As I waited in line this afternoon to pick up my dry cleaning, I was reminded of a leadership lesson we often share with clients: What matters most is how you treat those who matter least. You see, I was standing there at the dry cleaners observing the well dressed man in front of me complain about his service. He was clearly a very important person (or so he thought) who could not control his temper. He was berating the poor gentleman who had accidentally starched his shirts. I thought to myself …. frustrating, but hardly a major crisis. Would he treat his boss this way? And what does it say about his leadership character? A lot.
In a recent USA Today article, CEOs talk about how you treat a waiter can predict a lot about your character. It’s true. We constantly remind leaders that they are always on stage. And the lens to your character is how you treat people whom you don’t know or people you don’t have to treat well. So, next time you go to lunch with colleagues, notice how they treat the waiter or how they grab a cab—it will tell you a lot about them as leaders.
While doing a little light reading on systems thinking, I came across a quote I really like—“Nothing inhibits future success like making procedures to formalize what generated a previous success.”
In The Art of Systems Thinking, O’Connor and McDermott remind us that what we often hail as a success was really a break-through—a new way of thinking—which comes from a change in one of our mental models. Once a break-through is formalized and institutionalized it becomes the norm—and we tend not to question it or give it any further thought. This is especially true when our organizations select people who act and think like the existing team. No one questions the norms. The risk? Nothing changes and over time the system runs down.
So, what can we do to avoid organizational decay? O’Connor and McDermott offer thoughts on two types of learning—simple learning and generative learning. Simple learning takes place when we change what we do in response to the results and feedback we get—for example, making changes to your operations based on the results of a satisfaction survey completed by your customers. It’s important to do this—and it’s a good way to get better and/or more efficient at what you already do.
However, if you’re really looking for the change, revitalization, and innovations needed to stave off decay, you need to foster generative learning. Generative learning happens when we let feedback change our mental models—that is, change our deeply rooted assumptions and our way of looking at things—an essential if you need to solve big problems and drive your business toward a changing future.
(Source: The Art of Systems Thinking, Joseph O’Connor & Ian McDermott)
Late last year we had a client forward a link to a blog published by an anonymous employee. The subject of the blog was an organizational change the company was going through, and the employee was using the blog to post his / her observations about the company and change in question.
We were asked for our point of view, which we provided. Several who have seen the response have suggested that it might be of interest to others, and now that some time (and the org change in question) has passed, I’m posting it below. I’ve changed names, organizations, and other details to preserve client confidentiality.
Yes, I’ve been reading it. Here’s our position (an informed one; we have a lot of experience and expertise re: blogs):
* Unless s/he’s breaking a formal code of conduct or ethical guidelines that s/he signed, you can’t force her/him to shut it down. S/he will just start another blog, or tell a peer who will start another blog, and now the conversation will be about how the company really does treat employees poorly (in addition to being against free speech). Same thing if you issue a “no blogging” policy: you could never put fingers in all the holes in the dyke that would spring up.* If s/he is breaking a formal obligation of conduct, the Company has a choice about whether or not to discipline her/him for breach of conduct, and should make that choice knowing that the headline will be “[Company] Fires Employee for Blogging.” Delta, Yahoo, Google and others have done the same (do a Google News search for “fired for blogging”), so while it’s not a flattering headline (especially now), you’re not a trailblazer by any means. It will, however, bring the story into the wider blogosphere, and will explode the level of awareness about his blog to a national (certainly) or global (possibly) level. But you would have the ethical high-ground.
Here’s our counsel:
* First, go read IBM’s blogging guidelines: http://www.snellspace.com/IBM_Blogging_Policy_and_Guidelines.pdf. They are the model to follow.
* If you know who the blogger is, go to her/him with the guidelines and say “Here’s the deal: We respect your right to talk about this. In fact, we think the catharsis is good, and we’re a big enough company to take the criticism (also in part, by the way, because in the long run we really do think this is the best decision for the full body of our employees). But we ask that as you post you respect a code of conduct, and here’s an example from IBM. We also want to make sure you understand the code of conduct and ethics that you’re obligated to as an employee here. We’re going to expect you to live by those, too, and if you cross those lines, we’re going to have to handle the situation as we would for any employee, blog or not. That all being said, we think you have the right to do this, and that if anything it will help us understand where we need to offer more clarity for employees about [the change]. So if this works for you, we’ll be reading, and possibly even responding.”
* If you don’t know who the blogger is, copy that message and have [PR lead] or [Executive] paste it in the comments for the most recent post, as [themselves].
* You could also ignore the blog, but if her/his comments swing more negative, you will have lost much of your ability to frame the conversation that you can achieve now if you approach him with the message above. By engaging her/him around guidelines, s/he’s going to feel more obligated to treat the company fairly.
* A final choice is to engage her/him in the comments, answering some of her/his questions and making your points, but I’d hold off on that for now. Let her/him vent, but take the moral high ground on the blogging issue by taking the position above. It’s likely the best reputation-management move you can make.
Our two cents.
This particular client did not know who the blogger was, and they chose not to engage. Posting became more vitriolic for a time, but eventually, slowed and then stopped.
One of the books making the rounds at CRA this month is Why? What happens when people give reasons … and why by Columbia’s Charles Tilly.
The book is about explanations and how we give them, and how reasons stem from and shape relationships. Malcolm Gladwell recently reviewed the book in the New Yorker; read it if you’d like the survey-class version of the book. In it, Gladwell reviews Tilly’s four general categories of reasons:
- Conventions: Conventionally accepted explanations
- Stories: A very specific account of cause and effect
- Codes: High-level conventions that can invoke procedures and rules
- Technical accounts: Stories informed by specialized knowledge and authority
What’s interesting is that we tend to use different reasons for, well, different reasons, and those reasons are relationally driven. Gladwell:
Reason-giving, Tilly says, reflects, establishes, repairs, and negotiates relationships. The husband who uses a story to explain his unhappiness to his wife—“Ever since I got my new job, I feel like I’ve just been so busy that I haven’t had time for us”—is attempting to salvage the relationship. But when he wants out of the marriage, he’ll say, “It’s not you—it’s me.” He switches to a convention. As his wife realizes, it’s not the content of what he has said that matters. It’s his shift from the kind of reason-giving that signals commitment to the kind that signals disengagement. Marriages thrive on stories. They die on conventions.
Consider the orgy of reason-giving that followed Vice-President Dick Cheney’s quail-hunting accident involving his friend Harry Whittington. Allies of the Vice-President insisted that the media were making way too much of it. “Accidents happen,” they said, relying on a convention. Cheney, in a subsequent interview, looked penitently into the camera and said, “The image of him falling is something I’ll never be able to get out of my mind. I fired, and there’s Harry falling. And it was, I’d have to say, one of the worst days of my life.” Cheney told a story. Some of Cheney’s critics, meanwhile, focussed on whether he conformed to legal and ethical standards. Did he have a valid license? Was he too slow to notify the White House? They were interested in codes. Then came the response of hunting experts. They retold the narrative of Cheney’s accident, using their specialized knowledge of hunting procedure. The Cheney party had three guns, and on a quail shoot, some of them said, you should never have more than two. Why did Whittington retrieve the downed bird? A dog should have done that. Had Cheney’s shotgun been aimed more than thirty degrees from the ground, as it should have been? And what were they doing in the bush at five-thirty in the afternoon, when the light isn’t nearly good enough for safe hunting? The experts gave a technical account.
Here are four kinds of reasons, all relational in nature. If you like Cheney and are eager to relieve him of responsibility, you want the disengagement offered by a convention. For a beleaguered P.R. agent, the first line of defense in any burgeoning scandal is, inevitably, There is no story here. When, in Cheney’s case, this failed, the Vice-President had to convey his concern and regret while not admitting that he had done anything procedurally wrong. Only a story can accomplish that. Anything else—to shrug and say that accidents happen, for instance—would have been perceived as unpardonably callous. Cheney’s critics, for their part, wanted the finality and precision of a code: he acted improperly. And hunting experts wanted to display their authority and educate the public about how to hunt safely, so they retold the story of Cheney’s accident with the benefit of their specialized knowledge.
Academics tend to call reasons “account giving,” and there’s a wealth of literature on the topic. To plumb the depths see this Google Scholar search. One article I’ll be reading from that search: Account-Giving for a Corporate Transgression Influences Moral Judgment: When Those Who “Spin” Condone Harm-Doing.
We’ve not posted at CommLog for a while (some two months) as we’ve been undergoing a site redesign — one that incorporates CommLog content more thoroughly through www.crainc.com.
That work’s done now, and we’ll be posting to CommLog with our prior regularity.
One thing that’s new besides the look is our FeedBurner RSS feed, which is here. Another is the incorporation of what we’re reading into a library page, which is here.
Thanks for coming by, and we hope you return often.
