6.3. Reviewing the Results with the Department

Our next step was to review the ONA results with the entire group, but initially we were not sure of the best way to do that. The findings themselves suggested that a departmentwide meeting would be unproductive because people would be unlikely to speak their minds. So, we conducted reviews with each subgroup in isolation. Happily, what started out as a workaround turned out to be one of the most fruitful elements of the entire trust-building process.

Each review meeting was two hours long. In the first hour, the consultant reviewed the departmentwide findings. This was a very factual, rather than judgmental, session—the consultant simply showed the diagrams and explained what the numbers represented. Having the consultant, rather than management, present the numbers helped reinforce the neutrality of the presentation.

In the second hour, the consultant and the subgroup manager asked open-ended questions designed to elicit discussion. What did they think of the findings? Did they see anything in particular that they agreed with or disagreed with? Why did they think the results were what they were?

Free to speak their minds in the company of others from their own subgroups, people were a treasure trove of insights into how the trust problems had arisen and why they had persisted. One particularly interesting dynamic was what came to be known as "tribal blood feuds." Every subgroup could tell a story involving some perceived slight that it had suffered at the hands of one of the other subgroups years before, which continued to color their relations. But in several cases, the incidents had occurred before any of the current members had joined the group! New employees had been indoctrinated into a distrusting relationship.

The sessions confirmed the basic findings of the ONA. But more important, the sessions themselves helped ITSec start to overcome its problems. Talking about the longstanding distrust among the subgroups was sometimes cathartic in its own right and helped people put the issue into a broader context. In one memorable case, a person described a minor skirmish between his subgroup and another, and said, "Now that I hear it out loud, I can't believe we're still nursing this grudge."