Leadership / Management

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A lion, a donkey, and a fox were hunting together and caught a large quantity of game.  The donkey was asked to divide the spoil.  This the donkey did fairly, giving each an equal share 

The fox was very satisfied, but the lion flew into a rage.  With one swipe of his massive paw, the lion added the donkey to the pile of the slain.  Then he turned to the fox, “You divide it,” he roared angrily. 

The fox wasted no time.  He quickly piled all the game into one great heap.  From this he took a very small portion for himself.  Mostly, the fox took the less desirable bits and pieces. 

The lion now recovered his good humor. “Who taught you to divide so fairly?” the lion asked pleasantly.  “I learned my lesson from the donkey,” replied the fox as he carefully edged away. 

Similar learning has gone on in corporations as long as there have been corporations.  In the past, such lessons had little impact on the bottom line.  That is the case no longer.  Lessons learned and candidly shared will have everything to do with future organizational success.  Telling others, particularly management, what they want to hear has now become high risk behavior. 

In the future, corporations will find it hard to survive, much less thrive, unless they get better work from their employees.  This does not mean harder work or more work.  What it does mean are employees will have to learn to take active responsibility for their own behavior.  This will require employees to develop and have first-rate information about their jobs and make good use of genuine empowerment to shape lasting solutions to fundamental problems. 

This is not news.  Most leaders understand that tougher competition will require broader empowerment and greater commitment from everyone in the company.  Moreover, they understand that the key to better performance is better communication.  For twenty years or more, business leaders have used a score of communication tools — focus groups, vision progress surveys, management-by-walking around, and others — to convey and to gather the information needed to bring about change. 

What is news is that these familiar techniques used correctly, often inhibit the quality of communication that future corporations will require, not just of leaders, but of every employee.  For some time now I have watched leaders talking to reports at every level in order to find out what actually goes on in their companies.  What I have observed is that the methods these leaders use to tackle relatively simple problems actually prevent them from getting the kind of candid information, insightful behavior, and productive change they need to cope with the much more complex problem of organizational renewal. 

Years ago when corporations still wanted employees who did only what they were told, employee surveys and walk-around management were appropriate and effective tools.  They can still produce useful information about routine issues like cafeteria service and parking privileges.  What they do not do is get people to reflect on their work and behavior.  They do not encourage individual accountability.  And they do not surface the kinds of potentially threatening or embarrassing information that can motivate and produce real change.  Worst of all, these methods often push employees toward a behavior which pays mere lip service to candid communication.  The very structure of how people think about what they do and should not do supports this unconscious conspiracy to tell less than what everyone knows to be the truth.  One helpful way of understanding this is to see thinking, and therefore communications, in terms of single-loop thinking and double-loop thinking.  How a person thinks about a given issue directly impacts what they choose to communicate. 

Simply stated, the degree of candor in an organization often matches the degree to which people engage in double-loop thinking as opposed to single-loop thinking.  Single-loop thinking asks a one-dimensional question and seeks a one-dimensional answer.  My favorite example is a thermostat which measures ambient temperature against a standard setting and turns the heat source on or off accordingly.  The whole transaction is quite simple. 

Double-loop thinking takes an additional step.  It turns the question back on the questioner.  It asks follow-up questions.  In the case of the thermostat, double-loop thinking would wonder whether the current setting was actually the most effective temperature at which to keep the room and if so, whether the present heat source was the most effective means of achieving it.  A double-loop process might also ask why the current setting was chosen in the first place.  In other words, double-loop thinking asks questions not only about objective facts, but also about the reasons and motives behind those facts.  On an individual level, double-loop thinking is self-critique.  On a team level, it amounts to a healthy competition of ideas. 

Candid conversations require the civil discussion of reasons and motives.  It is not enough to know that the temperature is 85 degrees.  Candor requires me to ask not only why it is 85, but what the contributing factors might be. 

A CEO who had begun to practice his own form of management-by-walking-around learned from his employees that the company inhibited innovation by subjecting every new idea to more than seventy-one separate checks and sign offs.  He promptly appointed a task force to look at this situation.  The task force eliminated forty-two of the obstacles.  The result was a higher innovation rate. 

This sounds like a successful managerial intervention.  The CEO discovered a counter-productive process and, with the cooperation of others, produced a dramatic improvement.  Yet I would call it a case of single-loop thinking.  It addresses a difficulty, but ignores a more fundamental problem.  A more complete diagnosis or a double-loop approach to this situation would require the CEO to ask the employees who told him about the sign offs some tougher questions about company culture and their own behavior.  For example, “How long have you know about the seventy-one required sign offs?”  Or, “What goes on in this company that prevented you from questioning these practices and getting them corrected or eliminated?” 

Why didn’t the CEO ask these questions of the employees and why didn’t the employees ask these questions of themselves.  I submit that there are two closely related mechanisms at work here, one cultural and the other psychological. 

The cultural reason that the CEO did not dig deeper is that doing so might have been seen as putting people on the spot.  Digging deeper would have uncovered the employees’ collusion with the inefficient process.  Their motives were probably quite decent; they did not want to open Pandora’s Box or did not want to be negative.  But their behavior, and the behavior of the CEO in ignoring this dimension of the problem, combined with everyone’s failure to examine his or her individual behavior, blocked the kind of communication/learning that is crucial to organizational effectiveness. 

In the name of positive thinking, leaders often censor what everyone needs to say and hear.  For the sake of “morale” and “considerateness” they deprive employees and themselves of the opportunity to take responsibility for their own behavior by learning to understand it.  Because double-loop thinking depends on questioning one’s own assumptions and behavior, this apparently benevolent strategy is actually what I call counter-candor.  It represents an unconscious (though not always unconscious) conspiracy to be only so candid.  This is, only as candid as the culture is perceived to be able to stand.

Admittedly, being considerate and positive can contribute to the solution of single-loop problems like cutting costs.  But it will never help people figure out why they lived with problems for years on end, why they covered up those problems, why they covered up the cover-up, and why they were so good at pointing to the responsibility of others and so slow to focus on their own.  When the CEO questioned employees about how such inefficiencies could go unchallenged, they said it was high time that management took steps.  None of them asked why they themselves had never even drawn management’s attention to the numerous areas of waste and inefficiency. 

What we see here are leaders using socially “upbeat” behavior to inhibit candid communication.  What we do not see, at least not readily, is why anyone would want to do this.  The reason lies in a set of deeper and more complex psychological motives. 

Consider again the CEO and his efforts to reduce the number of sign offs necessary to get something done.  What the CEO discovered, but did not understand, is rather alarming.  The CEO found that what we are calling single-loop thinking did solve some problems.  But while the CEO saw some effective single-loop thinking, no double-loop thinking occurred at all.  Instead, the moment the important problems involved potential threat or embarrassment, rigorous reasoning went right out the window and defensive reasoning took over.  Supervisors and employees deftly sidestepped all responsibility and defended themselves against the charge of inaction or collusion by blaming others.  In fact, what I call defensive reasoning serves no purpose except self-protection, though the people who use it rarely acknowledge that they are protecting themselves.  It is the group, the department, the organization (their turf) that they are protecting.  They believe themselves to be using the kind of rigorous thinking employed in Total Quality Management which identifies problems, gathers objective data, postulates causes, tests explanations, and derives corrective action all along relatively scientific lines.  But the truth is far less the truth than the employees allowed themselves to believe.  In fact, they gathered data selectively, postulating only causes that did not threaten themselves.  No doubt they would have been offended if the CEO had reminded them that testing explanations in ways that are sloppy and self-serving are little more than parodies of the scientific method.  The supervisors and employees are not protecting others, they are blaming them.  They have learned this procedure carefully over time, supported at each step by defensive organizational rationalizations like caring, thoughtfulness, and being positive. 

The reason the employees fail to question their own rather remarkable behavior, the reason they so instinctively and thoroughly avoid double-loop thinking is psychological.  It has to do with the mental models that we all develop early in life for dealing with emotional or threatening issues.  In the process of growing up, all of us learn and store master programs for dealing with difficult situations.  These programs are sets of rules we use to design our own actions and interpret the actions of others.  We retrieve them whenever we need to diagnose a problem or invent a solution.  Without them, we would have to start from scratch each time we faced a challenge.   

One of the puzzling things about these mental models is that when the issues we face are embarrassing or threatening, the master programs we actually use are rarely the ones we think we use.  Each of us has what I call an espoused level of candor/action based on principles and precepts that fit our intellectual capacity and life experience.  But most of us have quite a different theory-in-use (candor/action) to which we resort in moments of stress and very few of us are aware of the contradiction between the two.  In short, without some effort to the contrary, most of us are consistently inconsistent in our candid communication. 

Espoused theories differ widely, but most theories-in-use have the same set of four governing values. 

1.      All of us design our behavior in order to remain in unilateral control.

2.      We seek to maximize winning and minimize losing.

3.      We work to suppress negative feelings about ourselves to soothe ourselves.

4.      We posture to be viewed as rational. 

By this I mean laying out clear-cut goals and then evaluating our own behavior on the basis of whether or not we have achieved them.  This helps maintain the illusion that there is a method to our madness. 

The purpose of this strategy is to avoid vulnerability, risk, embarrassment, and the appearance of incompetence.  In other words, it is a deeply defensive strategy and a recipe for ineffective communication.  It is a recipe for counter-candor because it helps us avoid reflecting on the consequences of our own behavior.  Theories-in-use assume a world that prizes unilateral control and winning above all else.  And in that world, we focus primarily on controlling others and on making sure that we are not ourselves controlled.  If any reflection does occur, it is in the service of winning and controlling, not of opening ourselves to candid communicating/learning. 

Perhaps worst of all, we take great care to assure that our defense mechanisms remain in place.  We are quick to ostracize and/or dismiss anyone who dares to take a risk by – 

A.  Openly forfeiting control.  This usually occurs when someone says the very thing everyone was hoping no one would say.

B.  Accepting a loss in order to grow and learn.  This happens when a member of the group wants to understand the why and how of improvement as opposed to just being happy with what is.  Especially if what is has been good enough for a long time.

C.  Engages in self-critique – fails to soothe themselves and the group in a public setting.  Asking hard questions will make someone, maybe everyone, uncomfortable.

D.   Fails to posture and, therefore, fails to help the group posture when it is trying hard to save face.  This happens when someone goes beyond the accepted level of candor. 

Defensive strategies discourage reflection in another way as well.  Because we practice this most of our lives, we are all highly skilled at carrying them out.  The things we do well are second nature; we rarely reflect on what we take for granted.  In other words, learning to tell the truth may well be the greatest cultural-behavioral challenge organizations will face in the future.

For more information about Ken Chapman and Associates’ Leadership Development Programs, contact Ken Chapman at 205.366.0265 or email Ken at kchapman@leaderscode.com.

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