Читать книгу Stepping Forward Together: Creating Trust and Commitment in the Workplace - Mac Ph.D. McIntire - Страница 9

Our conversation was briefly interrupted when the flight attendant brought our drinks – white wine for Paul and water, no ice, for me. She generously gave each of us two small packages of pretzels. It was the usual gourmet cuisine provided on airplanes these days. For a few hundred dollars more I could have flown first class and received complimentary bags of mixed nuts instead. Tempting, but then I wouldn’t have met Paul and had such a stimulating discussion. I was enjoying our conversation and was glad he had awakened me from my usual flight-home stupor.

“Okay,” I continued when the flight attendant moved her cart to the next row. “Before I tell you about the OPEN area on the Ladder of Commitment, you need to understand the factors that determine whether people will open up to one another. I’ll use the two of us as the example.

“We just met for the first time when we sat down on this plane tonight. We could have sat silently in our respective seats and never said a word to each other. Yet you opened up to me. What caused you to be open?”

“I don’t know. I pretty much will talk to anyone,” Paul offered. “It’s part of my personality. Maybe it’s the salesman in me. I’m an extrovert.”

“Yes, extroverts tend to be more open than introverts,” I agreed, “but there’s a difference between talking to someone and being OPEN with someone. Being open, really open, means you’re willing to share what you generally might hold close to your vest. Being open means you readily express your inner-most thoughts, motivations, and feelings. You freely share your ideas and opinions. True openness is a process of give and take involving both personal disclosure – the sharing of your thoughts and ideas – and the solicitation of feedback from others regarding those thoughts and ideas.

“So, Paul, based on that limited description of OPEN, do you feel like you are an open person?” I inquired.

“I’m not that open,” he conceded. “I certainly don’t go around sharing my innermost thoughts with just anyone. In fact, based on your description of OPEN, I really haven’t been open with you yet. We’ve just been talking.”

“That’s right. Talking is a first step toward OPEN, but it’s only a step,” I explained. “There’s a big difference between mere talking versus a truly open and frank discussion.

“So what would it take for you to feel you could be totally candid and open with me? What would determine whether you would OPEN up to me?”

“I’d have to trust you,” Paul surmised.

“Trust is a good word,” I agreed. “A lot of people say they need to trust someone before they open up to them. So that could be what it will take. But what else might determine whether you would be open with me?”

“If I was comfortable around you. Or if you were open with me . . .” He thought for a few more seconds and then added, “. . . or if I respected you. I don’t know. I’d really have to think about it for awhile.”

“All of those are good answers. Certainly the things you mention might impact your openness toward me,” I nodded. “But I think the determining factor of one’s openness is much simpler than that. Every reason you gave, and any others you could give for whether you might open up to someone, can be summarized in one word. I’ll tell you what that word is in a minute after I’ve demonstrated it to you in a role play.”

I paused as I pondered how to proceed. In my training seminars it’s easy to demonstrate what I was about to explain. But that role play gets very loud and animated. Since Paul and I were seated on an airplane, I was afraid my normal demonstration would cause quite a stir among our fellow passengers. I told Paul he would have to imagine the intensity of some of the things I was about to demonstrate.

Before I started my role play I suggested the majority of employees inside a company typically are hesitant to open up at work. Workers seldom share their most significant thoughts or ideas with their boss. Most employees sit in silence during meetings rather than openly divulge any questions or concerns they may have about an issue. Even when there are serious matters needing to be addressed, employees often keep quiet.

“You can always tell when people are afraid to open up because they seek out the extroverts to carry their torch,” I chided, giving Paul a little nudge, since he had declared that he is an extrovert. “Inside every company you’ll see people going around prior to a meeting trying to enlist the one person they feel will have the courage to be a spokesman. They draft the extroverted individual by saying: ‘Somebody ought to bring this up in the meeting’, ‘Somebody should say something about that’, ‘Why don’t you bring that up in the meeting?’, or ‘I think you should raise that issue next time we meet.’”

Paul smiled and said he’d seen this hallway ballet many times before.

“Why are they asking someone else to bring it up in the meeting?” I asked. “Why don’t they bring it up themselves?”

“Because they don’t want to stick their own necks out,” Paul replied.

“That’s right,” I said. “They want to see what happens to the sacrificial extrovert who brings up the issue before they chime in.”

Paul roared with laughter. I could tell he was quickly reassessing the value of his extroversion. Obviously he had been the sacrificial spokesman before.

I raised my index finger and said, “Now, let me demonstrate the one factor that determines whether a person will open up. Again, I’m going to model this a lot quieter than normal, but I’m sure you’ll get my point.”

I first set up the role play by reminding him I earlier had mentioned a client company of mine that had had six presidents in less than four years. The company had gone through a major downsizing, eliminating 25 percent of its workforce. To further cut costs the company also reduced the salaries of all of its mid-level mangers by 15 percent. The company’s board kept changing the president every few months in a fruitless effort to find a leader who could restore the company to profitability. Each new president came to the company determined to make a difference. Each had his own vision about where he wanted to take the company. Each tried to get the employees of the company committed to his vision and focused on the future. And each had failed.

“How do you think the employees responded to each new president’s vision when he or she came in? Do you think they got excited about the new vision?”

Paul shook his head and said “no.”

“What about the executive staff? Do you think they got behind the new president’s vision?”

“I doubt it.”

“That’s right. The employees actually started an office pool on how long the new president was going to last.”

I then started role playing by telling Paul to imagine I had been hired as the seventh new president of the company. I told him I’ve called a meeting of my key managers so I can share my vision for turning the company around. I begin the hypothetical meeting by telling my managers we need to step forward together as a team if we want to be successful in the future. I state my desire for people to be OPEN and honest. I believe the only way we can make the company successful is if everyone opens up and talks freely about the business. I ask them to openly share their ideas of what we need to do to improve the company. I tell them every problem or issue is fair game to address in the meeting. We can talk openly. I again encourage the managers to be open and honest, and then turn the time over to the participants in my make-believe meeting to ask any questions they wish.

“What do you think it would sound like in that meeting when I open it up for questions?” I asked. “Do you think the managers would open up to me?”

“Probably not,” Paul replied. “I’m sure they’d sit there in total silence.”

I agreed that first-time meetings with a new boss usually are very quiet. Most introductory encounters are one-way communication meetings where the manager talks and the staff members listen quietly, not knowing if it is safe to express their opinions or share their ideas.

“Fortunately, there’s always someone in the group – that one brave soul, the lone extrovert – who is willing to test the situation,” I said, nodding toward Paul to signal his role in the demonstration. (In reality his role was to just sit there, since I was acting out both his part and mine in the role play. I just wanted him to imagine he was the target of my response to his openness.)

“Paul, you get to play the role of the typical lone extrovert who opens up during a meeting.”

“That sounds like me. I’m always the sucker,” Paul sighed.

I told him that, as the seventh president in the role play, when I open the meeting for comments from the group he will be reluctant, at first, to ask his question. But I will encourage him by restating my expectation that people need to be open and honest. I reiterate that all comments will be acceptable, so, with renewed courage, he finally blurts out his question.

‘OK,” he says. ‘I have a question. Since we’ve been going through downsizing and major cost cutting, even to the point of cutting 25 percent of our staff and reducing managers’ salaries by 15 percent; I’m curious, (he pauses) how much money are they paying you as the new president of this company? Did you take a cut in your salary like we did in ours?’”

Paul laughed at the absurdity of the question. He said he’d heard some whopper questions like that from employees in his career.

I continued the role play by getting a stern look on my face and in as loud a voice as I dared use on the airplane, I said firmly: “Look, we are not here to talk about executive compensation in a forum such as this! We are here to talk about what YOU need to do to serve our customers better, what WE need to do to turn this company around. WE'RE NOT GOING TO TALK ABOUT COMPENSATION OR PERSONNEL ISSUES. THIS IS NOT THE PLACE OR TIME FOR THAT! DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME!!!!?”

Paul smiled and feigned cowering in fear. I quickly returned to the role play and, pretending to regain my composure, turned to the rest of the managers in the make-believe meeting room, and calmly said: “Now, are there any other questions I can answer for anyone?”

Paul grinned from ear to ear. He knew after an outburst like that no one else in the meeting would say a word.

I gestured toward my drawing of the Ladder of Commitment and asked: “If someone actually did respond to you like that in a meeting, where would you go on the Ladder, Paul?”

“I’d go to CLOSED,” he stated strongly.

“That’s right. But would you just go slightly closed like this?” I said, indicating a minor backslide from the bottom of OPEN to the top of CLOSED.

“No way! I’d go all the way to the bottom of CLOSED.”

I drew a thick, dark arrow from the OPEN area of the Ladder to the bottom of the CLOSED area showing where Paul said he would retreat after a stern reprimand like I just demonstrated. I then looked Paul directly in the eye to make sure I had his full attention before I made my next point.

“The key factor that determines whether a person will open up is the REACTION he gets when he does so,” I stressed. “The amount of openness a person exhibits is inversely proportionate to the amount of perceived punishment he might receive for doing so.”

I wrote the word “reaction” down the side of the arrow I had drawn between the OPEN and CLOSED rungs of the Ladder.

“The reactions people get when they open up determines whether they move up the Ladder. If people get a good reaction to their openness, they generally open more. But if they get a negative reaction, people tend to close down. The more negative the reaction, the deeper the closure. If someone over-reacts, like I did in my example, people usually close down big time.”

I could sense the wheels turning in Paul’s head as he pondered this point. I paused to allow him to think about personal examples of where he, or others, may have reacted poorly and caused people to go to CLOSED. Then I continued.

“By the way, Paul, going back to the role play, do you think you would be the only one in that meeting to close down?”

“No. Everyone in the room would close down.”

“That’s right. Have you ever been in a meeting where someone got shot down?” I asked.

“You bet.”

“How did the other people react to that reaction?”

“Everyone in the room shut down. No one said a word,” Paul confirmed. “I’ve been in meetings where someone over-reacted and everyone in the room went to CLOSED.” He was starting to pick up on the language of the Ladder. It meant he was internalizing the concepts.

“Actually,” Paul continued, “once someone reacts poorly in a meeting; you might as well end the meeting. No one is going to open up after that.”

“That’s right. Sadly, negative reactions in one meeting can close people down for many subsequent meetings. I’ve been in some companies where managers in weekly department-head meetings remain CLOSED because of something that happened a long time ago. In some companies every meeting is a CLOSED meeting.”

I went back to the role play to share some additional points about how reactions close people down.

“Are the people who witnessed my bad reaction in the meeting the only ones who close down?”

“No. Everyone closes down. When those people go back to their departments the other employees will probably be able to tell it was a bad meeting by how they are acting,” he suggested. “They may even say something about what happened in the meeting. Everyone who hears about the bad reaction will close down.”

“You’re right,” I agreed. “You know the minute the meeting is over someone is going to go right out and tell others what happened. They’ll say something like: ‘Man, you should have seen what happened to Paul. The new president came in and said he wanted everyone to be open and honest, and Paul believed him. He asked one question and bam! – off with his head.’

“What do you think it will sound like in the next meeting the new president schedules with his employees?” I asked.

“Total silence.”

“A bad reaction closes people down,” I stressed, “but, as my role play demonstrates, a bad reaction doesn’t just close down the one to whom the reaction was directed. Bad reactions can negatively impact everyone who hears about it. So let’s review what we just discovered about bad reactions,” I said, turning my notepad to a fresh page and writing down my points as we discussed them.

“First, the bad reaction did not have to happen to you to close you down. Seeing someone else get shot down can send you into a nose dive to CLOSED.

“Second, you did not have to witness the bad reaction to be negatively affected by it. Just hearing that someone has reacted poorly to a situation can cause people to avoid the situation themselves. Bad news travels fast. Even though someone was not there when it happened, once they hear about it, they tend to close down. No one wants to take the chance they might evoke the same reaction.

“The third point is related to this: Did a negative reaction have to happen at your manufacturing plant in order to close your employees down?”

Paul thought about the question for a second before responding.

“I guess not. Something could have happened to an employee at a previous employer that might have closed him down.”

“Exactly. If you listen carefully to your employees they’ll often send signals that something in their past is keeping them from opening up. For example, they may say: ‘At the company I came from, employees never talked to management’; or ‘I’d never do that. I know what happened at my last company when someone did that’; or ‘I learned a long time ago to just keep quiet’; or ‘Never volunteer for anything. That’s what I learned in the Army.’

“You see, Paul, the bad reaction did not have to happen at your company to close you down. Negative experiences in the past can cause people to be less open now. Someone who has experienced a bad marriage or an adverse dating relationship may be very hesitant to open themselves up to another relationship. Likewise, someone who has been stymied at a previous place of employment may be less inclined to share their ideas at a new job.

“Unfortunately, one of the challenges of getting people out of CLOSED and into the OPEN is convincing them to leave at the door the baggage they bring with them from their past. Negative experiences in the past often keep people from moving forward in the present.”

Paul slowly shook his head from side to side. “This is interesting. I have a guy in my company I’ve tried to get to open up, but it’s like pulling teeth with him. No matter what I do I can’t seem to convince him that I’m really interested in what he has to say. Maybe something happened to him in the past that caused him to close down.”

“Remember the attitude of ‘been there, done that’ that I mentioned earlier?” I reminded. “Human beings have a tendency to believe that one bad reaction to a situation foretells all future reactions to similar situations. People paint the reactions from their past onto the canvas of the present. It’s hard for some people to get over the horrible reactions they’ve experienced. They close down to current opportunities because of past obstructions.

“I heard a line in a movie that sums up pretty well how a lot of people tend to view things when they go to a new company. It said, ‘Just because everything is different, doesn’t mean anything has changed.’ I think a lot of people think, ‘Just because this is a new company doesn’t mean anything is different here than at my old company. I’m sure they won’t listen to me here either, so I’ll just keep my mouth shut.’”

“So what do you do about it? How do you overcome that attitude?” Paul asked.

“I was just about to tell you that,” I said. “But then I thought of a couple more important points about reactions that might be helpful to understand before I move on.

“Now I want you to ponder my next question carefully,” I said, pausing for effect.

“Did a bad reaction actually have to happen in order to close people down?”

Paul thought for a moment. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“‘You’ll get fired for that,’” I said, giving him the answer to the question in my statements. “‘THEY’LL never allow that.’ ‘MANAGEMENT won’t support it.’ ‘The BOSS doesn’t like it.’ ‘It will never get approved.’ ‘That’s not what THEY want.’ ‘We tried that once.’ ‘Don’t let THEM catch you doing that.’ ‘You’ll get in trouble if you do that.’ ‘Trust me, THEY’LL never follow-through.’ ‘Don’t let me ever catch you doing that again.’ ‘Just do what THEY want!’”

“I see what you mean,” Paul said, reflectively.

“I call these comments ‘killer phrases’. Killer phrases are statements people make that close others down without any attempt to verify the integrity of the statement. The dismissive statement is accepted as true without question, closing down any action the individual may have proposed. Even though it can’t be verified that anyone has, indeed, ‘been fired’ for an action, the mere mention that someone might be fired can cause a person to forsake their desire to act.”

Paul huffed and shook his head again. “I can almost hear some of the killer phrases that are used at my plant. It seems like every time we try to do something new, someone makes a comment that kills any initial enthusiasm there might have been for the project.”

He grew silent and glanced out the window of the plane.

“Just a few weeks ago I was conducting a meeting where I introduced a new production process to our assembly line supervisors. I thought everyone would like the idea. A few of the younger supervisors seemed enthusiastic about it until one of the more seasoned managers spoke at length about why it wouldn’t work. After that, everyone was suspicious of the new process.

“People make a lot of ‘closing’ statements in organizations, don’t they?” he lamented.

“Yes. Unfortunately, the first reaction of a lot of people to any new idea is a negative reaction. Their first comment when a new idea is presented is often critical and pessimistic. Good ideas get killed because people respond negatively to them.”

Paul agreed. “I wish I could control my own killer statements.”

“Yes, I wish I could control mine too,” I bemoaned. “You would think I would know better, but I find myself making killer statements far too often. My wife swears negativity is in my blood because my blood type is B-negative.”

Paul burst out laughing.

“That’s why it’s so important for each of us to become conscious about what we say and do. Instead of reacting we need to respond to the situation. Reactions just pop out, and often they pop out poorly. That’s why we need to take a moment and think of our response before we react inappropriately.”

I wrote down the fourth key point about reactions.

“So, in some instances the bad reaction did not have to happen at all to close you down. Just the mere hint that a bad reaction might happen can cause people to close. Rumors, gossip or killer statements can close people down faster than reality.

“I once had a manager tell me that after he opened up in a meeting and shared his thoughts with the president of the company, a colleague passed him a folded note warning that he may not want to be so open. The note said: ‘Beware: Dead Manager Walking.’”

“I’ve felt that way sometimes after I’ve opened up,” Paul confessed.

“Finally, one last point,” I added. “Did my reaction to you in this little role play have to be as dramatic as I demonstrated in order to cause you to close down?”

“No.”

“I didn’t have to yell at you, did I? My reaction could have been as simple as a stern look, an uncomfortable pause, a sarcastic tone, or a sharp retort. Anything – my facial expression, body posture, tone, volume, intensity, word choice – anything that you perceive to be negative has the potential of closing you down. Consequently, the bad reaction did not have to be dramatic to close you down. Sadly, the bad reaction may not be all that bad, yet still closes someone down.”

“That’s true.”

“That’s why it’s so difficult to get people to open up,” I hammered. “Sometimes a boss’ mere expression of a divergent opinion can close people down who are in the clutches of risk avoidance. Even the slightest hint of a negative reaction can cause people to clam up. And CLOSED people are a long way from COMMITMENT.”