to us. I see your point, but trying to talk to our people about this could be awfully messy. We’re really trying to be positive here, and this would just stir things up.”
The Acme story is a very common one: lots of energy is expended with little lasting progress. Employee surveys like the one Acme conducted—and like most other forms of leader-subordinate communication—have a fundamentally antimanagement bias whenever they deal with double-loop issues. They encourage employees not to reflect on their own behavior and attitudes. By assigning all the responsibility for fixing problems to management, they encourage managers not to relinquish the top-down, command-and-control mind-set that prevents empowerment.
The employees at Acme, like the 40 supervisors who were wined and dined for their TQM accomplishments, will continue to do what’s asked of them as long as they feel adequately rewarded. They will follow the rules, but they will not take initiative, they will not take risks, and they are very unlikely to engage in double-loop learning. In short, they will not adopt the new behaviors and frames of reference so critical to keeping