Here is my April Greensboro News & Record column:

            It’s an election year and we’re faced with local, state, and national candidates who all want to be our leaders.  It’s hard work to engage in productive discussions about our choices because leadership is a context and value laden phenomenon and we all have our own ideas as to what it actually involves.  It’s a bit like the Rorschach psychological test – what we see says more about us than the ink blots.       

A shared metaphor can simplify complexity and promote dialogue. What I call “multi-body-part leadership” is fun to use, helpful in evaluating candidates, and promotes communication.  It involves the head (logic, data & rational analysis), the heart (feelings & emotions) and the feet (taking action).  We’ll look at some actual local and state leaders through these lenses but, first, some behavioral dimensions.    

Size matters.  Big headed leaders can suffer from analysis paralysis and are often blind to the emotional impact of their decisions on others.  Leaders with oversized hearts have a hard time compromising and are susceptible to hurt feelings which can lead to behavior that is seen by others as irrational.  Leaders with big feet have a ready-fire-aim orientation, value action over thinking or feeling, and can take followers north when the best direction is south. 

Balance matters.  The most effective leaders have the ability to ground their decisions in data, the emotional intelligence to access, monitor, and process their feelings, and are able to stimulate action and get things done. No leader is perfect; they all have a preference for one dimension, but the most effective understand their strengths and have the skills to compensate for their weaknesses.

Former Greensboro mayor Bill Knight is the poster child for big headed leadership and the emotional turmoil triggered by his plans to reopen the White Street Landfill a provides a classical example of head/heart conflict.  Knight, a sincere and disciplined public servant is a creature of his training and experience.  He is a Certified Public Accountant, a profession grounded in logic, data, and objective analysis.  He concluded that Greensboro, at least in the short term, could experience badly needed savings, by not shipping our solid waste out of town. 

In a classic conflict reminiscent of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek drama, Knight with Spock-like logic pressed on with his cost saving mantra while area residents along with former mayors Johnson and Holliday, responded emotionally like Spock’s philosophical nemesis Doctor McCoy.  Whether current mayor Perkins will emerge as the more balanced Kirk-like leader remains to be seen, but the lesson is clear.  Effective leaders do not go directly from the head to the feet without taking the heart into account.

This past January, North Carolina Governor Beverly Purdue unexpectedly announced her decision to not seek reelection.  Driven by her values and plagued by a republican dominated legislature, she exercised her veto power a record 16 times before making her announcement.  Her popularity was sinking, her re-electability was in peril, and her passion for quality public education was victimized by budget cuts.  With, deflated expectations and unwillingness to compromise, she behaved in congruence with the wounded emotions of the big hearted and abruptly announced her decision.

The back room deal making, focus on task, lack of concern over process, and do whatever it takes to get the votes, style of Melvin “Skip” Alston is a prime example of big footed leadership. To give him his due, Alston, now in his final term as chairman of the Guilford County commissioners, was often able to get things through the system.  There is, however, a difference between alley fighting political skills and authentic leadership.  Effective leaders are as good at process as they are at task and end up with much better decisions and true commitment.

Before we cast our ballets this year we need to take the time to assess the body part balance of the candidates.  The best of all worlds would be if we could do organ transplants and create hybrid leaders with the logical analytical skills of past Mayor Knight, the emotional value congruence of Governor Purdue, and the get it accomplished orientation of Chairman Alston. 

We obviously can’t build multi-body-part candidates.  What we can do – whether we’re voting for county commissioners, congressional representatives, governor, or president of our country – is seek candidates with balance.  We don’t need more one dimensional distortions.

I’ve had a request for some data on the effects of layoffs on those who remain in organizations.  This is an article I wrote for both practitioners and academics that does that.  I condensed it, and although a bit long for a blog, it makes a strong case for strong leadership.

 Abstract

This article summarizes both academic and practitioner based research on the prevalence and ineffectiveness of downsizing as a response to global economic stress. It points out that a crucial leadership challenge involves re-recruiting layoff survivors and revitalizing downsized organizations. It offers leadership strategies to move organizations back to productivity and presents representative best practice case studies.

Organizations today are experiencing a global pandemic of downsizing.  In order to successful lead organizations through the trauma of layoffs; leaders need new and innovative approaches to organizational revitalization.  Downsizing has become an increasingly popular strategic intervention to reduce costs and increase productivity.  Rugaber (2009) reports that, in the US alone, mass layoffs of 50 or more people totaled 21,137 in 2008, a year that also included the most job losses since World War II.  Layoffs in the technology sector increased 72 percent over 2007 and the trend is continuing, according to a report by Challenger, Gray & Christmas (Bartash, 2009).  An emerging critical issue for those who lead these organizations is the formulation of strategies that deal with the debilitating effects of downsizing on those employees who remain.

A study of 4,172 employees representing 318 companies who had kept their jobs after layoffs (Business Wire, 2008) yielded some attention-grabbing results. Key findings were that 74 percent of these survivors reported a decrease in their productivity; 81 percent stated that customer service had declined; and 77 percent saw more mistakes and errors being made.  The three most common words used to describe survivors’ feelings (62 percent of respondents) were guilt, anxiety, and anger. This study by Leadership IQ, is consistent with an ever-increasing stream of downsizing research that provides compelling evidence that leaders of downsized organizations need to pay very careful attention to those who remain.  Here are some highlights of that research.

Tenuous Connection to Financial Performance. A longitudinal study (Dorfman, 1991) followed sixteen large restructurings for five years and found that stock performance in these firms trailed competitors by an average of 26 percent. Another (Casico, 2002) used ROI as an index and found no evidence that downsizing actually worked and that, in many cases, productivity actually decreased. In a pioneering study, DeMuse, Bergman & Vanderheiden (2004) tracked five financial indices of fortune 100 companies that went through downsizing– profit margin, return on assets, return on equity, asset efficiency, and market to book ratios – and compared the results, over a 12 year period, to companies that did not downsize.  The downsized companies generally reported lowered results during the first few years with improvement eventually returning to the level of the non-downsized firms. 

 No Significant Increase in Productivity and Reduced Risk Taking. A survey of 1,468 downsized firms by the Society for Human Resource Management (Ferris, Rosen & Barnum, 1996) reported that employee productivity did not increase and often worsened.  In a recent study (Prime, 2009)  indicated that a survey by CareerBuilders reported that 47 percent of layoff survivors had taken on additional work and 30 percent felt burned out. Cascio (2009) indicated that 58 percent of human resource professionals reported a deterioration of morale and a decrease in loyalty after layoffs.  My own research (Noer, 2009) found that, at the very time organizations needed employees to take risks and increase innovation, survivors tended to do the opposite: keep their heads down and hunker down in the trenches.   Another danger of downsizing is that turnover of those employees organizations want to retain will increase. Stjern (2009) reports that a two year study by of firms wishing to be included in Fortune Magazine’s list of the 100 best companies to work for, found that those with layoffs experienced 2.6 percent more voluntary turnover than those with no layoffs

Here is the leadership challenge for organizations using downsizing as a strategy to deal with economic decline and uncertainty.  The research, both academic and practitioner based is overwhelmingly clear: those who remain, the survivors, do not automatically rebound, nor does productivity automatically increase.  Organizations continue to spend time and money helping those who leave. The 2008-2009 edition of Lee, Hecht, and Harrison’s Severance and Separation Benchmark Practices Survey of 1,072 firms indicates, despite current conditions, that 65 percent have maintained their severance policies and 19 percent actually increased them (American Society of Employees, 2009).  The percentage offering outplacement services to displaced exempt employees also increased to 55 percent. While the focus on those who leave is important from both a humanitarian and, to a degree for those who remain, much more strategic effort needs to be expended on a far more important – in terms of competitive advantage – population: those who remain.  Here are two very important activities that global leaders need to assure take place in order that downsizings have the intended results

Make certain those who leave are treated with dignity, fairness, and respect. The perception of the way people are treated on the way out has a lot to do with the commitment and productivity of those who remain.  In an extensive best practice study of the automotive industry (Cameron & Mishra, 1991) it was confirmed that the way downsizings were implemented had a direct impact on post-layoff productivity and quality.  Fredrick Herzberg (1964) developed a theory that divides motivational factors into those that truly motivate (such as recognition and satisfaction with the work itself) and those that simply keep employees from becoming demotivated (the perception of fair pay and working conditions).  He called the latter hygiene factors, and the way survivors perceive the treatment of those who leave – the process of downsizing – is just that: a hygiene factor.  It won’t automatically ameliorate survivor symptoms, but it will greatly facilitate the odds of recovery.  Organizational leaders can insure a double win by assuring that those who implement layoffs do so in a manner that maximizes survivor hygiene. The first win is ethical; treating those who leave with dignity and fairness is the right thing to do.  The second win is strategic; it will help the organization rebound more rapidly.

There has been a substantial amount of research e.g. (Brockner, 1986) that connects the prognosis of layoff survivor recovery with the process of downsizing. The key variables are fairness (the selection criteria); equity (the degree to which layoffs are spread across a levels and functions); participation (opportunities for input and choice such as pay cuts, and job sharing); and caretaking (severance, prior notice, and respectful treatment).  In order to avoid untended consequences that could result in significant erosion of any layoff benefits, top executives need to exercise personal oversight over the process.  This will prevent, often well-intentioned, managers from causing irreparable harm by implementing processes such as giving no prior notice and escorting long term employees out of the building.

Empower employees, train managers in helping skills. Researcher Mishra and several colleagues have engaged in multiple downsizing research projects with a number of manufacturing and service organizations over the past twenty years.  They have followed some individual organizations for more than a decade. In a recent update (Mishra, Mishra, & Spreitzer, 2009) they report that the most successful have focused on building trust and empowering their employees.  They point out the necessity of training front line managers in empowerment and communication skills. The Leadership IQ survey (Business Wire, 2008) reinforced this message, indicating that employees who rated their supervisors high in visibility, approachability and candor were 72 percent less likely to report a decrease in productivity. A study of downsized hospitals (Chadwick, Hunter & Walston, 2004) indicated a positive correlation between those hospitals where supervisors focused on surviving employees’ emotional needs and positive financial outcomes.  A study by Kenexa Research Institute (2008) found that key themes in reengaging layoff survivors were building confidence in leadership, helping mange stress, and instilling optimism. The message for global leaders from these studies is that first line management represents a key strategic tool for revitalizing layoff survivors. I have found that training managers in basic helping skills and requiring them to meet individually with their employees is an extremely high leverage intervention that helps both the manager and the employee.  

In order to provide a real world perspective on this research, here are some brief examples, along with lessons learned, of what organizations have done. These are from a Best Practices in Leading Downsized Organizations conference hosted by The Center for Creative Leadership (Noer & Bunker, 1997).

• A regional Telephone Company.  The CEO was instrumental in insisting that the post-layoff culture be a major component of the new strategy. Senior managers were engaged in developing processes to communicate a new, shorter term, psychological employment contract. Sessions were implemented to facilitate venting and emotional release for all layoff survivors. The “lessons learned” were that layoffs are not a one time event; they need to be viewed within the context of a long term strategy.
• The Canadian Federal Government.  Beginning with key managers, a series of workshops were held to help leaders deal with their own survivor issues and form a network across departments to facilitate employee transitions. After seven workshops the “lessons learned” were that the workshops were very powerful and useful but networking required continuing effort.
• A large Division of a Pharmaceutical corporation.  Under the leadership of the top divisional executive, a planning and implementation team was formed to deal both with downsizing and the re-recruitment of the survivors.  “Lessons learned” were that key messages and communication need to be simple, clear, and redundant.
• A major Aerospace Corporation.  A top executive took the lead and facilitated a pilot off-site discussion among organizational leaders concerning their own survivor feelings.  The “lessons learned” were that the process was “freeing” and managers were better able to respond to their employees.
• A Large Telecommunications Corporation.  All mangers of mangers were required to attend a one day workshop designed to help them understand survivor symptoms and equip them to meet with their direct reports. “Lessons learned” were that the workshops had mixed results and top executives underestimated the extent that downsizing led to anger, fear, and mistrust among the managerial population.  

As global downsizing continues as primary strategy for reducing costs and responding to economic uncertainty, leaders need to formulate specific plans and exercise ethical and operational oversight for dealing with those who remain.  The research is clear, without paying specific attention to survivors; organizations will not realize the benefits of downsizing.  Innovative, entrepreneurial organizations will have the ability to adjust to a new psychological employment contract that will allow them to compete in the fast moving, temporary business environment of the future.  Success in this new world requires both employees and managers to assume new, often risky roles.

Academics, consultants, and managers need to focus their efforts on helping organizations and individuals cope with the productivity hindering effects of layoffs.  The research is clear; layoffs do not achieve their initial goals and often boomerang and leave the organization worse off then before the reductions.  Since downsizing is an increasing global response to economic decline, those organizations that are most successful in re-recruiting layoff survivors and revitalizing downsized organizations will have a distinct competitive advantage.    

 References

American Society of Employees, “Firms Focus on Severance Study Finds.” April, 2009. http://www.aseonline.org/2009/April/FirmsFocusedonSeveranceOutplacementStudyFi/tabid/6654/Default.aspx

 Bartash, J. “High Tech Layoffs Climb in First Quarter.” Physong, April 6, 2009.  http://www.physorg.com/news158261667.html

 Brockner, J., and others. “Layoffs, Equity Theory, and Work Performance: Further Evidence of Survivor Guilt.” Academy of Management Journal, 1986, 29, 373-384.

 Business Wire, “Leadership IQ Study: Don’t Expect Layoff Survivors to Be Grateful.” December 10, 2008. http://www.findarticles.com/particlesmi_m0EINis_2008_

Cameron, K., & Mishra, A. “Best Practices in White-Collar Downsizing: Managing Contradictions.” Executive, 1991, 5(3), 57-72.

 Cascio, W. “Use and Management of Downsizing as a Corporate Strategy.” SHERM Foundation: Executive Briefing. September, 2009.

 Cascio, W. Responsible Restructuring: Creative and Profitable Alternatives to Layoffs. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2002.

 Chadwick, C., Hunter, L., & Walston, S. “Effects of Downsizing Practices on the Performance of Hospitals.” Strategic Management Journal, 2004, 25, 405-427.

 DeMuse, K., Bergman, T., & Vanderheiden, P. “New Evidence Regarding Organizational Downsizing and a Firm’s Financial Performance.” Journal of Managerial Issues, 2004 (16) 42-63Ddorfman, J. “Heard on the Street.” Wall Street Journal, Dec 10, 1991, pp. C1-C2.

 Ferris, G., Rosen, D., & Barnum, D. Handbook of Human Resources Management. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996.

 Herzberg, F. “The Motivation-Hygiene Concept and Problems of Manpower.” Personnel Administration, 1964, 27(1), 3-7.

 Kenexa Research Institute, “Priority Number One in the Aftermath of Layoffs: Reenergizing Employees.” Employee Insight Report, 2008, (35).

 Mishra, A., Mishra, K., & Spreitzer, G. “How to Downsize your Company without Downsizing Morale.” MIT Slone Management Review, April, 2009.

 Noer, D. Healing the Wounds: Overcoming the Trauma of Layoffs and Revitalizing Downsized Organizations. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009. 

 Noer, D., & Bunker, K. (Eds.) “Best Practices in Leading Downsized Organizations.” Center for Creative Leadership Conference Proceedings, April, 1995, Greensboro: North Carolina.

 Prime CB, “Thirty Percent of Layoff Survivors Feel Burned-Out.” May, 28, 2009. http://www.primecb.com/30-percent-of-layoff-survivors-feel-burned-out/  

 Rugaber, C. “Mass Layoffs of 50 or more Workers.” AP World Stream, January 28, 2009. http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1A1-D960B3MO0.html

 Stjern, A. “Effects of Survivor Guilt Syndrome in the Workplace.” Associated Content, June 24, 2009.  http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1877291/effects_of_survivor_guilt_syndrome_pg2_pg2.html?cat=55

1. The overwhelming consensus of research is that layoff survivors don’t work harder because they feel lucky to have a job; they are angry, risk averse, with much lowered productivity. They don’t automatically snap back and that’s where training can add significant value.
2. Training line managers in basic helping skills – empathetic listening, non-judgmental reflection of feelings, and coaching is enormously beneficial in facilitating a return to productivity. It has a dual benefit: it equips managers with the tools necessary to authentically communicate and re-recruit their employees, and it helps managers deal with their own layoff survivor symptoms. 
3. This is almost always a high leverage intervention. A one to two day workshop format with role plays, feedback, and facilitated practice has amazing “bang for the buck” both in providing managers with the requisite skills and in demonstrating the relevance of the training function.

1.  Myth:  During downsizing, managerial communication needs to be clear, planned, objective, and structured.  Expressing uncertainly, ambiguity, or dealing in feelings and emotions is not useful.

Reality:  Feelings and emotions are the currency of the managerial realm. Surviving employees are attempting to deal with a toxic brew of productivity hindering emotions and need to feel authorized to talk about them.

HR Response:  Employees would much rather have managers tell them that they don’t know something as opposed to having them not say anything or make something up. HR can model the way and facilitate communication processes that demonstrate the necessary authenticity and empathy.

 2.  Myth: In tough times, the most effective managers “suck it up,” are tough minded, brutally honest, and don’t tolerate “touchy-feely” distractions. 

Reality: “Sucking it up” is precisely the wrong strategy for dealing with downsizing, change, and transition.  It is a defense mechanism – a form of evasion that anchors behavior in the past and prevents productive engagement and personal growth.

HR Response: Leadership in the post-layoff environment is a helping, not a controlling relationship, and requires reaching out, not closing down and hiding behind a facade of toughness and control.  Honesty grounded in a helping orientation is an absolute necessity. Honesty grounded in “brutality” may help the manager vent his or her own anger, but it will ultimately harm the manager, the employee, and the organization. The good news is that managers can be taught helping skills and with coaching can form the necessary empathetic relationships needed to re-recruit employees and restore organizational productivity. HR leaders should strongly consider helping managers brush up and apply basic helping skills.

3. Myth: Employees who keep their jobs – survivors – are better off than those who must leave – victims.

Reality:  Both those who stay and those who leave are, in a sense, “victims” of the paradigm shift to the new psychological employment contract.  Despite, often significant, economic issues, some who leave are able to re-frame their job loss, move away from victimhood, and discover a wake-up call. 

HR Response: HR leaders need to re-conceptualize career planning to more of an inside-out/outside-in process.  This will require the creativity and flexibility necessary to help employees take a broader, multi-organizational, and often multi-occupational approach to life and career planning.

A coaching client is facing some major stress issues because he believes his boss is pushing him to work even harder than his normal frantic pace.  I think there are some major unintended consequences to this continual pressure.

 I was once asked to comment on, what one reporter perceived, as people working excessively long hours and sacrificing their family time in order to hold on to a job during tough economic times. The reporter’s question was, “Is this a trend that will continue after the recession ends?  I hope not because there are some major unintended consequences that will harm both the employee and the organization.

 My experience is that, while employees may work longer hours and sacrifice more in the short term, they also build up a reservoir of resentment and repressed entitlement that will not serve their organizations well in the long term. 

 In the book, I call this “gunnysacking.”  It is a term for storing up repressed anger and frustration that – usually in response to a seemingly mild issue – results in an inappropriately strong and counter-productive response.

 Employers that expect their employees to keep working long hours and make personal sacrifices are sitting on a keg of dynamite.  Fear is not a good motivator and sooner or later, they will either snap or burn out and simply go through the motions.  Either way employers may get their body but certainly not their spirit or their creativity.

 What it will take to turn today’s organizations around are employees who are there because they enjoy the work and serving customers, not burned out, one dimensional employees who work excessively only because they can’t find another job and are afraid of getting fired.

Gunnysacking is a term for storing up hurt feelings, anger, affronts, and unresolved conflicts, and, when the weight of the psychological gunnysack becomes too heavy to bear, unloading it, often to an inappropriate degree in an inappropriate context.  We all gunnysack to some extent but, most psychologically healthy people find ways to keep their bags relatively light. 

Organizational leaders are not immune to gunnysacking.  I have discovered that a surprising number operate for many years under the oppressive burden of a heavy bag and use a crisis mode of operation as an authorization to unleash long repressed feelings of anger and frustration by figuratively beating their fellow employees about the head with their overloaded gunnysacks.  In layoffs this takes the form of those in power “getting” both functions and people that frustrated them in the past but were protected by a more tolerant organizational culture. 

 Gunnysacking is unhealthy for both those who practice it and for the prognosis of organizational survival.  Leaders who see it happening need to move quickly and stop it. They need to help those wielding those heavy bags find better ways to lighten them. If that won’t work, they need to carefully consider the costs in terms of productivity and morale, of retaining people who are more concerned with pursuing a personal vendetta than helping the organization recover.

 If, in the heat of the battle for organizational survival, you are tempted to form a coalition to “get” a person or a function for the wrong reasons, resist it. It won’t help you, the person you are targeting, or, most importantly, the organization.  If you find yourself the victim of gunnysacking, don’t try to get even; that only compounds the problem.  Try to discover what past event lies unresolved in the other person’s bag and muster up the courage to directly confront the issue.  Gunnysacking is alive and well in today’s downsized organizations.  Effective leaders need to move rapidly to confront it and personally refuse to succumb to its temptations.

Today’s organizations are populated by angry, demoralized, and risk averse layoff survivors. The skills it takes to re-recruit and help these wounded survivors move back into productivity and help them focus on customer needs instead of their own survivor symptoms are not the traditional planning, directing, and organizing skills of the past. The challenge is that moving managers into helping relationship in tough times is an against-the-grain activity with some significant cultural barriers.  Here are the top four.

The Barrier of Macho, Controlling Cultures: In many organizations, “real” (non-staff, line managers) did not reflect feelings, deal in empathetic dialogue, or ask for feedback. They made decisions, analyzed, and controlled. This was particularly true in financial service and marketing oriented organizations. In today’s world there is a direct connection between helping employees overcome layoff survivor symptoms and the bottom line.  Once managers make this connection they embrace a skill set that will help move the organization forward.  

The Barrier of Left-Brain Bias: The right side of the brain controls our emotional and intuitive perceptions and behaviors. The left brain is involved in analytical, rational thought. In the United States and most other Western cultures, organizations have a strong left-brain bias that results in an overemphasis on formal logic, analysis, and rationality.  In most organizations, even with the increasing evidence of the utility of emotional intelligence, IQ trumps EQ and helping skills are much less valued than controlling and analyzing skills.

The Barrier of Management Science: This is not scientific management as defined by Frederick Taylor (people can be taught to work systematically and can be factored into the production equation similar to machines). Rather, it has to do with the inferiority complex felt by business schools and management training institutions in relation to scientists and their subsequent overreaction as they tried to be “scientific”  Anything that was intuitive, feeling, or smacked of our unique human spirit was driven out of business education for fear that it would look weak and not seem scientific. In an era of downsizing managers need to be equipped with helping skills because controlling and evaluating won’t help heal the layoff survivor wounds.

The Barrier of Fear of Softness: At the zenith of the old paradigm there was a reaction to anything that was deemed “soft.” This included feelings, relationships, empathy, and anything that was “touchy-feely.” Organizations still talk about human resources and training as the “soft” side of management. But not only are people issues as real as financial and production figures, they require just as much skill and strength. In addition, they require authenticity and the risk of self-disclosure. This is much “harder” than hiding behind a memo, a stack of figures, or a quantitative decision matrix.

I’ve posted some of these activities before but, at a readers request, here are all ten. The difference between those organizations that will make it that fail will be leaders with the ability to facilitate transitions:  their own, the organization’s and those of their fellow employees.  What follows are ten very specific and prescriptive activities that will facilitate the development of these essential skills.

• Get involved in the leadership of a volunteer organization.  Pick one that does not receive funding or support from your organization.  Helping manage a volunteer organization is a powerful feedback and developmental experience.  It removes you from your positional power base and allows you to assess your true impact
• Take evening courses or sign up for special programs that teach helping skills..  The macro-leadership competency of the future will be the ability to help yourself, your organization, and your employees facilitate change and transition.  The so called soft-skills are really the hard-skills, and certainly the relevant skills!  Management will become a helping profession and managers will need the same kind of helping skills as other professionals in the field.   
• Complete a professional 360-degree feedback instrument.  By professional, I mean that you should use an instrument that has a history, validity standards, and norms.  Have the results interpreted by someone trained in helping you understand what it means and doesn’t mean.    
• Attend a professional leadership training program.  This type of training is different from a program on marketing, quality, or performance management.  It should focus on intra-personal insight, inter-personal skills, and the systems perspective necessary to develop a culture that leads to organizational learning.  There are some very good in-house programs and many excellent external offerings.
• Find a Truth Teller.  It is particularly important for top managers to cultivate and use truth tellers.  A truth teller is someone in the organization you can rely on to, as is said in baseball “call them they way they see them.”  Truth tellers provide unfiltered feedback.  They have three characteristics: they are tuned in to what is going on at all levels of the organization; they are secure and have no personal ax to grind; and you trust them.
• Attend Laboratory Training.  These sessions used to be called T-groups.  The bottom line is that this kind of laboratory training is a very powerful way to get the depth of feedback that will lead to self-awareness.  It is important to assure yourself that the facilitators are professional and the organization sponsoring the session has a track record with organizational managers.
• Become familiar with future search technology.  These large system-change processes go for the jugular in stimulating the learning organization.  If you want to jump-start your understanding of learning in the collective, you need to get on the bandwagon.
• Learn how to have a dialogue.  A dialogue is different from a discussion, an argument, a debate, or a business meeting.  The dialogue process is very important in developing learning organizations and is central to collective learning.  There are seminars and workshops.  You can also find some consultants who can teach you and your organization dialogue skills.
• Get active in your professional association.  Don’t just attend the national meeting – become a worker, serve on committees, pass out the literature, do time in the information booth, set up the chairs!  The higher up you are, the more the value of the grunt work.  It forces you to see an organizational system from a different perspective and helps you rethink your own skills and assumptions as to what constitutes value-added.
• Set up an intensive personal feedback project.  One option involves retaining an external consultant to nearly overwhelm you with feedback from a wide range of data points.  This is a very powerful process.  You can’t escape valid data, and a skilled consultant will help you understand it and do something about it.

Layoffs continue to be a part of the human resources landscape.  A current example is the planned merger of AT&T and T-Mobile.  If it is consummated downsizing is sure to follow.  I find it amazing that with the layoff history of the telecommunications industry there is no apparent strategy to develop a resilient, self-empowered workforce.

 Instead, the strategy continues to be to make employees dependent on the organization and that dependency will most certainly result in layoff survivor sickness which, in turn, will result in decreased productivity and less creativity.

 As the folk song goes, “When will they ever learn?”  I think the old employment contract is very deeply ingrained in our human resource culture.  It seems easier to control a dependent workforce and control and dependency is the name of the game in the old psychological employment contact.  I think most big companies are afraid of an empowered, independent workforce and that fear will cause them to loose good employees and not have the resilience necessary to survive the continual waves of downsizing.

Employees at all levels are struggling with dashed hopes, bruised egos, fear, anxiety, and mistrust.  In order to help rebuild productivity and commitment, business graduates need to get their hands dirty.  They need to let go of the cult of rational analysis and understand that the managerial currency of the realm is feelings and emotions. 

Management as a profession of scientific, clear, and antiseptic methodology was a myth in the early days of Fredrick Taylor’s “Scientific Management,” and is totally irrelevant to the needs of today’s organizations.   Many new managers, particularly newly minted, inexperienced MBA’s and undergraduate business majors come to the business world with the expectation that it is a place of rationality, subject to objective analysis and thoughtful, quantitatively based decision making.  This is somewhat a result of their own naiveté, but more from being subjected to quantitatively biased curriculum and the teaching of management professors who have spent their entire lives in classrooms – from grade school through graduate school, then into the role of teacher – and have never actually worked in a business.  Those business professors who have industry experience, too often gained it during the “good old days” when things were more predictable and people were seen as long term assets to be nurtured and developed over a career as opposed to the current paradigm of people as costs to be reduced.

When organizations actually had money for management training programs, they could deprogram business graduates and teach them relevant survival skills.  Today, they can no longer afford this luxury and have every right to expect that business graduates come to them equipped to deal with the real issues. Here are three things business schools need to do in order to be relevant to today’s business organizations.

• Move beyond the traditional – usually fragmented and disliked – organizational behavior course, into actually teaching helping, coaching, and transition facilitation skills. This requires both a realignment with helping professions such as psychology and sociology, and practicums to actually use and get feedback on these skills.
• Rectify the lopsided imbalance of head skills with an equal dose of heart skills.  As safe and sterile as it may seem, managers can’t analyze people out of their pain.  They need to connect with them at the heart and not the head. When employees are in the midst of a crisis of identity and purpose, they are not interested in strategic analysis, demand curves, or decision trees.  They need “high touch, low tech.”
• Find faculty who have the ability and desire to understand and deal with the real issues faced by organizations. Business organizations are struggling to come to grips with a new, short term, provisional, psychological employment contract. Unfortunately, tenured, research oriented, quantitatively focused, business school faculty members are often unable to generate the necessary empathy and requisite transition facilitation skills to be of much help to students who will face this “real world.”