We don't believe one another. It's fine for management to expound on lofty and humane visions of the future — but as soon as the vision hits a bump in the road, workers expect to be restructured out of the vehicles, caboose first.
Unclogging the Credibility Filter
With institutions spinning out of control, all we have is one another's word.
Here's how to be believed, and why it matters.
by Michael Finley
Copyuright (c) 1994 by Michael Finley
We live in an age when it takes some effort to believe anyone. Politics invented the credibility gap during the Lyndon Johnson years. Elected leaders today acknowledge only hazily any contract to be truthful to the people they serve.
In business, there is even greater skepticism — and no one seems to expect any different. In organization after organization, workers expect that management will sell them out in one way or another. No matter where you go — America, Europe, Asia — people go through their work days acting out a drama that gives lip service to honesty and loyalty, but in actuality is driven by control, secretiveness, dissembling, and betrayal.
We don't believe one another. It's fine for management to expound on lofty and humane visions of the future — but as soon as the vision hits a bump in the road, workers expect to be restructured out of the vehicles, caboose first.
And this skepticism is the very foundation on which well-intentioned organizations are doing their darnedest to improve quality, reengineer processes, and otherwise reinvent themselves to be more competitive in the global marketplace.
That's some shaky foundation.
A dozen forces are making us cynical about our leadership. Recent scandals and revelations have made us skeptical about institutions we once revered, from the presidency and the military to our local leaders. Americans have always been fiercely anti-authoritarian and mistrustful of those in positions of power. We are better informed by the media than ever before about the way governments and institutions work. Negative campaign and political techniques, however unappealing in the abstract, have proven devilishly effective in real life.
The United States is the oldest constituted nation in the world, and like a cranky old uncle we sometimes seem bent on stripping away our own illusions of virtue, fairness, and honor. But the whole world has lost confidence. Consider the case of Lech Walesa, hero of the anti-communist Solidarity shipworkers, now president of his liberated republic of Poland — and sitting atop a 5% approval rating in the polls. (You can almost hear President Clinton saying, "Hey, no one is that low!")
In 1987 Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner published The Leadership Challenge: How to Get Extraordinary Things Done in Organizations, a book that looked at the responsibilities of leaders from the top down. Their new book, Credibility: How Leaders Gain and Lose It, Why It Is Important, looks at some of the same challenges, but from the bottom up, through the eyes of those who follow them.
Basically, those eyes are glazed over with distrust in most organizations. Kouzes described a statistical Inspiration Gap that cropped up in his research. People were shown the statement "Management should be HONEST, upright, AND ethical," and asked how they felt about it. Nearly 90% of those asked responded that honesty etc. were very important; dismayingly, only 39% said that they thought their companies' management was honest etc. (In Japan, the ratio is even worse: honesty is important to 76%, but it is perceived to exist at only 16% of organizations.)
Credibility is more than a concept to organize a theory of leadership around. It is really the linchpin that enables all the changes competitive organizations have been seeking. No one will listen to our message if they have no confidence in us, the messengers.
When Kouzes and Posner asked what characteristics people find most admirable in leaders, the only four traits receiving over 50% of votes were honest, 87%; inspiring, 68%; competent, 58%; forward-looking, 71%. (The two runners-up with slightly under 50% were fair-minded, 49%; and supportive, 46%.)
When management is judged credible by workers, workers engage at a high level of performance within the organization. They feel they are important enough to be communicated with. They have a stake in the organization's success. They possess information about the entire enterprise, not just their own function within it. Their own values and those of the organization subtly converge.
When management comes up short in the credibility department, the opposite occurs. Workers produce only when they are being watched. Workers work for pay and pay alone. They do not see their fate and the organization's fate intertwined — indeed, there is always the sense of waiting for the betrayal that can come at any time. Workers may sabotage their own organization's efforts, in hostile pre-emptive strikes — "Do it to them before they do it to you."
Who defines credibility? Not management, and certainly not the public relations team. Just as the customers of a service or product are the people who define and evaluate quality, so are the various constituencies of a given organization — its employees, customers, shareholders, suppliers, and the community at large — the only true judges of its credibility.
Kouzes and Posner's research mirrors the results of several key studies in source credibility. They have found that, more than anything else, people look for leaders who combine trustworthiness, expertise, and dynamism. The three must be present together. All the credibility in the world is useless without competence and the ability to express oneself with energy. But competence and enthusiasm are likewise useless unless people are able to believe what is being said — Kouzes calls them "modern-day eunuchs," powerful but purposeless.
Kouzes prescribed six disciplines leaders must master to be credible.
1. Discover Your Self
To be a trustworthy person you must first be a person, and being a person means coming to terms with your own beliefs. For leaders, this often means breaking out of the organizational shell, out of the job and into the larger realm of your own personality and dreams.
This is not easy for many leaders, particularly the hard-driving workaholic type. It means going against the obsessive grain to find another you. It may mean reading. It may mean, as in the case of Ed McCracken of Silicon Graphics, a few minutes of daily meditation. Perhaps you are a performance robot weekdays, but on weekends you hop aboard a Harley and roar off to destinations unknown.
Values do not arise from a cloud of atomic particles. They come from people. To communicate organizational values credibly, you must nurture and develop them in yourself.
2. Appreciate Constituents
The number one creator of confidence, Kouzes said, is simple proximity. It is natural to give credence to someone you see often and feel that you know. At the same time, it is easy to distrust people you never see and never hear except when they want you to listen.
Kouzes told the story of Patricia Carrigan, who in her first official act as plant manager at the GM Parts plant in Bay City, Michigan, took several days to travel through the plant and introduce herself individually to each worker. It was an unprecedented gesture, and it left many workers open-mouthed. A few remarked that, in the fifteen years that the previous plant manager had held the job, they had never once seen him, much less spoken with him.
Just seeing her come by, say a few words, and smile had a powerful impact on employees. People rally around self-revealing behaviors. Physical proximity sends several messages: I acknowledge your existence. I do not think I am too good for you. I am not hiding from you. I do not have eleven and a half heads.
Said one of Carrigan's front-line workers, "There ain't a phony bone in her body."
It is risky to hang out with people, but the risk is matched by a reward: trust. The more people know you, the more they will want to believe what you say. Kouzes quoted John Kotter: "Valuing all key constituencies differentiates the better performers from the others."
Valuing all constituencies means communicating to each group, flying its flag — workers, shareholders, suppliers, customers, community — in terms that matter to that group. "A restaurant doesn't advertise to customers saying, 'We're the most profitable restaurant in town!' No, it emphasizes the best food, the impeccable service, the fun atmosphere."
Likewise, an organization builds trust by speaking to its constituencies with their needs and interests in mind. To employees: "This is a great place to work." To shareholders: "Our goal is 15% stock value appreciation this year." To the community at large: "We want to help make this a great place to live."
3. Affirm Shared Values
Workers can work for a company whose values conflict with their own — for a while.
Kouzes described a worker heading home after a hard day's toil. It was a good day — you only violated your personal code of ethics three times.
Value conflicts can be dismissed, but they have a way of coming back at you. Traffic on the freeway seems awfully heavy today — and how about that idiot that just cut in front of you? Your head starts to throb. Your stomach doesn't feel so good, either. Once you're home, you gulp down dinner and polish it off with a glass of Gelucil. All night you toss and turn. And in the morning, you head off, hoping for another "good day" of three or fewer ethical transgressions.
There is a better way, and it doesn't involve further repressing emotions. It means fashioning values for the organization that don't push workers over the edge.
Kouzes told of the efforts at Solectron Corp., an assembler of personal computers that hires people with the broadest possible array of backgrounds — 22 different languages under one roof. And yet William Chen, chairman at Solectron, managed to patch together perhaps the most effective quality values training program of any corporation anywhere — good enough to merit the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.
As the bumper sticker says, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance."
Or consider the Herculean communication efforts of co-op organizer Harry Cleberg, who somehow manages to communicate firsthand every 18 months with any of Farmland Inc.'s 250,000 co-op members who agree to meet with him as he crosses 22 states in his Ford pickup truck. One time a young high-tech executive complained within earshot of Cleberg of the difficulty of holding a large network together, and Cleberg blew up. "That's a cop-out," he said. "If I can do it, you can."
The key to building value consensus is to think we, not I. "Leadership is above all a service," said Kouzes. Apply it to the interests of the many and that wrenching freeway ride home can be as soothing as a loopy country song. One of Kouzes' favorites goes:
"My wife ran away with my best friend — and I miss him."
4. Develop Capacity
An organization that fashions honest values must then disseminate them. Bob Haas of Levi Strauss & Co. speaks of syndicating leadership throughout his company. "We share as much information as we possibly can throughout the company. Business literacy is a big issue in developing leadership."
Values cannot be disseminated by carrier pigeon. Leadership has to teach and coach and personally hand authority over to workers.
There are many hero stories of empowered workforces turning companies around, but none can top the achievement of Springfield Remanufacturing Corporation (SRC) as chronicled in The Great Game of Business by CEO Jack Stack.
Stack was a college dropout who returned to work a dozen years ago to a broken-down International Harvester diesel engine retrofitting plant. Things were a mess — inefficient, low-quality, and a dispirited, fatalistic blue-collar workforce. Stack wondered if the division was salvageable given the poor morale, lack of training, and dilapidated infrastructure.
But he noticed that workers were expert at memorizing and following sports statistics. He thought, if they can understand the numbers behind baseball (which they knew they cared about), they could surely understand the basics of business (which they also cared about, but didn't know yet).
Stack led a retraining effort that created a startlingly different workforce out of the very same people. Lathe operators who can read a balance sheet, sheet metal workers who appreciate inventory turns and return on investment. Unempowered employees one day, business-literate entrepreneurs the next.
That "open book" retraining, coupled with the most outrageously unbalanced leveraged buyout in corporate history (89 parts debt, 1 part equity), allowed SRC to spin itself out of International Harvester's orbit and into its own remarkable success path: an 18,200% stock price increase in eight years, zero layoffs, and sales growth exceeding 30% annually.
5. Serve a Purpose
The purpose of being credible is not to be nice to people. Business is business. But the purpose of business is not "business," or shouldn't be. It should be to provide a meaningful service to constituencies, so that all constituencies benefit.
The role of leadership includes, among other things, modeling businesslike behavior. Workers will not be committed to the goals of the organization if they see leadership shirking its part. Kouzes cited the example of one manager who, having the choice of relocating to a nice plush office building, opted instead to set up shop in a construction trailer adjacent to a rail siding. It was noisy, obnoxious, unglamorous — but it was where the action was, and workers could not fail to notice her choice.
Kouzes, a colleague of Tom Peters, recalled Peters' insistence on a "passion for excellence." The word passion does not mean what we think it means, he told members. "It means to suffer. Leaders have no business asking other people to suffer if they themselves are not up to it."
He cited an article by Corning's James R. Houghton, who monitored all his activities as corporate chairman for the year 1989. At year's end, he calculated that he had worked 2,642 hours. Of that total, about a quarter could be attributed to boosting companywide quality efforts — almost 500 hours.
Houghton decided that wasn't enough, though, and decided to raise his quality ratio for the year to 30% — a level commensurate with quality's importance to the company and a message to everyone in the company not only that quality mattered but that he knew it mattered and was willing to "suffer" to prove the point.
6. Sustain Hope
Hope? In business? Kouzes, who had closed out the first half of his talk with a recording of Dolly Parton's "Nine to Five," chose to illustrate the idea of hope with a stirring song about a positive future by Garth Brooks. Then he enjoined session attendees to jot down their own version of a Garth Brooks lyric. "I know my organization will have achieved its great goal of [goal] when [signs of goal being achieved]."
Kouzes explained that he asked for the signs of the goal being achieved because it is only through these little signs that we know anything. He cited an example from Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf's autobiography, in which the general described his intention to make an impression on a new command through small signs:
"Although I'd delayed making any sweeping changes all at once, I was on the lookout for ways to establish myself as a leader from the moment I set foot on base. The morning after we arrived, I went out for a run. As I came up on the barracks area, a formation of troops raced by me, led by a guy who looked as if he belonged in the Olympics. I turned around, and stretching back into the distance were the soldiers who hadn't been able to keep pace. The leaders stopped in front of their barracks and were catching their breath as I jogged up. They saluted and I could see they knew I was the incoming division commander. So I stopped and asked the company commander what they were doing. 'Sir, we've just completed our five-mile run.'
"'That's terrific. But what about those people back there?'
"'Sir, those are guys who couldn't keep up.'
"'But you've run off and left them.' The captain gave me a puzzled look. 'Think of it this way,' I said. 'Suppose you're a new recruit, you're just out of basic training, and you're feeling great about being a soldier. But then you find out that your unit does a lot more running than you're used to. And the very first day you're out with them, you run and you run until your legs give out and your lungs give out — but your unit keeps going and leaves you. What kind of unit cohesion does that build?'"
Of such little things are visions communicated, progress measured, and hope sustained. Schwarzkopf communicated that every man in the company was to be cared for and considered — even the slow runners. In time of battle, or business competition, no one can be left behind — and no one must be afraid of being left behind. Schwarzkopf loved his men, and they loved him back. There was no credibility gap.
Hope can be offered in other ways. Max Depree, chairman of Herman Miller Inc., writes in Leadership Jazz of the words of a nurse in neonatal intensive care who instructed him in the ways a grandfather might relate to a premature, one pound, seven ounce baby girl:
"For the next several months, come to the hospital every day to visit Zoe. When you come, rub her body and her legs and arms with the tip of your finger. While you're caressing her, you should tell her over and over how much you love her, because she has to be able to connect your voice to your touch."
Depree realized the nurse was telling him not only the secret of loving but the secret of leading — the need to connect a human voice and a human touch. Then and only then do people really hear us, and really believe.