It’s Time Employees Had a Voice
Many employees find they can no longer trust their company’s commitment—that is, top management’s commitment—to create both economic and social value for stakeholders. Employee activism is on the rise, particularly in Silicon Valley. Microsoft workers protested its cloud computing deal with the US Immigration Service following the agency’s separation of children from their parents at the US-Mexican border. Amazon employees demanded it stop selling facial recognition software to law enforcement.
But encouraging employees to voice their values, as Google did, can be dangerous unless embedded in a well-thought-out and managed learning and governance process. A Google researcher said she was fired after criticizing an artificial intelligence system used in hiring for its inherent bias against minorities and, according to CNN, there have been many other such incidents at Google.
The mistrust is widespread and consequential. According to the 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer, “None of the four societal institutions [we] study—government, business, NGOs and media—is trusted…, a wake-up call for our institutions to embrace a new way of effectively building trust.” Forty percent of employees in Fortune 1000 companies say that management’s handling of social issues influences their decision to work for that company. Low trust and commitment damage organizational performance.[1]
Why do senior executives fail to give employees a voice?
Prerogative. Management fears losing control and therefore resists sharing strategic decision making with employees, although employees have strategically valuable information that management often lacks. Boeing employees knew about problems with the MAX 37 well before the crisis hit.
Purpose. Management’s dominant assumption is that a firm’s purpose is to increase short-term shareholder value. At Boeing, that overruled the stated mission to build safe airplanes.
Psychology. Like all of us, top executives tend to avoid feedback that will disconfirm their view of their own effectiveness.
Assumptions. Typical top-down management assumes that lower levels neither want to make a difference nor have much wisdom to offer. Yet senior teams that have given lower levels a voice are often surprised at the quality of the feedback they receive. “Better than some of the consultants we have hired,” said one leader.
Yes, a lot stands in the way of giving employees a strategic voice. Thus, a mere 35% of employees feel that their CEO has “his or her finger on the pulse of employee attitudes towards important societal issues.” Somewhere between 34 and 58 percent fear retaliation if they speak up.
Clearly, it’s time for leaders to enable their employees to speak truth to power safely and productively, if only to avoid self-inflicted disasters such as those at Wells Fargo and Boeing and Google’s recent embarrassment over firing employees for speaking up. What is required is honest, collective, and public conversations between senior management and those below.
Honest means that the whole truth is on the table for discussion.
Collective means that leaders and key internal and external stakeholders are involved and learn together what is working and not working.
Public means that relevant stakeholders understand the conversation process and learn from top management what it heard (the good, bad, and sometimes ugly) and what it plans to do in response.
While I am very sympathetic to unions for companies that have failed to orchestrate an honest conversation with their employees about their frustrations, management can be proactive in giving employees a voice. Over the past 30 years, my colleagues and I have developed a structured governance and learning process (with a prescribed sequence of steps and ground rules) to enable these difficult conversations. Our decades of research show that, in the hands of courageous, purposeful, values-driven leaders, this process helps an organization deliver both economic value (profits) and social value. The process increases trust, commitment, and performance simultaneously. (For details, see my book Fit to Compete.)
Design Principles for Your Governance and Learning Process
The principles below, derived from our research, can guide leaders who want to develop their own governance and learning system to enable honest conversations.
Commit to a higher purpose. The CEO and senior team have to agree that the business’s purpose is to create economic value for shareholders and social value for employees, customers, partners, community, and society. Otherwise, attempts at honest conversation won’t surface the misalignments between aspiration and reality that undermine strategy.
Iterate between advocacy and inquiry:
Advocate your strategy for creating economic and social value.
Launch an inquiry into your organization’s alignment with that strategy, using a task force to interview a cross-section of relevant employees.
Based on the inquiry’s findings, advocate an action plan.
Launch another inquiry by a small representative group into that plan’s strengths and faults, then collaborate with that group to modify the plan as needed.
Communicate to the whole organization what you heard and your action plan. Only this can develop trust in the plan and commitment to it.
Make it safe to share the whole truth. The honest conversation must be disciplined and structured to prevent missteps like anger, blaming and defensiveness.
Reflect on the truth, diagnose root causes of problems, and develop a systemic action plan for change that will realign the organization—the whole system—with the espoused purpose, values, and strategy.
Make yourself (the leadership team) accountable to those who provided the feedback; that is, accountable for listening accurately and responding with an appropriate action plan.
Repeat the whole process periodically at the corporate and unit levels. This creates a partnership between top management and the organization.
Vince Forlenza, recently retired CEO of Becton Dickinson and one of many CEOs who have used this governance and learning process successfully, said that it “gave key people in the organization a voice. . . . I didn’t have the whole thing scoped out in my head. It was information from [the conversation] that enabled me to refine my thinking.”
Honest organization-wide conversation about your company’s highest aspirations is an important step in building a company worthy of the human spirit.
[1] Beer, M., & Eisenstat, R. (2000). “The Silent Killers of Strategy Execution and Learning,” Sloan Management Review. Vol. 4, Issue 4, pp. 29-40.