Enabling an Honest Organizational Conversation That Will Produce Fit and Fitness

Looking at the “whole truth” about the silent killers and their consequences is essential for companies to avoid decline. Yet, years of research by Chris Argyris have shown that defensive routines are deeply embedded in organizations and their leaders.^[20] Fearful of threatening or embarrassing higher ups, peers, subordinates, and themselves, the whole truth is rarely communicated. We learned about the silent killers from task forces composed of eight high-potential individuals appointed by top teams to interview 100 key managers about the organizations' strengths and weaknesses as part of an intervention I describe below. These task forces often displayed great anxiety about this assignment. When they were confronted with telling top management about the silent killers they became even more anxious, often starting the feedback process with a plea not to “shoot the messenger.”

Two factors prevent employees from speaking up, according to research by James Detert.^[21] The first is psychological safety. Employees are afraid that telling the truth will affect their acceptance and their careers. They also, undoubtedly, protect themselves from the anxiety associated with upward feedback. The second is a concern about the utility of honest feedback. Their experience tells them that speaking up does not lead to change. To establish this link, organizations need to establish forums for open, safe conversation and then do something about what they learn. The link between the conversation and their decisions must be explained to the employees. By open I mean that the whole organization (all relevant participants in the conversation) know the conversation is going on, there are clear signals from the leadership team that it wants candid feedback, and there are well-understood mechanisms for upward feedback and for everyone to learn about the actions management plans so they can be discussed and modified if needed. By safe I mean people believe their status in the organization will not be affected. Only if management is clear that they want feedback and demonstrate that bad news does not get punished can a climate of good vertical communication be established. Organizations are rather poor at doing this well, as the barrier of poor vertical communication we found indicates.

How organizations might be helped to confront organizational and leadership problems has occupied the field of organization development for several decades. A pioneer in the field, Richard Beckhard developed “The Confrontation Meeting.”^[22] In this meeting several levels of the organization are brought together to identify problems and solve them in a supportive atmosphere that encourages risk taking. In the past two decades other large system interventions based on Beckhard's model have followed.^[23] Underlying the use of these methods is the acknowledgement that organizations are generally poor at confronting difficult issues and that a disciplined method—a social technology—that creates the condition for a public, open and safe conversation is needed.

While methods for confronting hidden issues safely have been largely effective in surfacing the unvarnished truth about what is going in the organization, they have not been based on a comprehensive theory of business and organizational effectiveness. Nor have they incorporated the latest research on organizational change. The underlying theory has been that hierarchy prevents open communication and that open communication will help solve problems. In short, these methods have been focused on changing the human condition in organizations, making them less hierarchical and more democratic. They have failed to populate psychologically safe processes for feedback with means by which leadership teams could actually redesign their organization to fit the firm's objectives and strategy. That is because existing methods have failed to embrace the following paradoxes essential for successful business transformations:

• Embrace both the objective economic value creation and organization development. ^[24] Many of the methods for confronting internal organizational problems do not focus the inquiry sufficiently on task/business objectives and strategy. Successful corporate change efforts, research has shown, are motivated by task/business issues as opposed to programs focused solely on changing the human condition in organizations.^[25] That is because many managers see human resource and organization development programs as important for the long term but irrelevant for solving urgent business problems. Moreover, clarity of direction is an essential first step for beginning a dialogue about the organization's fit with its competitive environment.

• Embrace the paradox of top-down direction and bottom-up participation. ^[26] Effective change efforts are a partnership between leaders and led. Current methods for enabling honesty focus on empowering lower levels to speak but in the process of doing so may actually unempower top teams to lead change. In effect the methods developed assume that for organizations to be more effective they must become more democratic. While excessive hierarchy will undermine organizational effectiveness, so can indecisive leadership teams at the top. Along with other researchers, we have found that effective top teams are essential to a successful corporate transformation.^[27] Methods for organizational change must, therefore, enable leadership teams to get stronger and develop greater effectiveness as a team, to learn how to lead while leading learning and change.

• Embrace the paradox of “hard” and “soft.” ^[28] Organization change efforts tend to split “hard” structure and systems changes from interventions aimed at changing “soft” emotional, behavioral, and cultural factors. Management consulting firms recommend changes in structure and systems while organization development consultants focus on surfacing valid data—what people perceive and feel are problems. The former result in valid solutions that run into implementation problems. The latter often fail to result in the structure or systems that are required for a fundamental transformation in the business. The coordination problems surfaced in the companies we studied had their roots in organizational structures and processes, not just leadership behavior. Top teams needed a framework for analyzing and changing organizational design to create a long-term solution to problems they were experiencing while also targeting for change their behaviors as leadership teams.

• Embrace the paradox of advocacy and inquiry. ^[29] The methods for confronting hidden problems are often used to cope with crisis. A meeting that surfaces problems leads management to plan and advocate change. Too frequently, however, leaders do not then re-engage the organization to inquire about the efficacy of the organizational changes they have made. They particularly avoid inquiring into whether they have been successful in adopting the leadership behaviors required to support organizational changes. When inevitable inconsistencies between what leaders advocate and their actual decisions and behavior are not addressed publicly, cynicism emerges, trust is reduced, commitment diminishes, and momentum is lost. Leaders' capacity to elicit commitment to changes in the future is also reduced. If organizations are to be adaptive, their leaders will have to adopt a disciplined organizational learning process that “enforces” a continuous cycle of advocacy and inquiry throughout the life of the organization.

Convinced that the barriers to creating an honest conversation about the state of the organization as a total system is essential but very difficult for managers to orchestrate, Russell Eisenstat and I developed a strategic change process called Organizational Fitness Profiling (OFP).^[30] OFP creates an honest organizational conversation about the fit of the organization and its leadership with objectives and strategy advocated by the top management team. It guides top management through a diagnosis of the organization as a system (see Figure 19-3), the development of a plan to redesign and change the organizational levers in the model, and then further inquiry into the success of the c hange over time. Fitness Profiling embraces the paradoxes discussed earlier, thus allowing it to be a systemic change process—to change structure and systems as well as leadership and organizational behavior, to make change in the top team and in the coordination at lower levels, and to create broad change across several organizational levers while also creating deep cultural change. It has been applied in over 150 organizational units within 18 corporations operating in several different national cultures with quite different work values. Below I describe OFP through the lens of its application at the Santa Rosa Systems Division of Hewlett-Packard.^[31]