Authentic Conversations

Moving from Manipulation to Truth and Commitment

James D. Showkeir, Maren S. Showkeir

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781605096933
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Unternehmensentwicklung

In this groundbreaking new book, the Showkeirs take something people typically think of as merely functional—ordinary conversations—and show the power they have to create, sustain, and change the very nature of workplace culture. Conversations can lead to an engaged and energized workforce, or to one that is alienated and uninspired. If you want to change the culture you must change the conversations.All too often workplace conversations—between managers and direct reports, peer-to-peer, or with external stakeholders— create parent-child relationships. People hide facts, sugarcoat reality and claim helplessness to try to control interactions and get what they want. The Showkeirs expose the destructiveness of these manipulative conversations, and demonstrate how we can move to honest and authentic interactions that create adult relationships. By intentionally and thoughtfully changing conversations, organizations will engender increased commitment, true accountability, and improved workplace performance.Drawing on more than 25 years of experience as organizational consultants, their book offers examples of parent-child and adult-adult workplace conversations in a variety of settings, circumstances and industries. They also provide a hands-on guide, including sample scripts, for dealing with a host of potentially difficult conversations.Authentic Conversations goes to the heart of why so many people today are disengaged, uninspired, and uncommitted to their organization's success. It challenges the conventional wisdom about managing people and sets out specific, concrete ways to consciously make conversations the primary driver for change.

Chapter One

“Revolutionary Conversations for Adults”

Imagine, for a moment, working in an organization where power was distributed so widely that everyone, from the CEO to the call-center employee, understood what was at stake for the business. How would the way you talk to each other change?

In such an organization, you and everyone you worked with would have the right and the responsibility to embrace the risk in a volatile market and choose to be accountable for the whole business. By possessing organizational power, you would be responsible for maximizing your skills and competencies to contribute to greater business success. You could do the work and manage the work. You and your coworkers would be responsible for their own motivation and morale, for having a point of view and publicizing it with goodwill, all the while focusing on everyone’s success, not just your own.

With extensive business literacy as the foundation, you could make sound decisions affecting quality, customer service, and the cycle time that affects profits without constantly dealing with layers of bureaucracy. You’d have access to resources for solving problems and be accountable for employing them wisely. With a managing strategy that values partnership, committed adults would choose to be accountable for results.

It can happen—it does happen. We saw it happen at a plant in Michigan that supplied the automotive industry with steering and suspension parts. Because product quality had deteriorated significantly at this plant, customers were threatening to pull their business. Profits were shrinking dramatically, and the plant faced a real possibility of being shut down by corporate leaders. The relationship between management and the United Auto Workers union, which represented hourly employees, was adversarial. It was clear that if something didn’t change, hundreds of people would lose their jobs.

Facing this kind of pressure, the management and union teams began to see the imperative for altering the way they did business. It took time, and it was painful. It required that people see themselves and others in a different way.

Working in concert, union officials and management teams began engaging employees in new, more direct conversations. Together, they unveiled the big-picture financial statements to everyone at the plant, which illuminated the precarious state of affairs. Issues about quality were laid bare: Costs for rework and premium shipping costs were carving huge holes in the bottom line. Customers’ complaints about quality and timely delivery were made public, as well as the fact that they were seeking other suppliers. High levels of overtime and absenteeism were also eroding profits. Manufacturing processes were outdated.

These realizations led to a series of new conversations about how work got done. Plant managers and union leaders came to the conclusion that the traditional assembly-line manufacturing process was inhibiting good results. Working with employees, they designed product-oriented work centers that required everyone on a team to operate all the machines and manage quality throughout the manufacturing process. Workers were charged with scheduling, taking into account the needs of their suppliers and their customers. They prepared all products for shipping. All employees were asked to greatly expand their skills and capacity.

Contract negotiations also required new conversations about the ways workers would have to change. The plant boasted about thirty job classifications, and work had been organized so that individuals were trained to perform one function of a much larger process. Through many difficult, but honest conversations throughout the contract negotiations, the classifications were reduced from thirty to three.

Work competency was redefined. Manufacturing workers trained each other, quality engineers designed and delivered training, and other workers made machine operation job aids for when individuals got stuck. Customer panels educated workers about their requirements. Former supervisors became team coordinators, and slowly their views of the workers evolved. This had a big effect on how they engaged workers.

People were encouraged to talk about how they felt. Some managers were openly skeptical, even cynical, that hourly employees were capable of making the changes. Some hourly employees felt betrayed by the union and wondered aloud whether labor leaders had shirked their responsibilities by agreeing to the changes and reduced job classifications. Other workers insisted that altering the way they worked was the only path to survival and advocated personal accountability. The conversations were boisterous, edgy, and often heated. They were also marked by an authenticity that had previously been lacking. Everyone was engaged in working for a solution, even if they didn’t always agree on what it was.

Over the next two years, employees at the plant improved the quality of the products, regained the loyalty of their old customers, and acquired new business. The plant became one of the most profitable in the company.

This is just one story, but it is not an isolated example of what is possible. We have seen many such transformations when the values of the organization emphasize partnership and people are working for the good of the whole rather than from a self-interested perspective. Conversations change in both content and perspective when people are engaged in the workplace as adults. Employees, regardless of where they work, are far more likely to make better business decisions. Better business results spring from engaged employees who understand the interdependency necessary for success in the workplace.

Research substantiates this. Consider the following examples from the book 12: The Elements of Great Managing, by Rodd Wagner and James K. Harter, who work for the Gallup polling organization. The book includes published results from a study based on 10 million workplace interviews, with findings such as these:

Business units with a surplus of disengaged employees have 31 percent more turnover.

Workgroups with very high numbers of disengaged workers lose 51 percent more of their inventory to employee theft.

Workgroups whose engagement puts them in the bottom quartile of the Gallup database average 62 percent more accidents.

Engaged employees average 27 percent less absenteeism.

Being in the higher reaches of team engagement equates to 12 percent higher customer service scores than those in the bottom tier.

Teams in the top engaged quartile are three times more likely to succeed as those in the bottom quartile, averaging 18 percent higher productivity and 12 percent higher profitability.

In publicly traded companies, engaged organizations outperformed the earnings per share of their competitors by 18 percent and over time progressed at a faster rate than their industry peers.

According to Wagner and Harter, “The evidence is clear that the creation and maintenance of high employee engagement, as one of the few determinants of profitability largely within a company’s control, is one of the most crucial imperatives of any successful organization.”

The authors also include a statement that backs up the experience we had in Michigan. They say productive, creative, and profitable teams are more likely to strongly agree with the statement “I know what is expected of me at work.” But that deceptively simple statement has wider ramifications, as Wagner and Harter point out: “‘Knowing what’s expected’ is more than a job description. It is a detailed understanding of how what one person is supposed to do fits in with what everyone else is supposed to do, and how those expectations change when the circumstances change.”

So what does it mean to create and maintain engagement? What is required to do this? One element of engagement is business literacy. This means ensuring that all employees know and understand the enterprise, what is needed to be successful, the marketplace stakes, and how what they do fits in with what others do. This hasn’t happened in most traditional organizations, which leaves the people who have the most contact with customers the least literate about the business. They need access to the complete financial picture, including key measures of success and information about customers, suppliers, and other important players in the business. A shared vision is supported by company values, both implicit and explicit.

Engagement means understanding the story this information tells. It is the opposite of what we encountered in a conversation with Nellie, who worked at a major international insurance company where we were consulting. During introductions at a meeting, she said, “Hi, my name is Nellie, and I make charts and graphs,” and then fell silent. We continued the conversation:

“That sounds interesting,” we said. “What are they used for?”

“I don’t really know,” Nellie replied.

“Well, where does the information come from?” we asked.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “It shows up in my in-box, and I make a chart or graph and put it in a folder for pickup.”

Trying to get a better sense of her work, we pressed on: “How are your charts and graphs used by the company?”

She replied, “I don’t really know. I just spend all day at the computer making these charts and graphs.”

It was clear to us that she knew little about how what she did at her job for forty hours a week contributed to the overall success of the business. She was a pleasantly compliant employee, to be sure, but not literate about her workplace, and certainly not engaged or committed to business results. If Nellie’s experience was typical, the cost to the company would be enormous.

What might be different if the routine workplace conversations at the insurance company made clear the importance of her contribution? What if Nellie understood how other departments depended on her work to make effective sales presentations, educate customers, or represent actuarial tables? If she understood how she helped make the company successful and profitable, would it facilitate unique and understanding responses for customers? Would it more likely help in the creation of knowledge and greater willingness to respond quickly to change? Would it contribute to the value of business processes?

We’ve long been living with a business model based on Newtonian principles that dissect the whole into parts, with the result that people in organizations are often seen as interchangeable parts in a machine. That thinking was refined during the Industrial Revolution more than one hundred years ago, which spawned the command-and-control structure that is still common today. Considering that history, it is a considerable undertaking to shift to a strategy that sees people as the complex humans they are and engages them in partnership. Distributing organizational power rather than consolidating it requires significant organizational change.

In a traditional managing strategy, which values hierarchy, compliance, and consistency, the tendency is to make the people at the top most powerful by giving them the most access to information and other resources. Those in the upper echelons see themselves as being accountable for business results and for holding others accountable.

In return for a paycheck, those being held accountable are asked to listen, obey, and trust that top leaders see things correctly and that sound decisions are being made. A major premise of Peter Block’s book The Empowered Manager, written in 1986, is that the people in organizations who do the work are asked to comply with authority, deny self-expression, and sacrifice now for possible future rewards. His belief is that the deal for them is safety in exchange for ownership and it’s a deal that is impossible to keep. We agree.

Businesses contort themselves inventing policies and procedures so that people know exactly what is allowable and what is unacceptable. Jobs are defined to the gnat’s eyelash, without any context of how all the pieces fit together. Strict rules are instituted to restrict access to resources. In our work, we hear countless examples of people who have to get several levels of sign-off to spend company money. One senior director we know oversees a huge department at a high-tech company. He told us his sign-off limit is $5,000. He has responsibility for overseeing dozens of employees and maintaining complex systems that serve thousands of customers. He has always prided himself on delivering good business results, and yet he told us his experience was that “they don’t trust me more than $5,000 worth.”

Organizations that rely on partnership or collaboration have a different perspective. They understand that information is a kind of nourishment for the organization and that hungry people are less likely to make good decisions that serve the business. They realize that people are more likely to be accountable for things they understand. They know that combining the energies of the whole is ultimately more powerful than fostering the competitive energies that develop in a parent–child culture.

Engagement means being able to make meaningful decisions and to have the resources to act on those decisions.

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