• 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 their companies competitive.