Evolutionary Leadership by Susan Annunzio

Author:Susan Annunzio
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: A Fireside Book

Motivating Constituencies

Speaking the unspeakables is powerful for your entire workforce. It helps your top 20%—the people who will lead your company and your change effort—uncover and get rid of the obstacles to change. It also allows them to stop working covertly and go public with the ways they already have been facilitating change.

As the covert behavior of the top 20% becomes sanctioned by leadership, the middle 60% of your workforce no longer needs to be afraid. You can spur them to partner with the top 20% in leading change.

Again, your goal is to convert one-fourth of that middle 60% to join your company’s top performers. Then you will have a potent third of your workforce pulling together in the same boat.

Finally, addressing the unspeakables shuts down the bottom 20%. Your critics can have little to say if you walk onto a stage and address your company’s problems honestly and publicly. Such a demonstration takes the wind out of their sails. They can’t sit and smugly criticize you if you criticize yourself where appropriate.

In fact, as leaders publicly confront the tough questions, they tend to attract the sympathy of the workforce—sympathy that the bottom 20% has been trying to monopolize. And as top leaders become sympathetic figures, the bottom 20% is left looking like whiners, haranguers, and complainers. Their lack of interest in constructive problem-solving becomes clear.

You win on all three counts.

But there are two audiences for whom speaking the unspeakables can have particular importance.

First, creating an environment of such candor is especially appealing to your Generation X and Y employees—the ultimate skeptics. These are the people who are most consciously aware of the contradictions between your words and your behavior. They are astute observers of behavior. They pick up on every falsehood. But they also appreciate every push for honesty.

Second, it can be a critical exercise for your senior leadership team. As a small group, they have their own set of unspeakable truths that need to be aired. There are things about their group dynamics and the way they operate that may need to be discussed: who’s friends with whom, what political issues are lurking beneath the surface at every meeting. Just as getting the corporate unspeakables out in the open can free the broader group of employees to work better as a team, getting the unspeakables out within this small group of leaders can help them develop a better, more productive relationship. In fact, until these issues are resolved at the top, it will be difficult to resolve the bigger issues among the broader workforce.

When two large professional services firms merged, we staged team-building forums for the top leadership of the two firms. The frank, open discussions were so effective in promoting teamwork that when a dictate came down to cut costs by firing people, the team was able to work together to find the savings elsewhere.

At DSM Desotech, Ken Lawson had a problem getting employees to think beyond doing it “Ken’s way.” But nowhere was that tendency more deeply rooted than it was in his senior management group.

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