One reason American organizations have trouble harnessing good old American competitiveness and ingenuity is because another American value gets in the way -- freedom. Though we are joiners, we join with ambivalence.

The ultimate freedom each of us has is the freedom of our own attitudes. We get to decide if we will join, or subscribe, or cooperate, and in what spirit. Most management books depict processes in which people from a broad spectrum of backgrounds cheerfully set aside their native prejudices and preferences and march in lockstep to the heroic leader's drumbeat. We call these books "happy talk." They provide an intriguing metaphor or striking new paradigm people can use to aim for new levels of productivity. But they fail to address the fact that people have their own reasons for doing things. That is the main reason goups falter at their own tasks.

Here are some sub-reasons:

                    ƒ   Groups are anti-holistic. Group behavior can be a wonder to behold, as when a good team begins to click. More often, however, they are anti-holistic -- their whole is considerably less than the sum of their parts. There is a gap in every bit of communication, a falloff in quality at every handoff of work.

Every person at every stage in the change process who does not believe 100 percent in it diminishes its chances for success.

You can do the math on this. Say that every person on an assembly team of ten people is 95 percent committed to the program's success. The doubt of each person multiplies the doubt of the next person because each person's work affects every other person's output. The overall confidence of the team is thus not 95 percent, but:

95% X 95% X 95% X 95% X 95% X 95% X 95% X 95% X 95% X 95%

Each weakness adds to the aggregate weakness. By line's end, team confidence is down to about 56 percent, and that is not enough faith to keep the balloon in the air.

                    ƒ   Groups are inherently unpoliceable. People are free to ignore you, disagree with you, or follow you so far and then no more. This is just as true in a free society as it is in a dictatorship. You cannot make a group do anything, least of all think the same way.

                    ƒ   Groups are seldom unanimous. Within any group, even a committed one, there is a variety of degrees of commitment and understanding.

                    ƒ   Inertia is terrific on both ends of the spectrum -- starting and stopping. Think of individual behavior as a kayak -- easy to steer and hard to sink. Think of a group as a yacht. (Think of a large organization as the Exxon Valdez.)

                    ƒ   Disappointments are magnified by the social aspect. Groups are more prone to gossip, rumor, and innuendo. Negativity lives on in groups when it might have naturally subsided in most individuals.

                    ƒ   Conformity saps diversity. The very thing teaming sets out to achieve is very often the first thing it eradicates. Jerry Harvey calls this the "Abilene Paradox," in which everyone willingly sets aside his or her druthers in order to please the perceived majority will. Just when you need disagreement, people start to agree.

Of course, we are stuck with groups -- an individual is not an organization. But in our eagerness to start moving people around and putting them on teams and coaxing total involvement out of every last one of them, take a moment to remember how daunting the task is.

All those neurons firing at cross-purposes, and you armed with only a clipboard and an org chart. x

     Assessing the Organization

This is a sample questionnaire to help you gauge your organization's change culture. It's not a fixed instrument, but a model you should adapt using questions more relevant to your specific situation.

Which statement best characterizes conditions and attitudes in your organization?

Answer A, B, C or D. The scoring is simple:

Use your scores as a conversation starter with your team or group. Don't bother counting up the total score. Focus on individual areas. See if your organization falls consistently into one type, through every question. See who agrees with your assessment and who differs, and ask what can be done to move the scores closer to where you want to be.

The organizational profile

†    Leadership

A. Leadership expects you to do what you are told.

B. Leadership does not mind using fear tactics to get desired results.

C. Leadership provides a vision of possibilities, provides pathways to success, and expects people to use them.

D. Leadership does not lead, expects people to find their own paths, or find none at all.

 

†    Values

A. My way or the highway.

B. Survival through obedience.

C. Success through adhering to highest ideals (customer satisfaction, highest quality, win/win thinking, equal opportunity, etc.)

D. Don't make waves.

 

†    CULTURE

A. Walls drip with fear.

B. Emphasis on measurement, performance evaluation, exhortation.

C. Celebratory, the hum of people working; no special perks at the top, and frequent reinforcement of the troops.

D. Lots of socializing, slack discipline, the customer comes last.

 

†    REWARDS

A. Live to work another day.

B. Individual, not team-based rewards; emphasis is on monetary rewards for individuals. Pay is for what you produce.

C. Team rewards as well as individual rewards; rewards are a mix of monetary, social, symbolic, intellectual and emotional. Pay is for what you know.

D. You are paid well regardless of how you perform. Automatic pay raises, seniority advantages; tenure, even.

 

†    PERFORMANCE FEEDBACK

A. Feedback the instant you screw up.

B. Periodic feedback, often too late to be useful. Feedback is from the top down. Focus is outcome-oriented, on what you do.

C. Feedback is ongoing, informal, and can come from any direction -- top-down, bottom-up or sideways. Focus is on process and development, on how you do what you do, and how you might change.

D. No evaluation, or all evaluation is automatically excellent. The bar is never raised.

 

†    COMMUNICATION

A. The thrust of most communication is threatening, angry, manipulative, stress-inducing. Important information is withheld.

B. The point of most communication is to stimulate high performance. Negative outcomes are emphasized. Management talks, workers listen.

C. The point of most communication is to create and maintain a vision. Positive outcomes are emphasized. All parties are free to talk and listen.

D. All communication is positive, and thus meaningless. The system is infatuated with itself, and the sound of its voice.

 

†    SYSTEMS

A. People distrust machines. They may even be objects of their surveillance. Access is restricted. Security is obsessive.

B. Non-creative centralized systems, in which the users serve the machines, meeting its demands.

C. Interactive distributed systems, in which the machines serve the users, meeting their requirements.

D. People over-trust machines, to the point of worship. The organization is on automatic pilot. So long as the blanks are filled in, everything is OK.

 

†    TEAMWORK

A. Teamwork is regarded as conspiracy. If there are teams, they are like teams of horses, assigned the task of pulling weight, period.

B. Team tyranny, in which everyone must be on a team, with the goals of improving efficiency and meeting quotas.

C. Team equity, in which teams are used only when appropriate, with the ultimate goal of creating a future.

D. No one is on a team unless they feel like it. Teams are vehicles for socializing. x

     Change and Unreason

Rational people, presented with the opportunity to improve, will be grateful for the suggestion and take steps to make the improvement. But who is 100 percent rational? Is your neocortex the established master of your amygdala? Doubt it; even the steadiest person indulges in frequent illogic, emotional indulgence, finger-pointing, self-pity, paranoia, denial, and cynicism.

One of the bravura observations about human behavior this century was a list of "Ten Common Irrational Ideas" compiled in the 1950s by Albert Ellis and Robert Harper. They weren't talking about organizational change initiatives and why groups balk at the command to jump. Yet their list intuits every feeble, vain response people throw up to change challenges.

1. "It is a dire necessity for an adult to be loved and approved by almost everyone for virtually everything he/she does."

Picture a manager or team leader with a good idea, but too insecure to withstand the early stages of introducing the idea and hearing people's objections to it. As soon as the going gets a little rough, the prime mover caves in.

2. "One should be thoroughly competent, adequate, and achieving, in all possible respects."

A perfectionist team expects to hit high C on the very first try, and is unwilling to slog along a failure-strewn path of trial-and-error. This perfectionism protects the team and its leadership from mussing up their record of uninterrupted success. Imagine anything of value being achieved by people unwilling to experience initial failure and frustration. The error at stake is thinking the effort is more about the people undertaking it than the good the effort will accomplish.

3. "Certain people are bad, wicked, or villainous and they should be severely blamed and punished for their sins."

What is sweeter than to pin 100 percent of the blame on a failure on someone else, and to focus all eyes not on success but on the subhuman failings of the responsible party? Demonization comes in handy for both management and labor. It is a sign that one's true objective is not improvement but exculpation.

4. "It is terrible, horrible, and catastrophic when things are not going the way one would like them to go."

Change would not be change if it were predictable. But we rail against the unpredictability of events as if they were against the rules we imagine the world operates by. We move the blame even farther from ourselves by designating these events as "acts of God."

5. "Human unhappiness is externally caused and people have little or no ability to control their sorrows or rid themselves of their negative feelings."

This is the attitude of the victim, an attitude one holds dearer than success itself. It portrays the individual in an organization as a helpless pawn in a game played by far more powerful forces. When a change idea is put on the table, it is not a thing to be considered but a thing to be held up to the darkest sort of suspicion.

6. "If something is or may be dangerous or fearsome, one should be terribly occupied with and upset about it."

This is the unknown that we automatically fill in with negatives. We are incapable of imagining an uncertain outcome without focusing on the worst-case scenario. In this mindset all change is to be avoided because all change involves the x-factor which can only be fatal.

7. "It is easier to avoid facing many life difficulties and self-responsibilities than to undertake more rewarding forms of self-discipline."

In the classic contest of flight or fight, the easy response is usually flight. People can be sitting around a table discussing an idea, nodding emphatically, and still be in an all-out flight from the idea they are nodding about. To focus on the proposed solution takes courage and commitment -- and many of us have exhausted our stores of those things.

8. "The past is all-important and because something once strongly affected one's life, it should indefinitely do so."

Taking all our cues from the past is like driving using only the rear-view mirror. The past is not all there is; and it is not a map of the future. Over-reliance on it robs us of our other resources, our intuition and creativity.

9. "People and things should be different from the way they are, and it is catastrophic if perfect solutions to the grim realities of life are not immediately found."

If at first you don't succeed, give up. This attitude is convenient to people who like the idea of change but not the commitment to it. They are forever hopping from initiative to initiative, abandoning each one when it does not yield results the first day. It is the error of externality, always looking for results outside oneself, instead of letting the natural solution bubble up from within.

10. "Maximum human happiness can be achieved by inertia and inaction or by passively and uncommittedy 'enjoying oneself.'"^[2]

Better not to try than to try. It is the measure of how beaten people are by everyday stress that they view their best chance as being like the mauled camper who acts dead as the bear abuses their bleeding body. Act dead, and maybe the problem will go away.

What makes these insights so exasperating is that, while they are irrational, they are not untrue. A great deal of the world's wisdom inheres in the principle of resisting impetuous action. Let sleeping dogs lie. People have been put through too much stress, with too little relief, to sign on glibly to every new crusade that announces itself.

The problem arises when it is time for a legitimate crusade, when joint action is truly required, and like the boy who cried wolf in Æsop's fable, the people are unable to view this call to arms as different from every other false alarm. x

     Rebalancing the Stress Load

There used to be only two schools of thought about increasing people's flexibility to change: Pummel and Pamper. Pummel's attitude about what workers were feeling was basically, Who cares? Pamper went to the opposite extreme, taking responsibility for everything happening in the individual worker's head.

In recent years a third option, weighted toward Push, has appeared. It involves laying out negative scenarios and options: adapt or you're fired. It feeds into people's naturally negative perspective. The best-known spokesperson for Push in recent years has been Morris Shechtman, once a psychotherapist but now a management consultant. His book Working Without a Net, in which he advocated the abandonment of touchie-feelie programs that shield workers from the realities of competition, was cited by Newt Gingrich as one of the must-read texts of the new conservative majority.

The traditional view is that it is not management's job to get inside employees' heads and worry about their anxieties. To anticipate workers' negative feelings amounts to caretaking, one of the more insidious forms of Pamper. Kindness, critics of Pamper like Shechtman say, is not always kind.  But being cruel in order to be kind usually winds up being just cruel.

And whether you get inside employees' heads or not, what happens there does affect performance. Reading workers the riot act may quell the riotous. It does not swell the ranks of the ready, willing and able. What Shechtman calls caretaking is one of the critical jobs of good managers -- communicating with workers in ways they can respond to. Putting all the responsibility for communication on the workers, as Shechtman suggests, may seem tough but it is an abdication.

Removing the safety net sends a scary message to people who are trying to be help the organization change, but are no quite there yet. While an anti-caretaking position will flush out your proactives, who are always happy to make a change anyway, it will drive away people caught between the extremes. There are lots of people with good change potential here, and a company that declares war against employee hand-holding is going to lose these people. Remember, there are never enough metaphiles to go around. Your organization needs ordinary people with ordinary change resistance.

The logical next step is to graft a Pull dimension onto the Push position. Make it plain to workers that those who are unwilling to change don't have a future with your organization. They have frying pan written all over them. But provide every possible pathway to allow worthwhile in-betweeners a chance to escape the burning platform.

Change means added stress on people. It drains us of our energy reserves. The more you ask people to change, the more resources you must supply to help balance the stress load.

It's a one-for-one ratio. The third law of physics says that objects seek their lowest level of energy. Translated to people, it means that people seek their highest comfort level, the most security. Psychologist Abraham Maslow explained these needs in his famous "hierarchy of human needs." The first level of need is that of security: food, water, shelter, protection against harm.

Obviously, an employee is not going to be a quick-change artist if he or she is hungry. You may find it politically unappealing to have to feed workers, but at some level that is just what you have to do. If their change space has shrunk to the dot of an i, you need to expand the change space again, so that the person can do what needs doing.

Very important: explain to people that you understand that change is difficult for them. Whatever you have learned about easing the trauma of change, make that knowledge available to people. We suggest that companies adopt a stress-watch program to outline the ways that change-induced distress can swamp a worker, and even programs to alleviate the most common kinds of distress.

This is one area where Japanese companies outshine us. There is widespread agreement that working for one of the large zaibatsus in Japan, like Matsushita, Honda, Toyota, and Kao, is tremendously stressful. Failure means disgrace in that culture, and people take it very personally: "I'm sorry I let you all down."

But Japanese companies undertake a variety of ways to keep stress from tipping over into distress. They place a heavy emphasis on socializing and exercise. Something happens to a team that works up a sweat doing jumping jacks together. Endorphins, it appears, can paper over a host of misgivings.

Some Japanese companies practice rage management. One factory provides workers with a room where you can beat up a human-shaped dummy with a mask of your manager on it.

If employees at these companies are nursing a grievance, management wants to get it out into the open air. Focus group discussions are another way for people to get their feelings out, which even Shechtman agrees is essential. No satisfaction is guaranteed -- that would be Pamper -- but at least there will be the relief of getting it out of the cramped confines of the worker's stomach lining.

They even borrow a page from ancient Greece. Greece had an annual festival called the Lupercal. On this day the customary rules were overturned, women were allowed to cheat on their husbands and slaves were allowed to beat their masters. In Japan, middle managers are invited to socialize with senior management, even to get drunk with them.

Since control and harmony are so important to the Japanese psyche, alcohol works as a kind of chemical crowbar to pry people from their usual propriety, dulling the neocortex and inflaming the amygdala, upshifting aggressive behaviors to lupercalian levels. The literature is full of stories of drunken managers telling their bosses off, and living to tell the tale. In the morning, long-term built-up stress has been replaced by short-term hangovers. Propriety is restored, and everyone feels better, after a day or two. The rice wine in this case served as a Pull pathway. It enabled frustrated workers to say what was in their hearts, and thus expanded their change space.

 

You don't have to be Japanese to take a bite out of organizational stress. American companies have pioneered nunmerous stress reduction programs, from employee exercise workouts, to wellness counseling, company outings and celebrations, softball leagues, and dress-down Fridays. The object of these programs may not always be to reduce stress, but that is their effect.

No way are you or the people you work with going to significantly reduce the amount of stress that pulls at you, whether it is the stress of global change, personal change, or organizational change. Life itself is a weave of stressors, and you can't start picking whole threads out of your life. x

     Seven Hard Truths

If you are serious about helping your organization increase its tolerance for change, there are seven facts about people and change that you must understand.

When undergoing change:

                    ƒ   People feel awkward, ill-at-ease, and self-conscious. The people best adapted to change are those raised in an ever-changing environment, like army brats who move every three or so years, or research scientists seeking change with every breath. For the rest of us, change is scary, painful, and unwanted.

                    ƒ   People will think first about what they must give up. It's a defense mechanism; the worst-case scenario. People will first think about what they have to lose by being on a team rather than what they have to gain. The job of an effective team leader, then, becomes one of painting positive expectations of outcomes to overcome this natural defensive behavior. To get at these lurking doubts, ask and answer this question: "What do I have to lose if this initiative succeeds?"

                    ƒ   People will feel alone. Though they may gossip about impending changes, people will not share their true feelings of change anxiety with others for fear of being seen as uncertain or uncommitted. As a result, little communications occurs at the very moment (during change) when good communications is most critical. When it comes to change, feelings are facts. Now is the moment to have colleagues get their real worries and doubts, not their carping and sniping, out on the table and resolved.

                    ƒ   People will demand that you up the dosage. We've worked with several organizations during major change times -- some more successful than others. One of the keys to successful change is timing. Companies that dole out change in small doses over longer periods of time, hoping to minimize negative impact, are surprised at the sudden dip in morale after about the second or third dose. Until participants can picture in their minds what their task and their role will be like when this change is complete, they will probably just nod their heads and not comply. Organizations that have had the best success with change make major steps in short timeframes, with the end-product carefully described upfront. With this information under their belt, people tolerate the short-term pain for the longer-term payoff. The "dribble" or incremental change method only heightens the sense of mistrust of management that many employees already have.

                    ƒ   People have different readiness levels for change. Any time a group of people are asked to change, some members will be excited and ready, and others will appear to have anchors tied around their enthusiasm. one way people differ from one another is in how fast they can commit to change. The challenge for organizations and teams is to boost the readiness of their least ready members, because these people determine the pace of the group as a whole. Any attempt to push faster will meet with increased resistance and slow the process. The personal change inventory in the previous chapter is a good way to identify people who are struggling with change, and a good excuse for getting together and talking about problems they are having, and what it will take to resolve those poroblems. Use peer pressure to your advantage: move the most change-ready workers along quickly and broadcast their successes. The pressure will bring resisters into line as if a magnet were pulling them.

                    ƒ   People will fret that they don't have enough resources. The first noise you hear from people in change pain is, "We could do it if we only had more resources." Sure, we all would like additional resources -- but we usually have not made much use of the resources already at our disposal. Untapped, available, shared, borrowed, stolen, or heretofore unknown resources are usually all people need to get it through a tough change phase. Look around. Use the unused and underused. Make do. Or don't do. One nifty trick, after you've exhausted your search, is to go to the persons blocking the needed resources and ask for their input on alternative resources. Those who block usually know the way around the block, if anyone bothers to ask. They won't volunteer this information, but if asked, they'll usually tell.

                    ƒ   If you take the pressure off, people will revert to their old behaviors. Momentum is an amazing and wonderful force. Like a compass, it keeps you going in the same direction. If the direction you're going, however, is the wrong one and needs changing, momentum can kill you. Momentum, like a magnet, will pull you back in the old direction, the old way of doing things. Change is a temporary force that pulls you in a new direction; but only if its applied continuously until the new behaviors become the norm, the new north. If you take the pressure off too early in a change process, the group will revert to the old way of doing business, old relationships, old behaviors, old processes, old habits. x