Conversations: Michael Beer

It seems simple, but many organizations are missing out by ignoring internal dissent Too many companies are filled with people too scared to speak up and highlight the operational and organizational problems they see. This widespread silence can be a huge problem for firms focused on improving their effectiveness. After all, you can’t fix what you don’t know is broken. Enter the world of “honest conversations.” Michael Beer, Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School and Chairman for the Center for Higher Ambition Leadership, in his book Fit to Compete: Why Honest Conversations About Your Company’s Capabilities Are the Key to a Winning Strategy, breaks down this organizational feedback gap and what companies can do to get around it. Large organizations have used his research to hear the plain truth from employees and translate that feedback into real change. This can even have positive ripple effects on workplace culture by improving trust and collaboration. In this COVID-19 era, in which many employees are disconnected from their company and culture, it’s more critical than ever to have an appealing, open culture, for both retention and performance. Your Workplace spoke with Michael about his latest book and what it means for people practitioners. YW: Why is it so hard to have honest conversations? Michael: The answer to that question, both from my research and that of many others, is the issue of organizational silence — that is, the inability of truth to speak to power. There’s no way to talk about what is undiscussable publicly. Everybody knows what the problems are, whether it’s a bunch of managers at the senior team level who are concerned more about their fiefdom than collaborating or because there’s an organizational structure that doesn’t quite work. But no one will speak up. No one says to the CEO: “Here’s what’s going on down in the engine room; this is why the boat is not going as well as it could.” That conversation does not occur naturally in an organization because all of us do not really want to have totally honest conversations. We’re defensive and we don’t want to always hear the whole truth. How did you try to solve this issue? We this process — the strategic fitness process — which medical products company Becton Dickinson has used for 30 years. Many division managers have used it. HR has played a role in facilitating it. We help develop the HR skills for doing this, mainly in how to become effective facilitators of what I call an honest, collective, and public conversation. By “honest,” I mean, the truth is on the table. “Collective” means that various parts of the organization are asked to tell, from their point of view, what’s working and what’s not working. And “public” refers to the fact that everybody in the organization knows about this inquiry and action-planning process. They will hear what senior management has heard and what they plan to do. That’s what the strategic fitness does. What are the steps to implementing this process? First the senior team has to create a direction. Ask: “what are we trying to do?” The next step is to write it down. It could be anything: from improving customer satisfaction or employee performance, for example. Then, appoint a task force of eight to nine of your best people. They will go out and interview hundreds of others. In the process, there is training to make sure they do a good job of interviewing. They can talk about what they learned. However, this is not a PowerPoint presentation, because we learned that those are not powerful. You want to have a real conversation. So the task force sits around a table in what we call a fishbowl. Having identified a set of themes, they talk about what they heard, maybe for hours. They talk about projects that went awry and they talk about quotes they got without identifying who shared it. the senior team. The first time the task force talked with one of the business units at Becton Dickinson, the general manager said it “was not true.” However, the hundred people who were interviewed the realities within the organization. Next, the senior team is left with doing a diagnosis. “Why have we heard these things?”, “What’s the underlying root cause?”, “What do we do about it?” Finally, the senior team goes back to the task force and explains what they heard and how they are planning to deal with it. What are the benefits of this process? This process creates trust between the senior management and lower levels, which is difficult to do in the first place. But the fact that you’re having an honest conversation about what lower levels are thinking and experiencing is powerful, and it changes the culture of the organization. Management becomes more trusted. They are seen as more courageous because they’ve allowed the truth to speak to power. And the results are improved effectiveness and performance. However, our analysis only when the process is followed fully in practice. You can’t stop any of it or not do all of it because that decreases its effectiveness. The senior management has to embrace the idea of being humble enough to hear the truth. What impact might this have on workplace culture? This is all about culture. we don’t need to focus on culture. Instead, we focus on how the organization is working. The honest conversation gets people talking about the organization, gets them to work more effectively, and creates trust and commitment, which is what you want in the culture. You want a culture that’s team-based where employees trust each other. You want them to work together, collaborate and be honest with each other. You can’t create that easily. You can’t create that by telling people to do it. The strategic process itself creates the culture of collaboration and honesty, as long as the senior management embraces it. Even though the process itself is focused on performance and effectiveness, a by-product of that focus is the creation of trust and commitment. Just like how Toyota has a quality process for their production, this is the same thing for an organization. It’s a total quality improvement process for the organization that improves performance, efficacy and culture. What is the advantage of using this process over more traditional methods like employee surveys? The problem with surveys is that they might tell you there’s a problem, like 70% of employees don’t trust management, for example. What it doesn’t tell you is why. There is no understanding. You also might not put the right questions on the survey. You don’t know about the problems you don’t know about, so you can’t ask the question because you don’t even understand it. the survey does not tell you why something is going on. This process allows you to understand the why and the dynamics of the organization because it’s qualitative and tells you the nuances and how you might think of changing it. The surveys are static and dependent on you understanding what questions to ask. That’s the value of a qualitative upward feedback process. I don’t think surveys are useless, but they are not useful for solving problems. They leave hard data with the senior team, and they have no way to become motivated to change it all. How does this process tie into HR practice? My observation about HR is that it’s better now than it was 20 or 30 years ago. But most HR people are still too focused on various specific tasks of HR. They ask, “Are we getting people hired?” However, the second question: “Are we hiring the right people?” They also often don’t get involved in the question of organization design, structure and process. This includes questions of whether the firm is organized well to get things done and even what the leadership capability of their senior team is. That’s a difficult conversation to have. So, this is a tool for HR to be able to get the things changed that need to be changed. Anything to add for people professionals? As an HR professional, this is a powerful way to think about organizations as systems that sometimes don’t allow open conversation and discussion of issues. Recognize that you, as an HR director, can do more than simply go to the general manager and say this is what’s wrong with the organization. You can do something much more powerful by learning to talk about it like a back-and-forth relationship. Do it on an ongoing basis, and in the process it becomes more powerful and influential as HR people truly become strategic partners. The people I’ve worked with are now recognized for doing something important in helping the organization become more efficacious and more human.

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Conversations: Michael Beer

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Alice Chen

It seems simple, but many organizations are missing out by ignoring internal dissent

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Alice Chen

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