My friend Genevieve is an outstanding HR professional and legendary consumer of fine chocolate. She has recently spent her time working on integrating two corporate cultures following a big merger. It’s not going well. “I’m stress-eating Lindt balls,” she confessed. “The other night, I ran out and ate a cocoa-flavoured lip balm, just so I could get through the last of the surveys.”
Genevieve is travelling the country, visiting her firm’s many offices and doing pulse surveys to see how everyone’s doing six months into the new regime. Apparently, they are not doing that well. The new leadership, it seems, is not getting it. The shiny new internal campaign to unite the workforce, Funding Our Future, has fallen flat, believed to be little more than an over-branded series of cost-cutting activities.
The “workforce optimization” is underway, and the rumours about who’s getting whacked and when are swirling ferociously through unofficial Slack rooms and Facebook Groups, one of which is ingeniously named “Finding Our Resumes”. Hiring is frozen, expenditures over $1,000 require a papal edict, micro-cultures are being bulldozed with apparently random reorganizations, and customers are beginning to wonder just what the heck is going on.
Now I don’t know for sure, but I’m going to bet that down the hall in the C-suite, they think things are going pretty well. Just a few months in and they have a great plan; they’ve got some early wins for the shareholders with cost reduction; they visited all the locations and shared the vision and talked with the grassroots. Sure, it’ll be difficult, and some hard decisions are going to have to be made, but no pain, no gain, right?
As Genevieve licked the inside of a Snickers wrapper, she wondered why the C-suite just wasn’t listening to what the employees were concerned about. “They’re using 20-year-old CRM tools and getting yelled at because they can’t find the information our customers ask for,” she explained. “The new leaders promised strategic investments to modernize, then cancelled the CRM upgrades. How is that funding our frigging future?”
A disconnect indeed. Genevieve is perfectly correct that the Corporate Overlords are not doing the right things, and also that they don’t have a particularly accurate view of the lived reality inside their organization. But here’s the thing: they honestly think they were listening.
The Executive Listening Myth
After all, these executives spent almost a month criss-crossing North America. They held town halls, breakfasts, meet and greets, site tours, client dinners, and lunch and learns. How could they not have heard what employees were saying? Here’s how: the whole thing was carefully orchestrated to ensure that exactly the opposite happened.
The minute the travel schedule was published, the local leadership went into DefCon 5 to make sure every second of the visit was tighter than a new pair of Spanx. They met the plane with a hired car, which drove the Overlords to the executive suite for a lovely sit-down, followed by a walking tour of a floor or two and maybe the production area.
Hand-picked managers gave quick tours of their domains, spreading the positivity on thick and sweet. Selfies happened. Intranets were updated. Newsletters were written.
Then off to a town hall to deliver the gospel-du-jour, take a few planted questions and have lunch with the high-potentials (that’s those people chosen for their high potential to fit nicely into the prevailing management culture – in other words, a room full of low-risk Tiggers).
Afternoon featured some planning meetings with the folks who need to speak nonsense to power to keep their jobs in the new regime, and next, to a scrumptious steak dinner with a few carefully selected deliriously happy clients, and back to the hotel for a celebratory night cap.
After 14 hours of listening their butts off, these Overlords had pages of notes, tons of warm feelings and feedback that utterly confirmed they were on the right track. They felt good about the universe as they popped their pillow chocolates into their mouths before bed.
Across town, Genevieve was chewing stale fun-size Hallowe’en candy and reading the town hall feedback surveys. Like her colleagues around the company, she was the one attending the team meetings and walking the darker areas of the sites, where the dissenters can be found. Where things aren’t rosy and lovely. Where there are difficult questions, frightened workers and pockets of dysfunction older than most of the management consultants who dreamed up Funding Our Future.
Executives are Micro-Managed Battery Hens
The problem in these situations is not that executives didn’t listen; they weren’t allowed to listen. It’s time to stop treating our Overlords like micro-managed battery hens.
What if we sent them each an access card to all of our facilities and invited them to just turn up? What if we let them roam freely for an afternoon through our plants, warehouses, offices and stores? What if town halls were reversed and employees presented to executives instead of the other way around? How about we invited them to call up any customer on the list and see how it’s going? That, my friends, is a free-range executive.
Most senior executives I know are desperate for an accurate, unmediated, nuanced view of their organizations. The thing they fear most is the thing they don’t see coming, and the smart ones understand that their employees and customers are the early warning system for sh*t storms. If that is your leadership, stop handling them and let them go free-range. If that is not your leadership, go find a new job.
As for Genevieve, she’s starting a new role at a new company next month and has been celebrating with hand-dipped truffles from a chocolate boutique.
Related Posts (or not)
Let’s End Time-Sucking, Money-Wasting Executive Retreats
How to Spot Your Internal Influencers
BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help organizations build their brands through great conversations with employees and customers
Drop me a line at ewilliams(at)candlerchase.com
Follow me @bizmkter
But don’t you think the Overlords like the snow job? It makes them feel safe and warm and all that affirmation gives them plausible credibility. Problem, what problem?
Those would be ostriches.
Overlord, ostrich – distinction without a difference. Unless you want to call them mushrooms.