Prepare a 300 word response and cite two references in responding to the following question. ONE CHAPTER FINDING AND ONE ADDITIONAL REFERENCE FOR EACH DISCUSSION.
Kotter, J. P. and Cohen, D. S. (2012). Leading Change. Boston, M.A., Harvard Business School Press. ISBN: 9781422186435
Bolman, L.G., and Deal, T.E. (2017), Reframing Organizations (6th ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Discussion 12
Why is it important to understand the organizational culture?
Discussion 13
Why are policies and procedures critical to an effective organization?
Discussion 14
What have you learned that will make you a better leader for the 21st century?
Finding chapters
12
discussion
Kotter
Chapters 9-10
13
discussion
Bolman & Deal chapters 15-19
14
Discussion
Bolman & Deal
Chapters 20-21 Kotter Chapters 11-12
Kotter chapter 9&10
Chap 9 Consolidating Gains and Producing More Change
When people registered for the annual management meeting, they were given a packet of materials that included a compilation of favorable press clippings from the prior twelve months. At the opening banquet, the CEO praised the 110 executives for all they had accomplished and ended the night with four toasts. During the first full day of the meeting, no fewer than six speakers identified recent achievements and saluted the audience. That night, an awards banquet gave plaques to fifteen people. The next morning, presentations on “best practices” dissolved into more back patting. In the evening, a famous singer entertained the group. If all that didn’t send egos into deep space, the final congratulatory speech by the CEO did.
Whatever sense of urgency that had existed at the senior management level died at that meeting. The implicit message was loud and clear. We can handle this tough market environment. Piece of cake. Look at all we’ve accomplished recently. We’re in great shape. So relax and enjoy the music.
Of course no one actually said, “Relax,” and the CEO was very much aware that much more was required to complete a transformation started a few years earlier. All he was trying to do was thank his executives and motivate them with sincere praise. But the message received by the audience was that the difficult work of change was behind them.
During the next year, a dozen change initiatives at that firm were put on hold or slowed down. A consultant’s recommendation for a major reorganization in one division was shelved. The third phase in a reengineering effort in another division was temporarily delayed. Suddenly people began having second thoughts about agreed-on alterations in corporate personnel practices. The investment bankers who were trying to divest one business were told to take a rest. Issues identified earlier and marked for action during that year were mostly ignored. By the time key change agents in top management fully realized what was happening, much of the momentum built up after three years of hard work was lost.
Major change often takes a long time, especially in big organizations. Many forces can stall the process far short of the finish line: turnover of key change agents, sheer exhaustion on the part of leaders, bad luck. Under these circumstances, short-term wins are essential to keep momentum going, but the celebration of those wins can be lethal if urgency is lost. With complacency up, the forces of tradition can sweep back in with remarkable force and speed.
Resistance: Always Waiting to Reassert Itself
Irrational and political resistance to change never fully dissipates. Even if you’re successful in the early stages of a transformation, you often don’t win over the self-centered manager who is appalled when a reorganization encroaches on his turf, or the narrowly focused engineer who can’t fathom why you want to spend so much time worrying about customers, or the stone-hearted finance executive who thinks empowering employees is ridiculous. You can drive these people underground or into the tall grass. But instead of changing or leaving, they will often sit there waiting for an opportunity to make a comeback. In celebrating short-term wins, change agents can give the opposition just that opportunity.
Sometimes the resisters actually organize the celebration, especially if they are shrewd and cynical. After a hyperventilated meeting, they give voice to the implicit message. I guess that proves we have won, they say. The sacrifices were significant, but we did accomplish something. Now let’s all take a deserved breather. If people really are
10. Consolidating Gains and Producing More Change
When people registered for the annual management meeting, they were given a packet of materials that included a compilation of favorable press clippings from the prior twelve months. At the opening banquet, the CEO praised the 110 executives for all they had accomplished and ended the night with four toasts. During the first full day of the meeting, no fewer than six speakers identified recent achievements and saluted the audience. That night, an awards banquet gave plaques to fifteen people. The next morning, presentations on “best practices” dissolved into more back patting. In the evening, a famous singer entertained the group. If all that didn’t send egos into deep space, the final congratulatory speech by the CEO did.
Whatever sense of urgency that had existed at the senior management level died at that meeting. The implicit message was loud and clear. We can handle this tough market environment. Piece of cake. Look at all we’ve accomplished recently. We’re in great shape. So relax and enjoy the music.
Of course no one actually said, “Relax,” and the CEO was very much aware that much more was required to complete a transformation started a few years earlier. All he was trying to do was thank his executives and motivate them with sincere praise. But the message received by the audience was that the difficult work of change was behind them.
During the next year, a dozen change initiatives at that firm were put on hold or slowed down. A consultant’s recommendation for a major reorganization in one division was shelved. The third phase in a reengineering effort in another division was temporarily delayed. Suddenly people began having second thoughts about agreed-on alterations in corporate personnel practices. The investment bankers who were trying to divest one business were told to take a rest. Issues identified earlier and marked for action during that year were mostly ignored. By the time key change agents in top management fully realized what was happening, much of the momentum built up after three years of hard work was lost.
Major change often takes a long time, especially in big organizations. Many forces can stall the process far short of the finish line: turnover of key change agents, sheer exhaustion on the part of leaders, bad luck. Under these circumstances, short-term wins are essential to keep momentum going, but the celebration of those wins can be lethal if urgency is lost. With complacency up, the forces of tradition can sweep back in with remarkable force and speed.
Resistance: Always Waiting to Reassert Itself
Irrational and political resistance to change never fully dissipates. Even if you’re successful in the early stages of a transformation, you often don’t win over the self-centered manager who is appalled when a reorganization encroaches on his turf, or the narrowly focused engineer who can’t fathom why you want to spend so much time worrying about customers, or the stone-hearted finance executive who thinks empowering employees is ridiculous. You can drive these people underground or into the tall grass. But instead of changing or leaving, they will often sit there waiting for an opportunity to make a comeback. In celebrating short-term wins, change agents can give the opposition just that opportunity.
Sometimes the resisters actually organize the celebration, especially if they are shrewd and cynical. After a hyperventilated meeting, they give voice to the implicit message. I guess that proves we have won, they say. The sacrifices were significant, but we did accomplish something. Now let’s all take a deserved breather. If people really are
The consequences of a mistake here can be extremely serious. After watching dozens of major change efforts in the past decade, I’m confident of one cardinal rule: Whenever you let up before the job is done, critical momentum can be lost and regression may follow. Until changed practices attain a new equilibrium and have been driven into the culture, they can be very fragile. Three years of work can come undone with remarkable speed. Once regression begins, rebuilding momentum can be a daunting task, not unlike asking people to throw their bodies in front of a huge boulder that has already begun to roll back down the hill. All but change zealots will recoil from this request. Under these circumstances, the human capacity to rationalize is amazing: “I’ve done my share; now it’s Juan’s turn.” “Maybe we went too far; maybe a little regression is good.”
Progress can slip quickly for two reasons. One has to do with corporate culture, and I’ll talk more about that in the next chapter. The second is directly related to the kind of increased interdependence that is created by a fast-moving environment, interconnections that make it difficult to change anything without changing everything.
The Problem of Interdependence
All organizations are made up of interdependent parts. What happens in the sales department has some effect on the manufacturing group. R&D’s work influences product development. Engineering specifications affect manufacturing. The amount of interdependence, however, can vary greatly among organizations depending on a number of factors, none of which is more important than the competitiveness of the business environment.
In the kind of benign oligopolistic world that existed in many major industries for much of the twentieth century, the relatively stable and prosperous environment allowed organizations to minimize internal interdependence. Large in-process inventories buffered various sections of a plant and provided each with some autonomy. Large finished-goods inventories protected manufacturing from actions in the sales department. A slow and linear product development process allowed engineering, sales, marketing, and manufacturing some degree of independence. The lack of better transportation and communication options gave the Malaysian operation considerable freedom from headquarters in New York.
This way of running a business is disappearing for a number of reasons, particularly because of increased competition. With the exception of a few monopolies, organizations cannot now afford big inventories, slow and linear product development, and a foreign operation that goes its own way. Now and in the foreseeable future, most organizations need to be faster, less costly, and more customer focused. As a result, internal interdependencies will grow. Firms are finding that without big inventories, the various parts of a plant need to be much more carefully coordinated, that with pressure to bring out new products faster, the elements of product development need much closer integration, and so on. But these new interconnections greatly complicate transformation efforts, because change happens much more easily in a system of independent parts.
Imagine walking into an office and not liking the way it is arranged. So you move one chair to the left. You put a few books on the credenza. You get a hammer and rehang a painting. All this may take an hour at most, since the task is relatively straightforward. Indeed, creating change in any system of independent parts is usually not difficult.
Now imagine going into another office where a series of ropes, big rubber bands, and steel cables connect the objects to one another. First, you’d have trouble even walking into the room without getting tangled up. After making your way slowly over to the chair, you
10 Anchoring New Approaches in the Culture After years of work, the results were impressive. A once inwardly focused and sluggish aerospace organization was now producing innovative new products at a rapid pace. Not all the offerings were winning in the marketplace, but enough were succeeding that over a five-year period divisional revenues had gone up 62 percent, while net income rose 76 percent; comparable figures for the previous five years were 21 percent and 15 percent, respectively. The division general manager retired, proud that he had helped make an important contribution to the business. He could have stayed a few more years but chose not to: The changes had been made, the results were impressive, the work was done. At the time of the GM’s departure, I don’t think anyone fully realized that the new style of operating had never been firmly grounded in the division’s culture. If people did, they judged it to be a minor problem. After all, they would say, look at all the change. And look at the results. Within two years of his retirement, both the new product introduction rate and the success of those products in the marketplace dropped precipitously. Nothing happened suddenly; the regression was all very incremental. At first, no one seemed to notice. After a year, the only top executive who expressed much alarm was a recent arrival from outside the company. Other top executives mostly ignored him. Here is my postmortem. Some central precepts in the division’s culture were incompatible with all the changes that had been made. Yet that inconsistency was never confronted. As long as the division GM and the transformation program worked day and night to reinforce the new practices, the total weight of these efforts overwhelmed the cultural influence. But when the division GM left and the transformation program ended, the culture reasserted itself. The primary shared value in that organization, a value firmly established in the business’s early years, was “developing our technology will solve all problems.” Like so much of corporate culture, this idea was never formally stated or written down. When confronted with the belief, most people would readily admit it wasn’t entirely true. But give a group of managers three or four beers and then listen to what they had to say, and you heard a lot that sounded like “developing our technology will solve all problems.” Because this core value wasn’t diametrically in conflict with the change effort, the two coexisted, although uncomfortably. New practices forced attention first and foremost on customers. The core value would direct it to technology. The new practices were aimed at helping the firm move faster than competitors. The core value said to move at a pace dictated by rational internal technological development. Someone sensitive to culture would have seen this tension in the company. But because the conflict was so subtle, most people wouldn’t have noticed anything. The communication of the vision, the reinforcement by management, the altered performance appraisal, and other influences strongly supported the new practices. You would have had to listen very closely to hear the underlying culture trying to assert itself: “Yes, but, blah-blah blah-blah, technology, blah-blah blah-blah.” Because no one confronted this problem, little if any effort was made to help the new practices grow deep roots, ones that sank down into the core culture or were strong enough to replace it. Shallow roots require constant watering. As long as the GM and other change agents were there daily with the garden hose, all was well. Without that attention, the practices dried up, withered
KOTTER 11-12
11 The Organization of the Future The rate of change in the business world is not going to slow down anytime soon. If anything, competition in most industries will probably speed up over the next few decades. Enterprises everywhere will be presented with even more terrible hazards and wonderful opportunities, driven by the globalization of the economy along with related technological and social trends. The typical twentieth-century organization has not operated well in a rapidly changing environment. Structure, systems, practices, and culture have often been more of a drag on change than a facilitator. If environmental volatility continues to increase, as most people now predict, the standard organization of the twentieth century will likely become a dinosaur. So what will the winning enterprise of the twenty-first century look like? Speculating on the future is always hazardous, but the discussion presented in this book has rather clear implications. A Persistent Sense of Urgency Major change is never successful unless the complacency level is low. A high urgency rate helps enormously in completing all the stages of a transformation process. If the rate of external change continues to climb, then the urgency rate of the winning twenty-first-century organization will have to be medium to high all the time. The twentieth-century model of lengthy periods of calm or complacency being punctuated by shorter periods of hectic activity will not work. A higher rate of urgency does not imply ever present panic, anxiety, or fear. It means a state in which complacency is virtually absent, in which people are always looking for both problems and opportunities, and in which the norm is “do it now.” Keeping urgency up will require, first and foremost, performance information systems that are far superior to what we generally see today. The tradition of distributing financial accounting data to a small number of people on a monthly or quarterly basis will have to become a thing of the past. More people, more often, will need data on customers, competitors, employees, suppliers, shareholders, technological developments, and financial results. The systems that supply this information cannot be designed, as are some today, to make the organization or one of its units look good. They will need to be created to provide honest and unvarnished news, especially about performance. In the past decade, a number of firms have taken important steps toward creating these new performance feedback systems. Information on customer satisfaction, in particular, is being collected more accurately, more often, and for more people. Likewise, managers are actually seeing customers, especially disgruntled ones, more often. All this is good, but we still have a long way to go. Typical employees in typical firms today still receive little data on their performance, the performance of their group or department, and the performance of the firm. To both create these systems and use their output productively, corporate cultures in the twenty-first century will have to value candid discussions far more than they do today. Norms associated with political politeness, with nonconformational diplomaticese, and with killing-the-messenger-of-bad-news will have to change. The volume knob on the dishonest dialog channel will have to be turned way down. For those readers who have lived in hopelessly political organizations most of their careers and who therefore think this goal is quixotic, I can only point out that these kinds of candid and honest cultures do exist today. I’ve seen them. Creating those norms can certainly be difficult, but the task is not impossible. Typically, the change begins with a single powerful person, spreads from him or her
12 Leadership and Lifelong Learning The key to creating and sustaining the kind of successful twenty-first-century organization described in chapter 11 is leadership—not only at the top of the hierarchy, with a capital L, but also in a more modest sense (l) throughout the enterprise. This means that over the next few decades we will see both a new form of organization emerge to cope with faster-moving and more competitive environments and a new kind of employee, at least in successful firms. The twenty-first-century employee will need to know more about both leadership and management than did his or her twentieth-century counterpart. The twenty-first-century manager will need to know much about leadership. With these skills, the type of “learning organization” discussed in chapter 11 can be built and maintained. Without these skills, dynamic adaptive enterprises are not possible. For those raised on traditional notions about leadership, this idea makes no sense. In the most commonly known historical model, leadership is the province of the chosen few. Within that framework, the concept of masses of people helping to provide the leadership needed to drive the eight-stage change process is at best foolhardy. Even if you think you reject the old model, if you have lived on planet earth during the twentieth century this highly elitist notion is likely buried somewhere in your head and may affect your actions in ways invisible to you. The single biggest error in the traditional model is related to its assumptions about the origins of leadership. Stated simply, the historically dominant concept takes leadership skills as a divine gift of birth, a gift granted to a small number of people. Although I, too, once believed this, I have found that the traditional idea simply does not fit well with what I have observed in nearly thirty years of studying organizations and the people who run them. In particular, the older model is nearly oblivious to the power and the potential of lifelong learning. A Prototype of the Twenty-First-Century Executive I first met Manny in 1986. At that time, he was an alert, friendly, and ambitious forty-year-old manager. He had already done well in his career, but nothing about him seemed exceptional. No one in his firm, at least as much as I could tell, called him “a leader.” I found him to be a little cautious and somewhat political, like many people raised in twentieth-century bureaucracies. I would have expected him to remain in a senior staff job for a few decades and to make a useful but far from outstanding contribution to his corporation. The second time I met Manny was in 1995. In only a short conversation, I could sense a depth and sophistication that had been unapparent before. In talking with others at his company, again and again I heard a similar assessment. “Isn’t it amazing how much Manny has grown,” they told me. “Yes,” I said, “it’s amazing.” Today Manny is running a business that will generate about $600 million in after-tax profits. That business is rapidly globalizing with all the attendant hazards and opportunities. As I write this, he is leading his group through a major transformation designed to position the organization for a promising future. All from a man who did not look like a leader, much less a great leader, at age forty. A few people like Manny have always been around. Instead of slowing down and peaking at age thirty-five or forty-five, they keep learning at a rate we
Bolman & DEAL 15-20
CHAPTER 15 INTEGRATING FRAMES FOR EFFECTIVE PRACTICE The world is but canvas to our imaginations. —Henry David Thoreau Can a natural disaster determine a presidential election? Crises are an acid test of leadership. In the heat of the moment, leaders sometimes hesitate until events pass them by. Other times they jump too quickly, making bad decisions. Either way, they look weak, foolish, or out of touch. A deft response to crisis bolsters a leader’s credibility. When Superstorm Sandy roared out of the Atlantic Ocean a week before the U.S. presidential election in 2012, it posed a major test for elected officials up and down the East Coast but even more for the two men locked in a close contest for the presidency, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. Romney struggled to find his footing, hampered by the ambiguity of the challenger’s role and by comments he had made months earlier suggesting he favored defunding the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the arm of the U.S. government responsible for coming to the rescue in major natural disasters. Obama could have stumbled, as his predecessor, President George W. Bush, had during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Just before Sandy hit, Obama was campaigning in Florida. He almost got stuck there, which would have painted a picture of a misguided president who cared more about getting elected than helping storm victims. Instead, he got back to Washington to do what presidents are supposed to do in such an emergency—convey an image of being concerned and in charge. Leveraging the advantages of incumbency, he ordered relief to the affected areas, coordinated with governors and mayors and travelled to scenes of destruction to offer comfort and reassurance. He garnered rave reviews from two prominent Republicans, New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New Jersey’s Governor Chris Christie. Christie’s praise was particularly potent—he had given a fiery speech in support of Romney at the Republican convention and had recently described Obama as a flailing president who couldn’t find the light switch. Obama could always give a good speech—otherwise he would never have attained the presidency in 2008. But many critics and supporters alike saw him as bloodless, remote, and passive, deficient in the strength and passion needed to cope with the leadership challenges of the presidency. But in the face of Superstorm Sandy, his sure-footed response captured elements of every frame. He cut through red tape and bureaucracy to speed help to victims. He worked the phones to develop personal relationships with key leaders like Bloomberg and Christie. He visited affected areas, hugged victims, and promised swift and effective help. He recognized both the political and symbolic benefits of getting off the campaign trail for several days to focus on the biggest natural disaster to hit the United States since Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005. Just before Sandy hit, the election polls showed the race as a virtual tie. A few days later, Obama began to pull away and he easily won reelection. Harmonizing the frames and crafting inventive responses to new circumstances are essential to both management and leadership. This chapter considers questions about using the frames in combination. How do you decide how to frame an event? How do you integrate multiple lenses in responding to the same situation? We begin by revisiting the turbulent world of managers. We then explore what happens when people diverge in viewing the same challenge. We offer questions and guidelines to stimulate thinking about aligning perspectives with specific situations. Finally, we examine literature on effective managers and organizations to see which modes of thought dominate current theory. Life as Managers Know It Traditional mythology depicts managers as rational people who plan, organize, coordinate, and control the activities of subordinates. Periodicals, books, and business schools sometimes paint a pristine image of modern managers: unruffled and well organized, with clean desks, power suits, and sophisticated information systems. Such “super managers” develop and implement farsighted strategies, producing predictable and robust results. It is a reassuring picture of clarity and order. Unfortunately, it’s wrong. An entirely different picture appears if you watch managers at work (Carlson, 1951; Florén and Tell, 2013; Kahneman, 2011; Klein, 1999; Kotter, 1982; Luthans, 1988; Mintzberg, 1973; Tengblad, 2013). It’s a hectic life, shifting rapidly from one situation to another. Much of it involves dealing with people and emotions. Decisions emerge from a fluid, swirling vortex of conversations, meetings, and memos. Information systems ensure an overload of detail about what happened yesterday or last month. Yet they fail to answer a far more important question: What next? McCloskey (1998) maintains that only two important European novels have depicted managers in a positive light. One is Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, published in 1902. The other is David Lodge’s Nice Work (1988), whose central figure is Victor Wilcox, the manager of a struggling British factory. The novel opens with Wilcox struggling through a sleepless night that provides an all-too-realistic glimpse of managerial life: Worries streak towards him like an enemy spaceship in [a video game]. He flinches, dodges, zaps them with instant solutions, but the assault is endless: the Avco account, the Rawlinson account, the price of pig-iron, the value of the pound, the competition from Foundrax, the incompetence of his Marketing Director, the persistent breakdowns of the core blowers, the vandalizing of the toilets in the fettling shop, the pressure from his divisional boss, the last month’s account, the quarterly forecast, the annual review (Lodge, 1988, p. 3). The work of managers, Tengblad (2013) concludes, is more akin to juggling hot potatoes than engaging in analytic contemplation. In deciding what to do next, managers operate largely on the basis of intuition, drawing on firsthand observations, hunches, and judgment derived from experience. Too swamped to spend much time thinking, analyzing, or reading, they get most of their information in meetings, on the Internet, on the fly, or over the phone. They are hassled priests, modern muddlers, and corporate wheeler-dealers. How does one reconcile the actual work of managers with the heroic imagery? “Whenever I report this frenetic pattern to groups of executives,” says Harold Leavitt, “regardless of hierarchical level or nationality, they always respond with a mix of discomfiture and recognition. Reluctantly, and somewhat sheepishly, they will admit that the description fits, but they don’t like to be told about it. If they were really good managers, they seem to feel, they would be in control, their desks would be clean, and their shops would run as smoothly as a Mercedes engine” (1996, p. 294). Led to believe that they should be rational and on top of things, managers may instead become bewildered and demoralized. They are supposed to plan and organize, yet they find themselves muddling and playing catch-up. They want to solve problems and make decisions. But when problems are ill defined and options murky, control is mostly an illusion and rationality an elusive dream. Across Frames: Organizations as Multiple Realities Life in organizations is packed with activities and happenings that can be interpreted in a number of ways. Exhibit 15.1 examines familiar processes through four lenses. As the chart shows, any event can be framed in different ways and serve multiple purposes. Planning, for example, produces specific objectives. But it also creates arenas for airing conflict and becomes a sacred occasion to renegotiate symbolic meanings. Exhibit 15.1. Four Interpretations of Organizational Processes. Process Structural Frame Human Resource Frame Political Frame Symbolic Frame Strategic planning Process to set objectives and coordinate resources Activities to promote participation, build support Arenas to air conflicts and realign power Ritual to signal responsibility, produce symbols, negotiate meanings Decision making Rational sequence to produce correct decision Open process to produce commitment Opportunity to gain or exercise power Ritual to confirm values and provide opportunities for bonding Reorganizing Realign roles and responsibilities to fit tasks and environment Improve balance between human needs and formal roles Redistribute power and form new coalitions Maintain an image of accountability and responsiveness; negotiate a new social order Evaluating Way to distribute rewards or penalties and control performance Feedback for helping individuals grow and improve Opportunity to exercise power Occasion to play roles in shared ritual Approaching conflict Authorities maintain organizational goals by resolving conflict Individuals confront conflict to develop relationships Use power to defeat opponents and achieve goals Use conflict to negotiate meaning and develop shared values Goal setting Keep organization headed in the right direction Open communications and keep people committed to goals Provide opportunity for individuals and groups to express interests Develop symbols and shared values Communication Transmit facts and information Exchange information, needs, and feelings Influence or manipulate others Tell stories Meetings Formal occasions for making decisions Informal occasions for involvement, sharing feelings Competitive occasions to win points Sacred occasions to celebrate and transform the culture Motivation Economic incentives Growth and self-actualization Coercion, manipulation, and seduction Symbols and celebrations Multiple realities produce confusion and conflict as individuals see the same event through different lenses. A hospital administrator once called a meeting to make an important decision. The chief technician viewed it as a chance to express feelings and build relationships. The director of nursing hoped to gain power vis-à-vis physicians. The medical director saw it as an occasion for reaffirming the hospital’s distinctive approach to medical care. The meeting became a cacophonous jumble, like a group of musicians each playing from a different score. The confusion that can result when people view the world through different lenses is illustrated in this classic case: Doctor Fights Order to Quit Maine Island Dr. Gregory O’Keefe found himself the focus of a fierce battle between 1,200 year-round residents of Vinalhaven, Maine (an island fishing community), and the National Health Service Corps (NHSC), which paid his salary and insisted he take a promotion to an administrator’s desk in Rockville, Maryland. He didn’t want to go, and his patients felt the same way. The islanders were so distressed they lobbied Senator William Cohen (R-Maine) to keep him there: It’s certainly not the prestige or glamour of the job that is holding O’Keefe, who drives the town’s only ambulance and, as often as twice a week, takes critically ill patients to mainland hospitals via an emergency ferry run or a Coast Guard cutter, private plane, or even a lobster boat. Apparently unyielding in their insistence that O’Keefe accept the promotion or resign, NHSC officials seemed startled last week by the spate of protests from angry islanders, which prompted nationwide media attention and inquiries from the Maine congressional delegation. NHSC says it probably would not replace O’Keefe on the island, which, in the agency’s view, is now able to support a private medical practice. Cohen described himself as “frustrated by the lack of responsiveness of lower-level bureaucrats.” But to the NHSC, O’Keefe is a foot soldier in a military organization of more than 1,600 physicians assigned to isolated, medically needy communities. And he’s had the audacity to question the orders of a superior officer. “It’s like a soldier who wanted to stay at Ft. Myers and jumped on TV and called the defense secretary a rat for wanting him to move,” Shirley Barth, press officer for the federal Public Health Service, said in a telephone interview Thursday (Goodman, 1983, p. 1). The NHSC officials had trouble seeing beyond the structural frame; they had a job to do and a structure for getting it done. O’Keefe’s resistance was illegitimate. O’Keefe saw the situation in human resource terms. He felt the work he was doing was meaningful and satisfying, and the islanders needed him. For Senator Cohen, it was a political issue; could minor bureaucrats be allowed to harm his constituents through mindless abuse of power? For the hardy residents of Vinalhaven, O’Keefe was a heroic figure of mythic proportions: “If he gets one night’s sleep out of 20, he’s lucky, but he’s always up there smiling and working.” The islanders were full of stories about O’Keefe’s humility, skill, humaneness, dedication, wit, confidence, and caring. With so many people peering through different filters, confusion, and conflict were predictable. The inability of NHSC officials to understand and acknowledge the existence of other perspectives illustrates the risks of clinging to a single view of a situation. Whenever someone’s actions seem to make no sense, it is worth asking whether you and they are seeing contrasting realities. You know better what you’re up against when you understand their perspective, even if you’re sure they’re wrong. Their mind-set—not yours—determines how they act. Matching Frames to Situations In a given situation, one lens may be more helpful than others. At a strategic crossroads, a rational process focused on gathering and analyzing information may be exactly what is needed. At other times, developing commitment or building a power base may be more critical. In times of great stress, decision processes may become a form of ritual that brings comfort and support. Choosing a frame to size things up or understanding others’ perspectives involves a combination of analysis, intuition, and artistry. Exhibit 15.2 poses questions to facilitate analysis and stimulate intuition. It also suggests conditions under which each way of thinking is most likely to be effective. Are commitment and motivation essential to success? The human resource and symbolic approaches need to be considered whenever issues of individual dedication, energy, and skill are vital to success. A new curriculum launched by a school district will fail without teacher support. Support might be strengthened by human resource approaches, such as participation and self-managing teams or through symbolic approaches linking the innovation to values and symbols teachers cherish. Is the technical quality important? When a good decision needs to be technically sound, the structural frame’s emphasis on data and logic is essential. But if a decision must be acceptable to major constituents, then human resource, political, or symbolic issues loom larger. Could the technical quality of a decision ever be unimportant? A college found itself embroiled in a three-month battle over the choice of a commencement speaker. The faculty pushed for a great scholar, the students for a movie star. The president was more than willing to invite anyone acceptable to both groups; she saw no technical criterion for judging that one choice was better than the other. Are ambiguity and uncertainty high? If goals are clear, technology well understood, and behavior reasonably predictable, the structural and human resource approaches are likely to apply. As ambiguity increases, the political and symbolic perspectives become more relevant. The political frame expects that the pursuit of self-interest will often produce confused and chaotic contests that require political intervention. The symbolic lens sees symbols as a way of finding order, meaning, and “truth” in situations too complex, uncertain, or mysterious for rational or political analysis. Are conflict and scarce resources significant? Human resource logic fits best in situations favoring collaboration—as in profitable, growing firms or highly unified schools. But when conflict is high and resources are scarce, dynamics of conflict, power, and self-interest regularly come to the fore. In situations like a bidding war or an election campaign, sophisticated political strategies are vital to success. In other cases, skilled leaders may find that an overarching symbol helps potential adversaries transcend their differences and work together. Exhibit 15.2. Choosing a Frame. Question If Yes: If No: Are individual commitment and motivation essential to success? Human resourceSymbolic StructuralPolitical Is the technical quality of the decision important? Structural Human resourcePoliticalSymbolic Are there high levels of ambiguity and uncertainty? PoliticalSymbolic StructuralHuman resource Are conflict and scarce resources significant? Political Symbolic StructuralHuman resource Are you working from the bottom up? Political Symbolic StructuralHuman resource In 1994, after decades of increasing turmoil, the Republic of South Africa finally ended its system of white rule and held a national election in which the black majority could vote for the first time. The African National Congress and its leader, Nelson Mandela, came to power with more than 60 percent of the vote, but it was a sudden and wrenching adjustment for many South Africans. Historic tensions plagued the new government, and there was a serious threat of violence and guerilla warfare from armed and dangerous white bitter-enders. Looking for a way to build unity, Mandela alighted on an unlikely vehicle: rugby. White South Africans loved the sport and the national team, the Springboks. Black South Africans hated rugby and routinely cheered for the Springboks’ opponents. Mandela lobbied to bring the rugby world cup tournament to South Africa, and he charmed the Springbok captain in order to enlist him as a champion of a united nation. Mandela then undertook the even harder task of persuading black South Africans to support a team they hated. He was initially booed by distressed supporters, but his credibility, persuasive skills, and a mantra of “one team, one nation” eventually persuaded most of his followers to get on board. Then something magical happened. No one expected the Springboks to go very far in the tournament, but they kept winning until they reached the finals. Mandela’s coup de grâce, the final submission of white South Africa to his charms, came minutes before the final itself when the old terrorist-in-chief went onto the pitch to shake hands with the players dressed in the colors of the ancient enemy, the green Springbok shirt. For a moment, Ellis Park Stadium, 95 per cent white on the day, stood in dumb, disbelieving silence. Then someone took up a cry that others followed, ending in a thundering roar: “Nel-son! Nel-son! Nel-son!” …With Mandela playing as an invisible 16th man, Joel Stransky, the one Jewish player in the Springbok team, kicked the winning drop goal in extra time. Mandela emerged again, still in his green jersey, and, to even louder cries of “Nel-son! Nel-son!,” walked onto the pitch to shake the hand of [Springbok captain] François Pienaar. As he prepared to hand over the cup to his captain, he said: “François, thank you for what you have done for our country.” Pienaar, with extraordinary presence of mind, replied: “No, Mr President. Thank you for what you have done” (Carlin, 2007. Reprinted with permission). There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. There wasn’t a dry eye in the country. Everybody celebrated: one country at last. Are you working from the bottom up? Restructuring is an option primarily for those in a position of authority. Human resource approaches to improvement—such as training, job enrichment, and participation—usually need support from the top to be successful. The political frame, in contrast, is more likely to work for changes initiated from below. Change agents lower in the pecking order rarely can rely on formal clout, so they have to find other bases of power, such as symbolic acts, to draw attention to their cause and embarrass opponents. The 9/11 terrorists could have picked from an almost unlimited array of targets, but the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon were deliberately selected for their symbolic value. The questions in Exhibit 15.2 cannot be followed mechanically. They won’t substitute for judgment and intuition in deciding how to size up or respond to a situation. But they can guide and augment the process of choosing a promising course of action. Finding a workable strategy is a matter of playing probabilities. In some cases, your line of thinking might lead you to a familiar frame. But if the tried-and-true approach seems likely to fall short, reframe again. You may discover an exciting and creative new lens for deciphering the situation. Then you can take on the challenge of communicating your breakthrough to others who still champion the old reality. Effective Managers and Organizations Does the ability to use multiple frames actually help managers decipher events and determine alternative ways to respond? If so, how are the frames embedded and integrated in everyday situations? We examine several strands of research to answer these questions. First, we look at four influential guides to organizational excellence: In Search of Excellence (Peters and Waterman, 1982), Built to Last (Collins and Porras, 1994), Good to Great (Collins, 2001), and Great by Choice (Collins and Hansen, 2011). We then review three studies of managerial work: The General Managers (Kotter, 1982), Managing Public Policy (Lynn, 1987), and Real Managers (Luthans, Yodgetts, and Rosenkrantz, 1988). Finally, we look at studies of managers’ frame orientations to see whether current thinking is equal to present-day challenges. Organizational Excellence Peters and Waterman’s best-seller In Search of Excellence (1982) explored the question, “What do high-performing corporations have in common?” Peters and Waterman studied more than 60 large companies in six major industries: high technology (Digital Equipment and IBM, for example), consumer products (Kodak, Procter & Gamble), manufacturing (3M, Caterpillar), service (McDonald’s, Delta Airlines), project management (Boeing, Bechtel), and natural resources (Exxon, DuPont). The companies were chosen on the basis of both objective performance indicators (such as long-term growth and profitability) and the judgment of knowledgeable observers. Collins and Porras (1994) attempted a similar study of what they termed “visionary” companies but tried to address two methodological limitations in the Peters and Waterman study. Collins and Porras included a comparison group (missing in Peters and Waterman) by matching each of their top performers with another firm in the same industry with a comparable history. Their pairings included Citibank with Chase Manhattan, General Electric with Westinghouse, Sony with Kenwood, Hewlett-Packard with Texas Instruments, and Merck with Pfizer. Collins and Porras emphasized long-term results by restricting their study to companies at least 50 years old with evidence of consistent success over many decades. Built to Last was the first in a series of works that Jim Collins, alone and with colleagues, has produced that attempt to draw lessons from successful
companies. Good to Great (2001) used a comparative approach similar to that of Collins and Porras but focused on a different criterion for success: instead of organizations that had excelled for many years, he identified a group of companies that had made a dramatic breakthrough from middling to superlative and compared them with similar companies that had remained ordinary. In Great by Choice, Collins and Hansen focused on seven companies (Amgen, Biomet, Intel, Microsoft, Progressive Insurance, Southwest Airlines, and Stryker) that had dramatically outperformed the stock market and their respective industries over a period of two to three decades. All of these studies identified roughly seven or eight critical characteristics of excellent companies, similar in some respects and distinct in others, as Exhibit 15.3 shows. All suggest that excellent companies manage to embrace paradox. They are loose yet tight, highly disciplined yet entrepreneurial. Peters and Waterman’s “bias for action” and Collins and Porras’s “try a lot, keep what works” both point to risk taking and experimenting as ways to learn and avoid bogging down in analysis paralysis. All four studies emphasize a clear core identity that helps firms stay on track and be clear about what they will not do. All of the Collins studies emphasized a nonfinding that ran afoul of conventional wisdom: They did not find that success was associated with larger-than-life charismatic leaders. All three books highlighted leaders who were typically homegrown and focused on building their organization rather than their own reputation. Collins’s “level 5” leaders were driven but self-effacing, extremely disciplined, and hardworking but consistent in attributing success to their colleagues rather than themselves. As Exhibit 15.3 shows, all four studies produced three-frame models of excellence. Notice that none of the characteristics of excellence are political. Does an effective organization eliminate politics? Or did the authors miss something? By definition, their samples focused on companies with a strong record of growth and profitability. Infighting and backbiting tend to be less visible on a winning team than on a losing one. When resources are relatively abundant, political dynamics are less prominent because it’s easier to use slack assets to keep everyone happy. Recall, too, that a strong culture breeds people who share both values and habits of mind. A unifying culture reduces conflict and political strife—or at least makes them easier to manage.
CHAPTER 16 REFRAMING IN ACTION OPPORTUNITIES AND PERILS When you are face to face with a difficulty, you are up against a discovery. —William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) Life in organizations is often governed by routine, with undercurrents of suppressed conflicts, jealousies, or unhealed egos from past skirmishes. Periodically, however, past or present issues come to the surface, and tensions are laid bare. One likely scenario is a transition from one boss to another. How participants frame their circumstances is fateful for the outcomes. Reach and Grasp Put yourself in the shoes of Cindy Marshall. You’re headed to the office for your first day in a new job. Your company has transferred you to Kansas City to manage a customer service unit. It’s a big promotion, with a substantial increase in pay and responsibility, but you know you face a major challenge. You are inheriting a department with a reputation for slow, substandard service. Senior management places much of the blame on your predecessor, Bill Howard, seen as too authoritarian and rigid. Howard is moving to another job, but the company asked him to stay on for a week to help you get oriented. One potential sticking point: He hired most of your new staff. Many may still feel loyal to him. When you arrive, you get a frosty hello from Susan Bond, the department secretary. As you walk into your new office, you see Howard behind the desk in a conversation with three other staff members. You say hello, and he responds by saying, “Didn’t the secretary tell you that we’re in a meeting right now? If you’ll wait outside, I’ll be able to see you in about an hour.” As Cindy Marshall, what would you do? You’re in the glare of the spotlight, and the audience eagerly awaits your response. If you feel threatened or attacked—as most of us would—those feelings will push you toward either fight or flight. Escalating the conflict is risky and could damage everyone. Backing away or fleeing could suggest that you are too emotional or not tough enough. This is a classic example of a manager’s nightmare: an unexpected situation that threatens to explode in your face. Howard’s greeting tries to throw you off stride and put you in a bind. It carries echoes of historic patterns of male arrogance and condescension in relating to women (similar to those that surfaced in the Anne Barreta case in Chapter 8). Whether or not he intended it that way, Howard’s response appears well designed for disconcerting a younger female colleague. He makes it likely that, as Cindy, you will feel trapped and powerless, or you will do something rash and regrettable. Either way, he wins and you lose. The frames suggest another set of possibilities. They offer the advantage of multiple angles to size up the situation. What’s really going on here? What options do you have? What script does the situation demand? How might you reinterpret the scene to create a more effective scenario? Reframing is a powerful tool in a tough situation for generating possibilities other than fight or flight. An immediate question facing you, as Cindy Marshall, is whether to respond to Howard on the spot or to buy time. If you’re at a loss for what to say or if you fear you will make things worse instead of better, take time to “go to the balcony”—try to get above the confusion of the moment long enough to get a sharper perspective. Better yet, find an effective response on the spot. Each of the frames generates its own possibilities, creatively translated into alternative scenarios. They can also be misapplied or misused. Success depends on the skill and artistry of the person following a given script. In this chapter, we describe setups Marshall might compose, showing that each of the four lenses can produce both effective and ineffective reactions. We conclude with a summary of the power and risks of reframing and highlight its importance for outsiders and newcomers taking on new responsibilities. Structural Frame A Structural Scenario A structural scenario casts managers and leaders in fundamental roles of clarifying goals, attending to the relationship between structure and environment, and developing a clearly defined array of roles and relationships appropriate to what needs to be done. Without a workable structure, people become unsure about what they are supposed to be doing. The result is confusion, frustration, and conflict. In an effective organization, individuals understand their responsibilities and their contribution. Policies, linkages, and lines of authority are straightforward and accepted. With the right structure, the organization can achieve its goals, and individuals can see their role in the big picture. The main job of a leader is to focus on task, facts, and logic, rather than personality and emotions. Most people problems stem from structural flaws, not personal limitations or liability. The structural leader is not rigidly authoritarian and does not attempt to solve every problem by issuing orders (although that is sometimes appropriate). Instead, the leader tries to design and implement a process or architecture appropriate to the circumstances. You may wonder what structure has to do with a direct, personal confrontation, but the structural scenario in the box can be scripted to generate a variety of responses. Here’s one example: Howard: Didn’t the secretary tell you that we’re in a meeting right now? If you’ll wait outside, I’ll be able to see you in about an hour. Marshall: My appointment as manager of this office began at nine this morning. This is now my office, and you’re sitting behind my desk. Either you relinquish the desk immediately, or I will call headquarters and report you for insubordination. Howard: I was asked to stay on the job for one more week to try to help you learn the ropes. Frankly, I doubt that you’re ready for this job, but you don’t seem to want any help. Marshall: I repeat, I am now in charge of this office. Let me also remind you that headquarters assigned you to stay this week to assist me. I expect you to carry out that order. If you don’t, I will submit a letter for your file detailing your lack of cooperation. Now, [firmly] I want my desk. Howard: Well, we were working on important office business, but since the princess here is more interested in giving orders than in getting work done, let’s move our meeting down to your office, Joe. Enjoy your desk! In this exchange, Marshall places heavy emphasis on her formal authority and the chain of command. By invoking her superiors and her legitimate authority, she takes charge and gets Howard to back down, but at a price. She unwittingly colludes with Howard in making the encounter a personal confrontation. She risks long-term tension with her new subordinates, who surely feel awkward during this combative encounter. They may conclude that the new boss is like the old one—autocratic and rigid. There are other options. Here’s another example of how Marshall might exercise her authority: Howard: Didn’t the secretary tell you that we’re in a meeting right now? If you’ll wait outside, I’ll be able to see you in about an hour. Marshall: She didn’t mention it, and I don’t want to interrupt important work, but we also need to set some priorities and work out an agenda for the day anyway. Bill, have you developed a plan for how you and I can get to work on the transition? Howard: We can meet later on, after I get through some pressing business. Marshall: The pressing business is just the kind of thing I need to learn about as the new manager here. What issues are you discussing? Howard: How to keep the office functioning when the new manager is not ready for the job. Marshall: Well, I have a lot to learn, but I feel up to it. With your help, I think we can have a smooth and productive transition. How about if you continue your meeting and I just sit in as an observer? Then, Bill, you and I could meet to work out a plan for how we’ll handle the transition. After that, I’d like to schedule a meeting with each manager to get an individual progress report. I’d like to hear from each of you about your major customer service objectives and how you would assess your progress. Now, what were you talking about before I got here? This time, Marshall is still clear and firm in establishing her authority, but she does it without appearing harsh or dictatorial. She underscores the importance of setting priorities. Note the deft use of a question when she asks whether Howard has a plan for making the transition productive. That lets her engage Howard while declining his invitation for combat. She emphasizes shared goals and defines a temporary role for herself as an observer. She focuses steadfastly on the task and not on Howard’s provocations. In keeping the exchange on a rational level and outlining a transition plan, she avoids escalating or submerging the conflict. She also communicates to her new staff that she has done her homework, is organized, and knows what she wants. When she says she would like to hear their personal objectives and progress, she communicates an expectation that they should follow her example. Human Resource Frame A Human Resource Scenario The human resource leader believes that people are the center of any organization. If people feel the organization is responsive to their needs and supportive of their personal goals, they will deliver commitment and loyalty. Administrators who are authoritarian or insensitive, who don’t communicate effectively, or who don’t care can never be effective leaders. The human resource leader works on behalf of both the organization and its people, seeking to serve the best interests of both. The job of the leader is support and empowerment. Support takes a variety of forms: showing concern, listening to people’s aspirations and goals, and communicating personal warmth and openness. The leader empowers through participation and inclusion, ensuring that people have the autonomy and support needed to do their job. The human resource frame favors listening and responsiveness, but some people go a little too far in trying to be responsive: Howard: Didn’t the secretary tell you that we’re in a meeting right now? If you’ll wait outside, I’ll be able to see you in about an hour. Marshall: Oh, gosh, no, she didn’t. I just feel terrible about interrupting your meeting. I hope I didn’t offend anyone because to me, it’s really important to establish good working relationships right from the outset. While I’m waiting, is there anything I can do to help? Would anyone like a cup of coffee? Howard: No. We’ll let you know when we’re finished. Marshall: Oh…Um, well, have a good meeting, and I’ll see you in an hour. In the effort to be friendly and accommodating, Marshall is acting more like a waitress than a manager. She defuses the conflict, but her staff are likely to see their new boss as weak. She could instead capitalize on an interest in people: Howard: Didn’t the secretary tell you that we’re in a meeting right now? If you’ll wait outside, I’ll be able to see you in about an hour. Marshall: I’m sorry if I’m interrupting, but I’m eager to get started, and I’ll need all your help. [She walks around, introduces herself, and shakes hands with each member of her new staff. Howard scowls silently.] Bill, could we take a few minutes to talk about how we can work together on the transition, now that I’m coming in to manage the department? Howard: You’re not the manager yet. I was asked to stay on for a week to get you started—though, frankly, I doubt that you’re ready for this job. Marshall: I understand your concern, Bill. I know how committed you are to the success of the department. If I were you, I might be worried about whether I was turning my baby over to someone who wouldn’t be able to take care of it. But I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t feel ready. I want to benefit as much as I can from your experience. Is it urgent to get on with what you were talking about, or could we take some time first to talk about how we can start working together? Howard: We have some things we need to finish. Marshall: Well, as a manager, I always prefer to trust the judgment of the people who are closest to the action. I’ll just sit in while you finish up, and then we can talk about how we move forward from there. Here, Marshall is unfazed and relentlessly cheerful; she avoids a battle and acknowledges Howard’s perspective. When he says she is not ready for the job, she resists the temptation to debate or return his salvo. Instead, she recognizes his concern but calmly communicates her confidence and focus on moving ahead. She demonstrates an important skill of a human resource leader: the ability to combine advocacy with inquiry. She listens carefully to Howard but gently stands her ground. She asks for his help while expressing confidence that she can do the job. When he says they have things to finish, she responds with the agility of a martial artist, using Howard’s energy to her own advantage. She expresses part of her philosophy—she prefers to trust her staff’s judgment—and positions herself as an observer, thus gaining an opportunity to learn more about her staff and the issues they are addressing. By reframing the situation, she has gotten off to a better start with Howard and is able to signal to others the kind of people-oriented leader she intends to be. Political Frame A Political Scenario The political leader believes that managers have to recognize political reality and know how to deal with conflict. Inside and outside any organization, a range of people and interest groups, each with their own agenda, compete for scarce resources. There are never enough to give all parties what they want, so there will always be struggles. The job of the leader is to recognize major constituencies, develop ties to their leadership, and manage conflict as productively as possible. Above all, leaders need to build a power base and use power carefully. They can’t give every group everything it wants, but they can create arenas where groups can negotiate differences and come up with a reasonable compromise. They also need to work at articulating interests everyone has in common. It is wasteful for people to expend energy fighting each other when there are plenty of enemies outside to battle. Any group that doesn’t get its act together internally tends to get trounced by outsiders. Some managers translate the political approach described in this box to mean management by intimidation and manipulation. It sometimes works, but the risks are high. Here’s an example: Howard: Didn’t the secretary tell you that we’re in a meeting right now? If you’ll wait outside, I’ll be able to see you in about an hour. Marshall: In your next job, maybe you should train your secretary better. Anyway, I can’t waste time sitting around in hallways. Everyone in this room knows why I’m here. You’ve got a choice, Bill. You can cooperate with me, or you can lose any credibility you still have in this company. Howard: If I didn’t have any more experience than you do, I wouldn’t be so quick to throw my weight around. But if you think you know it all already, I guess you won’t need any help from me. Marshall: What I know is that this department has gone downhill under your leadership, and it’s my job to turn it around. You can go home right now, if you want—you know where the door is. But if you’re smart, you’ll stay and help. The vice president wants my report on the transition. You’ll be a lot better off if I can tell him you’ve been cooperative. Moviegoers cheer when bullies get their comeuppance. It can be satisfying to give the verbal equivalent of a kick in the groin to someone who deserves it. In this exchange, Marshall establishes that she is tough, even dangerous. But such coercive tactics can be expensive in the long run. She is likely to win this battle because her hand is stronger. But she may lose the war. She increases Howard’s antagonism, and her attack may offend him and frighten her new staff. Even if they dislike Howard, they may see Marshall as arrogant and callous. She lays the ground for a counterattack, and she may have done political damage that will be difficult to reverse. Sophisticated political leaders prefer to avoid naked demonstrations of power, looking instead for ways to appeal to the self-interests of potential adversaries: Howard: Didn’t the secretary tell you that we’re in a meeting right now? If you’ll wait outside, I’ll be able to see you in about an hour. Marshall: [pleasantly] Bill, if it’s okay with you, I’d prefer to skip the games and go to work. I expect this department to be a winner, and I hope that’s what we all want. I also would like to manage the transition in a way that’s good for your career, Bill, and for the careers of others in the room. Howard: If I need advice from you on my career, I’ll ask. Marshall: Okay, but the vice president has asked me to let him know about the cooperation I get here. I’d like to be able to say that everyone has been helping me as much as possible. Is that what you’d like, too? Howard: I’ve known the vice president a lot longer than you have. I can talk to him myself. Marshall: I know, Bill; he’s told me that. In fact, I just came from his office. If you’d like, we could both go see him right now. Howard: Uh, no, not right now. Marshall: Well, then, let’s get on with it. Do you want to finish what you were discussing, or is this a good time for us to develop some agreement on how we’re going to work together? In this politically based response, Marshall is both direct and diplomatic. She uses a light touch in dismissing Howard’s opening salvo. (“I’d prefer to skip the games.”) She speaks directly to both Howard’s interest in his career and her subordinates’ interest in theirs. She deftly deflates his posturing by asking whether he wants to go with her to talk to the vice president. Clearly, she is confident of her political support and knows that his bluster has little to back it up. Note that in both political scenarios, Marshall draws on her power resources. In the first, she uses those resources to humiliate Howard, but in the second, her approach is subtler. She conserves her political capital and takes charge while leaving Howard with as much pride as possible, achieving something closer to a win-win than a win-lose outcome. Symbolic Frame A Symbolic Scenario The symbolic leader believes that the most important part of a leader’s job is inspiration—giving people something they can believe in. People become excited about and committed to a place with a unique identity, a special place where they feel that what they do is really important. Effective symbolic leaders are passionate about making the organization unique in its niche and communicating that passion to others. They use dramatic symbols to get people excited and to give them a deep sense of the organization’s mission. They are visible and energetic. They create slogans, tell stories, hold rallies, give awards, appear where they are least expected, and manage by wandering around. Symbolic leaders are sensitive to an organization’s history and culture. They seek to use the best in an organization’s traditions and values as a base for building a culture with cohesiveness and meaning. They articulate a vision that communicates the organization’s unique capabilities and mission. At first glance, Cindy Marshall’s encounter with Bill Howard might seem a poor candidate for the symbolic approach just outlined. An ineffective effort could produce embarrassing results, making the would-be symbolic leader look foolish: Howard: Didn’t the secretary tell you that we’re in a meeting right now? If you’ll wait outside, I’ll be able to see you in about an hour. Marshall: It’s great to see that you’re all hard at work. It’s proof that we all share a commitment to excellence in customer service. In fact, I’ve already made up buttons for all the staff. Here—I have one for each of you. They read, “The customer is always first.” They look great, and they communicate the spirit that we all want in the department. Go on with your meeting. I can use the hour to talk to some of the staff about their visions for the department. [She walks out of the office.] Howard: [to remaining staff] Did you believe that? I told you they hired a real space cadet to replace me. Maybe you didn’t believe me, but you just saw it with your own eyes. Marshall’s symbolic direction might be on the right track, but symbols work only when attuned to the context—both people and place. As a newcomer to the department culture, she needs to pay close attention to her audience. Meaningless symbols antagonize, and empty symbolic events backfire. Conversely, a skillful symbolic leader understands that a situation of challenge and stress can serve as a powerful opportunity to articulate values and build a sense of mission. Marshall demonstrates how, in a well-formed symbolic approach to Howard’s gruffness: Howard: Didn’t the secretary tell you that we’re in a meeting right now? If you’ll wait outside, I’ll be able to see you in about an hour. Marshall: [smiling] Maybe this is just the traditional initiation ritual in this department, Bill, but let me ask a question. If one of our customers came through the door right now, would you ask her to wait outside for an hour? Howard: If she just came barging in like you did, sure. Marshall: Are you working on something that’s more important than responding to our customers? Howard: They’re not your customers. You’ve only been here 5 minutes. Marshall: True, but I’ve been with this company long enough to know the importance of putting customers first. Howard: Look, you don’t know the first thing about how this department functions. Before you go off on some customer crusade, you ought to learn a little about how we do things. Marshall: There’s a lot I can learn from all of you, and I’m eager to get started. For example, I’m very interested in your ideas on how we can make this a department where as soon as people walk in, they get the sense that this is a place where people care, are responsive, and genuinely want to be helpful. I’d like that to be true for anyone who comes in—a staff member, a customer, or just someone who got lost and came into the wrong office. That’s not the message I got from my initiation just now, but I’m sure we can think of lots of ways to change that. How does that fit with your image of what the department should be like? Notice how Marshall recasts the conversation. She recognizes newcomers usually experience an initial test or “hazing.” Instead of engaging in a personal confrontation with Howard, she focuses on the department’s core values. She brings her “customer first” commitment with her, but she avoids positioning that value as something imposed from outside. Instead, she grounds it in an experience everyone in the room has just shared: the way she was greeted when she entered. Like many successful symbolic leaders, she is attuned to the cues about values and culture that are expressed in everyday life. She communicates her philosophy, but she also asks questions to draw out Howard and her new staff members. If she can use the organization’s history to an advantage in rekindling a commitment to customer service, she passes her first test and is off to a good start. Benefits and Risks of Reframing The multiple replays of the Howard–Marshall incident illustrate both the power and the risks of reframing. The frames are powerful because of their ability to spur imagination and generate new insights and options. But each frame has limits as well as strengths, and each can be applied well or poorly. Frames generate scripts, or scenarios, to guide action in high-stakes circumstances. By changing your script, you can change how you appear, what you do, and how your audience sees you. You can create the possibility of a makeover in everyday life. Few of us have the dramatic skill and versatility of a professional actor, but you can alter what you do by choosing an alternative script or scenario. You have been learning how to do this since birth. Both men and women, for example, typically employ different scenarios for same-sex and opposite-sex encounters. Students who are guarded and formal when talking to a professor become energized and intimate when talking to friends. Managers who are polite and deferential with the boss may be gruff and autocratic with subordinates and then come home at night to romp playfully with their kids. The tenderhearted neighbor becomes a ruthless competitor when his company’s market share is threatened. The tough-minded drill instructor bows to authority when facing a colonel. Consciously or not, we all read situations to figure out the scene we’re in and the role we should fill so that we can respond in character. But it’s important to ask ourselves whether the drama is the one we want and to recognize that we can choose which character to play and how to interpret or alter the script. The essence of reframing is examining the same situation from multiple vantage points. The effective leader changes lenses when things don’t make sense or aren’t working. Reframing offers the promise of powerful new options, but it cannot guarantee that every new strategy will be successful. Each lens offers distinctive advantages, but each has its blind spots and shortcomings. The structural frame risks ignoring everything outside the rational scope of tasks, procedures, policies, and organization charts. Structural thinking can overestimate the power of authority and underestimate the authority of power. Paradoxically, overreliance on structural assumptions and a narrow emphasis on rationality can lead to an irrational neglect of human, political, and cultural variables crucial to effective action. Adherents of the human resource frame sometimes cling to a romanticized view of human nature in which everyone hungers for growth and collaboration. When they are too optimistic about integrating individual and organizational needs, they may neglect both structure and the stubborn realities of conflict and scarcity. The political frame captures dynamics that other frames miss, but it has its own limits. A fixation on politics easily becomes a cynical self-fulfilling prophecy, reinforcing conflict and mistrust while sacrificing opportunities for rational discourse, collaboration, and hope. Political action too often is interpreted as amoral, scheming, and oblivious to the common good.
CHAPTER 17 REFRAMING LEADERSHIP A leader is a dealer in hope. —Napoléon Bonaparte The pitched battle between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump for the U.S. presidency in 2016 sent shockwaves around the world and was unprecedented in many ways. Clinton was the first woman nominated to run for president by a major party, while Trump was the first major candidate who had no previous political or military experience. Few, if any, could remember an election where both candidates were so widely disliked, nor one where one of the candidates, Trump, spent so much time battling leaders of his own party. Historians will no doubt spend years trying to sort this out, but a look through the four frames reveals important lessons for leadership. Structure, people, politics, and symbols all contributed to the outcome. Structure Two key structural issues were the process for nominating candidates and the Electoral College system for choosing the winner. In U.S. presidential elections, a party’s nominee emerges over several months from a state-by-state process of caucuses and primary elections that select delegates to each party’s national convention. The two major parties had different rules. On the Republican side, it was winner-take-all in many states, and a candidate could garner all of a state’s delegates with less than half the votes. Running in a multicandidate field, Trump racked up a majority of all Republican delegates with less than 40 percent of the total votes. The race ended early but produced an unconventional candidate opposed by many grassroots Republicans and much of the party’s leadership. Meanwhile, the Democratic race dragged on longer because the party awarded delegates on a proportional basis. Over the primary season, Clinton got a majority of the votes but had trouble pulling away from her major opponent, Bernie Sanders. Even when she won a state, she often got only a slightly larger share of the delegates. The Electoral College, a quaint eighteenth century compromise enshrined in the U.S. Constitution,1 gives each state a number of electors equivalent to its representation in Congress. Beginning in the 1990s, America became sharply divided between red (Republican) and blue (Democratic) states. In the 2016 election, most of the 50 states and the District of Columbia were sure to vote either red or blue, leaving only a few states that were real battlegrounds and three that were critical. Trump was almost sure to win if, but only if, he carried Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Human Needs Turning to the human resource frame, we can ask about the concerns and attitudes that were motivating American voters. It was a year of surprises as both sides of the political spectrum saw major shifts in the electorate toward greater anger and dissatisfaction with the status quo. Many voters wanted wholesale change because they believed Washington was broken. On the Democratic side, almost everyone expected that Clinton, who had narrowly lost the nomination to Barack Obama eight years earlier, had an easy path to the nomination. But Bernie Sanders, a relatively obscure senator from Vermont, mounted a ferocious challenge from the left on a platform of economic justice, universal health care, and free college tuition. Liberals and young voters flocked to him. Caught off guard, Clinton struggled to adjust her positions to catch up with a leftward drift among Democratic primary voters. She ultimately prevailed but emerged weaker than expected amid concerns that many Sanders voters might never support her. Meanwhile, the surprises were even greater on the Republican side. When Donald Trump first announced that he was running for the nomination, almost everyone saw it as a publicity stunt that would quickly flame out. How could a brash real estate developer and television personality with no government experience and a crazy idea about building a wall along the U.S./Mexican border get anything more than a fringe vote? But Trump tapped into a huge reservoir of disenchantment among voters who felt that they were being left behind and that the America they knew was being undermined by globalization, immigrants, bureaucrats, and condescending coastal elites. Trump gave voice to their feelings. His promise to deport immigrants, bring jobs back, and make America great again resonated powerfully, and he overwhelmed the large field of more traditional Republicans running against him. The human resource frame also underscores the importance of the personal characteristics of the two candidates. Clinton and Trump had a few things in common. Long before the election, both were household names and both had very high unfavorable ratings. The two were also the oldest pair of candidates in U.S. history; Trump would be 70 on Election Day, and Clinton would be 69. But they had very different personas. Trump was hot where Clinton was cool, flamboyant where she was restrained, shoot-from-the-hip where she was disciplined, and outrageous where she was cautious. To almost every issue, Trump offered dramatic but vague promises, while Clinton delineated specific policies and plans. Voters who liked one rarely liked the other. Many disliked both and lamented that they were forced to choose the lesser of two evils. The candidates also had contrasting leadership styles. Trump was an entertainer, a business magnate, and perhaps the least-disciplined presidential candidate in American history. He was notorious for over-the-top 3 AM Twitter storms attacking his various enemies. He was a relentless warrior who mostly embodied the political and symbolic frames, both central to effective leadership. Clinton was a cool-headed policy wonk—strong on details but weaker on assembling them into a compelling vision. She was more attuned to the structural and human resource frames. Her picture of the future was clearer on the details but fuzzier in terms of the big picture. Voters knew that Trump promised to “Make America great again,” but were less clear about Clinton’s core message. Changing Coalitions The political frame points to the importance of coalitions and scarce resources, and the 2016 election occurred in the context of a deeply polarized nation and a changing electorate. Beginning in the 1960s, the Republicans had evolved from the party of the industrial north to a coalition of economic conservatives (including much of the business elite) and white social conservatives (particularly in the south and the Plains states). The party appealed to the first group with support for low taxes, free markets, and free trade and kept the second group happy by opposing abortion, gay marriage, and government programs many whites saw as mostly benefitting persons of color. The Democratic coalition, meanwhile, underwent its own evolution in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Members of the white working class, particularly religious and social conservatives, drifted toward the Republicans, but a new Democratic coalition emerged that brought together groups heavily concentrated in and around major cities—the poor, minorities, and upscale progressives. The differences between Clinton and Trump backers in the 2016 campaign reflected the evolution in both parties. Democrats increased their share of college-educated voters, and Clinton won among women and people of color. But Trump won among whites, particularly white men without college degrees. Tellingly, 81 percent of Trump supporters, but only 19 percent of Clinton’s said that life for people like them was worse now than 50 years earlier (Smith, 2016). Culture and Narrative The symbolic frame underscores the importance of culture and narrative in understanding the election. A critical cultural shift in the U.S. electorate was the gradual decline of non-Hispanic whites as a percentage of the population. People of color had become a majority in four states (California, Hawaii, New Mexico, and Texas) and were gaining in many others. This worked both for and against Trump: demographics were shifting toward the Democrats, but that shift triggered powerful levels of distress and anger among many whites. The specter of terrorism, beginning with 9/11 and continuing with the rise of ISIS, exacerbated voters’ suspicions toward immigrants in general and Muslims in particular. Trump supporters were not poorer than Clinton voters, but they had the lowest opinions of Muslims and were most likely to favor mass deportation of undocumented immigrants (Matthews, 2016). What followed was one of the bitterest, most divisive presidential campaigns in U.S. history. Many Trump supporters saw Clinton as a corrupt, lying criminal who would confiscate their guns, open the door to terrorists, and destroy everything good in America if she became president. They cheered when Trump said that she would be in jail if he became president and nodded assent when he told them that “this election is our last chance to save our country.” Many Clinton supporters found the prospect of a Trump presidency genuinely terrifying. They saw him as a homegrown version of Adolf Hitler—an authoritarian, narcissistic, racist misogynist. In the end, Clinton got some 2.8 million more votes, but Trump won the presidency. He took the battleground states he had to get (Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania) and picked up narrow victories in two blue states in the upper Midwest, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Leadership Lessons from the 2016 Election In the tale of the 2016 election we can find many of the lessons for leadership that form the backbone of this chapter. Structure matters but is not always sufficient for leadership success. Clinton won on campaign infrastructure, but that was not enough to win the presidency. During the primaries, both candidates had to appeal to the partisan zealots who form the party’s base, but Trump defied the conventional wisdom that a candidate needs to move to the center in a general election to pick up independents and undecideds. He thrived on huge rallies where his passionate supporters devoured his message and showered him with approval. That passion turned out to be critical. Symbolically, elections are always about shaping the narrative in order to control how voters perceive you and your opponent. Trump framed himself as the only leader strong enough to save America from terminal decline. In his story, the United States had become a weak, borderless nation that was failing on almost every front, and he knew how to “Make America great again.” That catchphrase crystallized his message and rallied his supporters. Clinton, better on policy specifics than grand narrative, struggled to communicate an equally focused and compelling message. Her catchphrases included “I’m with her,” “Stronger together,” “America is already great,” and “Love trumps hate.” They added up to a fuzzy rationale for her candidacy. In a change election, Trump offered a clearer message of making things better. Both campaigns’ efforts to develop a positive image for their candidate were sometimes overshadowed by efforts to persuade the public that their opponents were terrible leaders and vile human beings. Trump consistently referred to Clinton as “crooked Hillary” and labeled her the worst candidate for president in American history. That narrative drew support from an FBI investigation into Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail server while she was Secretary of State and from an ongoing drip-drip of e-mails hacked from her campaign by Russian operatives and distributed through Wikileaks. Clinton supporters believed that her momentum was seriously damaged when FBI director James Comey announced days before the election that new e-mails had been discovered that “might be pertinent” to the investigation. A week later, Comey said that it had been a false alarm, but Democrats believed the new announcement served only to keep the e-mails in the news. Although the Democrats got no help from the FBI or Wikileaks, they benefited from a continuing flow of new material from investigative reporters and from Trump himself to support their framing of him as a liar, misogynist, racist, and tax cheat who lacked the judgment and self-control to be trusted in the White House. Gender was a central issue for the first time in a U.S. presidential election. It both helped and hindered Clinton. She was a powerful symbol to millions who hoped to see the first woman president. But leadership has historically been associated with maleness, and research (that we examine later in this chapter) shows that women who seek high office often face discrimination and higher expectations than men. Both men and women are often uncomfortable with women who are powerful or who seem to want power. In the end, much of the public believed the worst about both candidates—polls suggested that Clinton was viewed unfavorably by 57 percent of the public and Trump by 62 percent. Even many Trump supporters feared that he lacked the maturity and steadiness required in a president. But they saw him as the candidate who could bring change to Washington. That was enough to make him president. We begin this chapter with a historical tour of theory and research on leadership, examining quantitative and qualitative strands that have run in parallel to one another. This will lead us into an exploration of the idea of leadership—what it is, what it is not, and what it can and cannot accomplish. We look at the differences between leadership and power and between leadership and management. We examine the intersection of leadership with gender and culture. Finally, we explore how each of the four frames generates its own image of leadership. Leadership in Organizations: A Brief History In nearly every culture, the earliest literature includes sagas of heroic figures who led their people to physical or spiritual victory over internal or external enemies. In Egypt and China, we find narratives about pharaohs and emperors and the rise and fall of dynasties that date back thousands of years. Ancient Chinese chronicles tell a cyclical story that begins when a dynamic leader leverages disorder and discontent and amasses sufficient force to found a new dynasty. For a time the new dynasty produces vigorous and far-sighted leaders who create a stable and prosperous state. But eventually corruption spreads, leadership falters, and the dynasty collapses in the face of a new challenger. Then the cycle begins anew. This saga still has a powerful resonance in modern China because the Communist party leaders understand that their dynasty, like all that have come before, may someday lose the “mandate of heaven.” From ancient times to the late nineteenth century, the leadership literature consisted mostly of narratives about monarchs, generals, and political leaders. Then the rise of big business triggered an interest in the qualities of the giants who founded great enterprises, like Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller. In the same era, social science began to separate from philosophy and emerge as a distinct academic field. Scholars like Harvard psychologist William James and the sociologists Herbert Spencer in England and Emile Durkheim in France began to lay the intellectual foundations for a science of society and human behavior based on systematic research. Out of this ferment emerged two distinct approaches to understanding leadership in organizations that have coexisted for more than a century, traveling more or less side by side, with only occasional nods to one another. One track, which we label quantitative-analytic, emphasizes testing hypotheses with quantitative data to develop leadership theory. The work is typically published as articles in scholarly journals (an overview of eras in the evolution of this strand appears in Exhibit 17.1). A second track, qualitative-holistic, relies on case studies and interviews with practitioners to develop ideas and theory about how leadership works in practice. Such work is often published in books aimed at an audience that includes both practitioners and scholars. We will survey quantitative and then qualitative work before trying to capture the current state of the field. Exhibit 17.1. A Short History of Quantitative-Analytic Leadership Research. Leadership Theory Examples Central Idea Current Status Trait theory: how are leaders different? Galton, 1869; Terman, 1904; Kirkpatrick and Locke, 1991; Zaccaro, 2007 Leaders possess distinctive personal characteristics (intelligence, self-confidence, integrity, extraversion, and so on). Fell out of favor in the 1950s when reviewers found weak empirical support, but has returned to favor in recent decades. Leadership style theory: how do leaders act? Lewin, Lippitt, and White, 1939; Likert, 1961; Fleishman and Harris, 1962 Leadership depends on style (democratic vs. autocratic, task-oriented vs. people-oriented, etc.). Mixed evidence stimulated move toward contingency theories, which often include leader style variables. Contingency theory: how do circumstances affect leadership? Fiedler, 1967; Lawrence and Lorsch, 1967; Evans, 1970; House, 1971, 1996 Effective leadership depends on the characteristics of followers and context: what works in one situation may not work in another. No single contingency view has found consistent empirical support or wide acceptance, but most modern leadership research incorporates the idea that leadership depends on circumstances. Leader-member exchange (LMX) theory: what happens in the leader-follower relationship? Dansereau, Graen, and Haga, 1975; Graen and Uhl-Bien, 2008 Leadership is rooted in the quality of the relationships between leaders and individual followers. Advocates of LMX theory have been actively conducting research since the 1970s; many LMX propositions have empirical support, but the approach is criticized for complexity and viewing leadership too narrowly. Transformational leadership theory: how do leaders transform followers? Burns, 1978; Bass, 1985; Conger and Kanungo, 1998 Transformational (or charismatic) leaders use inspiration, idealized influence, and the like to generate followers’ trust and willingness to go above and beyond. Evidence suggests transformational leadership makes a difference, but more research is needed on when and how it works best. Quantitative-Analytic Research Since the early twentieth century, quantitative research has moved through several eras, gradually evolving from simpler to more complex views of leadership. The initial research, flowing from the “great man” theory of leadership (Carlyle, 1841), focused on finding the distinctive traits that made leaders different from everyone else. Around 1950, multiple reviews (Stogdill, 1948; Gibb, 1947; Jenkins, 1947) concluded that there was little consistency in leadership traits across people and circumstances. That gave rise to two lines of research in the 1950s and subsequent decades: one on leadership style and another on situational contingencies. Style research focused particularly on the difference between task-oriented and people-oriented leaders. The results suggested that leaders who focused on people generated higher morale although not necessarily higher productivity, and that the most effective leaders were good at dealing with both tasks and people (Fleishman and Harris, 1962). Contingency theorists examined characteristics of situations that interacted with leader behavior. One influential line, for example, found that task-oriented leaders did best in situations that were either highly favorable or highly unfavorable for the leader, while people-oriented leaders did best in situations in the middle (Fiedler, 1964, 1967). Another contingency theory, Hersey and Blanchard’s situational leadership model (1969, 1977), had less research support (Hambleton and Gumpert, 1982; Graeff, 1983; Blank, Weitzel, and Green, 1990) but became more popular with practitioners because it is more intuitive and offers clearer practical guidance to practitioners. The model incorporates its own version of the distinction between task and people, using a two-by-two table to develop four different leadership styles (see Exhibit 17.2). Hersey and Blanchard argued that each style was appropriate for a different level of subordinate “readiness,” which they defined in terms of how able and willing subordinates were to do the work. If subordinates are neither willing nor able, then the leader should tell them how to do the job. If they want to do the job but lack skill, then the leader should sell or coach to build capacity. When subordinates are able but unwilling or insecure, then the leader should use a participative style to build motivation. If they are both able and willing, the leader should delegate and get out of the way. Exhibit 17.2. Situational Leadership Model. High Relationship, Low Task: Participate Use when followers are “able” but “unwilling” or “insecure.” High Relationship, High Task: Sell (or Coach) Use when followers are “unable” but “willing” or “motivated.” Low Relationship, Low Task: Delegate Use when followers are “able” and “willing” or “motivated.” Low Relationship, High Task: Tell Use when followers are “unable” and “unwilling” or “insecure.” Hersey and Blanchard’s model continues to be popular for leadership training but has been criticized for lack of research support and for generating self-fulfilling prophesies. If, for example, managers give unwilling and unable subordinates high direction and low support, what would cause their motivation to improve? The manager of a computer design team told us ruefully, “I treated my group with a ‘telling’ management style and found that in fact they became both less able and less willing.” The 1970s spawned a new line of research: leader-member exchange theory (LMX). LMX research began with the insight that leaders create different relationships with different followers, and, in particular, they create in-groups and out-groups by interacting with some subordinates in a more personal way while focusing strictly on task with others (Dansereau, Graen, and Haga, 1975; Graen and Uhl-Bien, 2008). One practical implication from this research is that leaders can get better results by creating strong relationships with all, not just some, of their subordinates (Graen and Uhl-Bien, 2008, p. 225). A major new strand that emerged in the 1980s emphasized a distinction between transactional and transforming leadership (Burns, 1978). Transactional leadership involves practical, give-and-take exchanges, such as pay for performance. Transforming leaders, on the other hand, “champion and inspire followers…to rise above narrow interests and work together for transcending goals” (Burns, 2003, p. 26). Over the next two decades, research on transformational, or charismatic, leadership became a dominant research strand, producing a number of studies confirming that transformational leaders had a more powerful impact than those who relied only on transactional approaches (Shamir, House, and Arthur, 1993; Conger and Kanungo, 1998). Qualitative-Holistic Leadership Studies The quantitative research tradition has both strengths and limits. Over more than a century, scholars have tested hypotheses, discarded ideas that don’t work, and gradually built theory that fits the data. But the work has often simplified the complexities of leadership by treating only a few variables at a time and by treating leadership as equivalent to what happens between managers and their subordinates. Qualitative research on real-world practice has viewed leadership in more nuanced and holistic ways, often developing ideas decades before they make their way into quantitative studies. Mary Parker Follett (1896, 1918, 1941), for example, was well ahead of her time in exploring distributed leadership, charisma, and the importance of the human element. Many of the major themes in Follett’s work were extended by two of the most influential management thinkers of the early twentieth century: Elton Mayo and Chester Barnard. Mayo, often viewed as the founder of the “human relations” school of management, conducted the famous studies that gave rise to the “Hawthorn effect” and promoted the idea, viewed as radical at the time, that human and social factors mattered as much as technical and economic ones (Mayo, 1933). Chester Barnard, a telephone executive, was a practitioner rather than an academic, but he wrote one of the most influential management books of the midtwentieth century, The Functions of the Executive (Barnard, 1938). Barnard argued that the task of leadership is to balance technical and human factors to achieve cooperation among the many groups and individuals within an organization. Organizations rarely survive indefinitely, he noted, because it is so challenging to solve two central issues: achieving goals while satisfying the needs of those who do the work. The idea that leadership is about balancing or integrating concerns for task and people remained a central theme in qualitative work on leadership for the next several decades (examples include Argyris, 1962; Bennis, 1961; Likert, 1961; McGregor, 1960), but in later years researchers began to give greater attention to political and symbolic issues in the workplace (Dalton, 1959; Mintzberg, 1973; Kotter, 1985; Heifetz and Linsky, 2002). Interest in the symbolic dimension of leadership exploded in the 1980s when students of organization discovered something long known to anthropologists—organizations had cultures, and those cultures mattered (Deal and Kennedy, 1982; Peters and Waterman, 1982; Schein, 1992). Symbolic elements such as charisma, vision, and transformational leadership became dominant themes in discussions of leadership, although Collins and Porras (1994) and Collins (2001) led a kind of counterrevolution, arguing that charisma was overrated (Collins and Porras, 1994). Instead, they argued, leaders of successful companies were disciplined and determined but humble (attributing success to the team, not to themselves) and even self-effacing. Heifetz and Linsky (2002), focusing particularly on leadership in the public sector, took a similar position, arguing that the essence of leadership is not vision but mobilizing followers to work on solving hard problems. Evolution of the Idea of Leadership Prior to the twentieth century, leadership was usually equated to high position, and the dominant theme in leadership studies was that leaders were born with special gifts that made them different from ordinary mortals. That view is dying, brought down by leadership research and by the complex challenges of leading in contemporary organizations. Our tour of more than 100 years of leadership history shows a gradual shift from a simpler view centered on the individual to a more complex view that takes account of individual, relationship, and context. Five propositions capture this evolution: Leadership Is an Activity, Not a Position Leadership is distinct from authority and position, although authorities may be leaders. Weber (1947) and Barnard (1938) both linked authority to legitimacy. People consent and choose to obey authority only as long as they believe it is legitimate. Authority and leadership are both built on voluntary compliance. Leaders cannot lead without legitimacy, but many examples of authority fall outside the domain of leadership. As Gardner put it, “The meter maid has authority, but not necessarily leadership” (1989, p. 7). Heifetz (1994) argues that authority often impedes leadership because in times of distress we expect those in authority to know and do more than they can and to solve our problems for us. This tempts leaders to overpromise and underdeliver, a recurring setup for failure and disappointment. After the 2016 election, many observers wondered how Donald Trump would be able to deliver on the many promises that he made during his election campaign. The management literature has often equated leadership to whatever managers do with their subordinates, but this defines leadership too narrowly. Leaders need skill in managing relationships with all significant stakeholders, including superiors, peers, and external constituents (Burns, 1978; Gardner, 1986; Kotter and Cohen, 2002; Heifetz and Linsky, 2002). Leadership Is Different from Management You can be a leader without being a manager, and many managers could not “lead a squad of seven-year-olds to the ice-cream counter” (Gardner, 1989, p. 2). Bennis and
CHAPTER 18 REFRAMING CHANGE IN ORGANIZATIONS There is no more delicate matter to take in hand, nor more dangerous to conduct, nor more doubtful in its success, than to set up as a leader in the introduction of changes. For he who innovates will have for his enemies all those who are well off under the existing order of things, and only the lukewarm support in those who might be better off under the new. —Machiavelli, 1514, p.27 Running for president in 2008, Barack Obama ran on a platform promising “change.” Running for reelection in 2012, President Obama defended his record against Governor Mitt Romney’s campaign promise of “change.” And so it goes in one presidential race after another. In the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton promised both change and continuity with the policies of the popular incumbent, Obama. Donald Trump ran as an unabashed change candidate, promising a return to greatness. After the election, Trump supporters rejoiced and Clinton voters were horrified. Yet the status quo is often remarkably durable, hanging on until the next election and a renewed promise of change and hope. A similar pattern is observable in American businesses. When profits dip, when employees become restless or when some other calamity looms, executives think about “pursuing a different path.” They scan prevailing ideas in “good currency” for the latest magical remedies to make things better. They do not always realize that many panaceas for solving problems have already been tried and found wanting. Henry Mintzberg, for example, was a proponent of strategic planning in the 1970s and 1980s as a more systematic way. In his 1994 book, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, he concluded: “…strategic planning did not work…the form (‘the rationality of planning’) did not conform to the function (‘the needs of strategy making’)” (p. 415). Countless other modern management theories and techniques have suffered a similar fate. Successful change efforts often reach back to the past. In 1993, Lou Gerstner Jr., the new CEO of IBM, pulled the company out of a downward spiral by harking back to the time when Tom Watson Sr. was CEO and IBM was the most admired company in the world. He reinvigorated old values and refurbished dormant cultural practices. Howard Schultz followed a similar path when Starbucks took a dive in 2007 (see Chapter 13). He made public his concern that the company had wandered from the cultural values and ways that enabled it to become a household name. He put Starbucks back on a path to growth and profitability and restored the spirit that had once made the company unique. Yet clinging to the status quo can also stifle progress. The United States is one of only three nations that have not yet officially converted to the metric system. This seems odd, given that the United States has little in common with the other two holdouts—Liberia and Myanmar. It seems even stranger because the system was first officially authorized in the United States in 1866, and as far back as 1958, the Federal Register contained provisions that “all calibrations in the U.S. customary system of weights and measurements carried out by the National Bureau of Standards will continue to be based on metric measurement and standards.” And it seems even more puzzling because in 1996 all federal agencies were ordered to adopt the metric system. Adhering to a thousand-year-old English system that even the English have been abandoning imposes many disadvantages. It handicaps international commerce, for example, and it led to measurement confusion in the design of the Hubble space telescope, costing taxpayers millions of dollars. Yet the United States has made little progress in going metric, despite cosmetic changes such as putting kilometers alongside miles on vehicle speedometers. America’s inertia in implementing the metric system illustrates pervasive and predictable challenges of change that repeatedly scuttle promising innovations. Organizations spend millions of dollars on change strategies that produce little improvement or make things worse. Mergers sour. Technology falls short of its potential. Vital strategies never wend their way into practice. In elections, challengers promise change, but winners struggle to deliver on even a fraction of their pledges. To shrink the gap between change advocates’ intentions and outcomes, a voluminous body of literature has flourished. The sheer volume of change models, case studies, and prescriptive remedies is overwhelming. Some contain productive insights. Beer and Nohria (2001), for example, compare two distinct change models—a hard, top-down approach that emphasizes shareholder value (Theory E) and a softer, more participative strategy (Theory O) that targets organizational culture. Kanter, Stein, and Jick’s “Big Three” model (1992) helps managers sort through the interplay of change strategies, implementers, and recipients. But despite growing knowledge, the same mistakes keep repeating themselves. It’s like reading a stream of books on dieting but never losing weight. The target is never easy to reach, and it often seems that everyone wants things to be different, so long as they don’t have to do anything differently. The key question is: What keeps the innovations that organizations need from taking hold? This chapter opens by examining the innovation process at two different companies. It then moves to a multiframe analysis to show how participation, training, structural realignment, political bargaining, and symbolic rituals of letting go can help achieve more positive outcomes. It concludes with a discussion integrating the frames with Kotter’s influential analysis of the stages of change. The Innovation Process What makes organizational change so difficult? When Bain and Company surveyed 250 American companies to determine their experience with making needed changes, they discovered a disturbing trend: Only 12 percent achieved what they set out to accomplish 38 percent failed by a wide margin, capturing less than half of their original target 50 percent settled for a significant shortfall (Bain Insights, 2016) Comparing two typically flawed change efforts with an atypical success story offers insights. Six Sigma at 3M Beginning at Motorola in 1986 and later enhanced at General Electric, Six Sigma evolved from a statistical concept to a range of metrics, methods, and management approaches intended to reduce defects and increase quality in products and services (Pande, Neuman, and Cavanagh, 2000). It became the new corporate shibboleth in the 1990s after its successful, widespread use at GE. Essentially the approach has two components, one emphasizing metrics and control and the other emphasizing systems design. It has spawned acronyms like DMAIC (define, measure, analyze, improve, and control) and DFSS (design for Six Sigma—by building quality in from the start). GE executives groomed in the Six Sigma way brought the techniques with them when they moved to other corporations. One example was James McNerney, who missed the chance to succeed Jack Welch as GE’s CEO but was snapped up by 3M in 2001 to bring some discipline to a legendary enterprise that seemed to be losing its edge. Profit and sales growth had been erratic, and the stock price had languished. McNerney got people’s attention by slashing eight thousand jobs (11 percent of the workforce), putting teeth in the performance review process, and tightening the free-flowing spending spigot. Thousands of 3M workers trained to earn the Six Sigma title of “Black Belt.” These converts pioneered companywide Six Sigma initiatives such as boosting production by reducing variation and eliminating pointless steps in manufacturing. The Black Belts trained rank-and-file employees as “Green Belts,” in charge of local Six Sigma initiatives. The Black Belt elite maintained metrics that tracked both overall and “neighborhood” efforts to systematize and streamline all aspects of work—including research and development. In the short run, McNerney’s strategy paid off. Indicators of productivity improved, costs were trimmed, and the stock price soared. But Six Sigma’s standardization began to intrude on 3M’s historical emphasis on innovation. Prior to McNerney’s arrival, new ideas were accorded almost unlimited time and funding to get started. Fifteen percent of employees’ on-the-clock time was devoted to developing groundbreaking products—with little accountability. This approach had given birth to legendary products like Scotch Tape and Post-it notes. Six Sigma systematized the research and development process. Sketchy, blue-sky projects gave way to scheduled, incremental development. Funds carried an expiration date, and progress through a planned pipeline was measured and charted. Development of new products began to wane. “The more you hardwire a company on total quality management, [the more] it is going to hurt breakthrough innovation,” says Vijay Govindarajan, a management professor at Dartmouth. “The mindset that is needed, the capabilities that are needed, the metrics that are needed, the whole culture that is needed for discontinuous innovation, are fundamentally different.” Art Fry, the inventor of the Post-it, agreed: “We all came to the conclusion that there was no way in the world that anything like a Post-it note would ever emerge from this new system” (Hindo, 2007, p. 9). With the lethargy ended but the damage done, McNerney left 3M in 2005 to become the new CEO at Boeing. Fry observed, “What’s remarkable is how fast a culture can be torn apart. [McNerney] didn’t kill it, because he wasn’t here long enough. But if he had been here much longer, I think he would have.” George Buckley, McNerney’s successor, observed in retrospect, “Perhaps one of the mistakes that we made as a company—it’s one of the dangers of Six Sigma—is that when you value sameness more than you value creativity, I think you potentially undermine the heart and soul of a company like 3M” (Hindo, 2007, p. 9). Benner and Tushman (2015) rely on the 3M case to argue that organizations need the capacity to manage paradox in order to foster both incremental and discontinuous innovation. Process improvements like Six Sigma, along with many other management “panaceas,” may make incremental innovation more efficient and reliable but also tend to block break-the-mold innovations. So organizations may become very good at improving existing products or services but fall to more nimble and creative competitors at times of dramatic changes in markets and technology. Take another example, JC Penney, an American institution where generations of Americans had shopped for almost everything for more than a century. More than a few remember it as “the place your mom dragged you to buy clothes you hated in 1984” (Morran, 2013). By 2011, the firm was treading water, and CEO Myron Ullman retired after seven years at the helm. Ullman’s initial years had gone well, but the recession of 2008 hit Penney’s middle-income shoppers hard, and the company had been going downhill since. The board looked for a savior and found him in Ron Johnson, a wunderkind merchant who had worked his magic at two of the most successful retailers in America. He’d made Target hip and led Apple Stores as they became the most profitable retail outlets on the planet. Johnson moved quickly to create a new, trendier JC Penney. His vision went well beyond changing the system of metrics and measurement or making the company more profitable. He wanted to graft an entirely new vision of retail merchandising onto ailing old root stock: “…to analysts and employees, Johnson was Willy Wonka asking [them] to go with him on a trip through his retail imagination” (Macke, 2013). Wanting to move fast, Johnson skipped market tests and staged rollouts. “No need,” said Johnson, “we didn’t test at Apple” (Heisler, 2013). Creative new floor plans divided stores into boutique shops featuring brands like Martha Stewart, Izod, Joe Fresh, and Dockers. Centralized locations provided places for customers to lounge, share a cup of coffee, have their hair done, or grab a quick lunch. Games and other entertainment kept children occupied while customers visited boutique offerings or just “hung out.” Johnson quickly did away with Penney’s traditional coupons, clearance racks and sales events, part of a model that relied on inflating prices, then marking them down to create the illusion of bargains. Johnson replaced all that with everyday “Fair and Square” prices. To Johnson’s rational way of thinking, this move made perfect sense. But shopping is more of a ritual than rational undertaking: JCP’s Ron Johnson was…clueless about what makes shopping meaningful for women. It’s the thrill of the hunt, not the buying…women love to shop and deals are what make the game worth playing. Bargain hunting is now like playing a game—and finding deeply discounted goods on sale is part of the game (Phillips, quoted in Denning, 2013). Johnson replaced much of Penney’s leadership with executives from other top retailers. Many, like Johnson, lived in California, far from company headquarters in Plano, Texas. They often looked down on the customers and the JC Penney culture they had inherited. One of Johnson’s recruits, COO Michael Kramer, another Apple alum, told the Wall Street Journal, “I hated the JC Penney culture. It was pathetic” (Tuttle, 2013). Inside and outside the company, perceptions grew that Johnson and his crew blamed customers rather than themselves as results went from bad to worse. Traditionally, great merchants, like Costco’s Jim Sinegal or Walmart’s Sam Walton, have loved spending time in their stores, chatting up staff and customers, asking questions, and studying everything to stay in touch with their business. Johnson, on the contrary, gave the impression that he wouldn’t shop in one of his own stores and didn’t particularly understand the people who did (Tuttle, 2013). Johnson substituted broadcasts for store visits. He sent out company-wide video updates every 25 days. Staff gathered in training rooms to hear what the CEO had to say and struggled to make sense of the gap between Johnson’s rosy reports and the chaos they were experiencing firsthand in the stores. It didn’t help that Johnson liked to broadcast from his home in Palo Alto or from the Ritz-Carlton in Dallas, where he stayed during visits to headquarters. Instead of marking milestones in Johnson’s turnaround effort, the broadcasts deepened a perception that he was out of touch and self-absorbed. Johnson’s reign at JC Penney lasted 17 months. Customers left, sales plummeted, and losses piled up. A board with few good options sacked Johnson and reappointed Ullman, the man who had left under a cloud less than two years earlier. The change initiatives at 3M and Penney’s reveal a familiar scenario: New CEO introduces new techniques and scores a short-term victory; political pressures and cultural resistance start to mount; CEO leaves to try again; organization licks its wounds and moves both backward and onward. In short, an optimistic beginning, tumultuous middle, and controversial conclusion. Ford Motor Company: An Atypical Case In 2006, the Ford Motor Company was chalking up a $13 billion loss and expected to lose even more the following year. Chairman William Ford III reluctantly concluded that his best efforts were no match for the executive infighting and entrenched mind-sets that were dragging the company down. His search for a tougher successor yielded Alan Mulally, the number two executive at Boeing. Mullaly had been passed over for the top job in favor of James McNerney, who had left 3M with mixed reviews. Ford convinced Mulally that Ford could give him what Boeing wouldn’t. Mullaly accepted what he knew would be a formidable challenge. To begin with, deteriorating political dynamics needed attention. First up was the media, who would give the public its first impression of the new Ford chief. Step one was leaked memos from Bill Ford bemoaning the lack of honesty at the top of the company and calling for immediate and dramatic change. Mullaly and his media staff cultivated key news sources and carefully staged the public announcement of his selection to assure that the new show opened to mostly rave reviews. A second challenge was to make sure employees came aboard for a new direction. On his second day of work Mullaly and Bill Ford led a joint town hall meeting in Detroit that was broadcast to workers around the world. After Ford introduced him, Mullaly said he was honored to be asked to join such a storied organization. Then he opened the floor to questions and gave upbeat but honest answers. Would he bring in a new executive team? No, he said, his team was right there. When the head of a strategic planning group asked if her unit would have a bigger role, he told her no, strategy is a job for “our team,” not a staff group. Two weeks later, Mullaly sent a frank e-mail message to everyone at Ford that described his “first impressions.” He was upfront about some bad news: Ford’s “gut-wrenching” circumstances meant that “some very good and loyal people are going to leave this company” in the months to come. But, he added, he was excited about the many people who were “bursting with ideas” and wanted to share them in e-mails, hallways, or the cafeteria. He ended on an upbeat note: “Everyone loves a comeback story. Let’s work together to write the best one ever.” Two more key constituencies were the board of directors and the Ford family. Mulally tested the same message with both groups: Ford needed to simplify its product line, produce cars that customers wanted, and develop a clear view of the future. Both groups responded enthusiastically, and many of Henry Ford’s descendants happily signed their names on a diagram of the family tree that Mulally had brought with him to their first meeting. Mulally also understood that Ford needed help from the United Automobile Workers (UAW). Both company and union were in a tough spot. Ford’s survival depended on negotiating a lower cost structure in its UAW contracts. The autoworkers’ leadership knew that Ford was in deep trouble and feared a disaster for its members if the company failed. Top leadership from both company and union held many meetings, at which Mulally promoted his mantra of “profitable growth for all.” His case centered on the fact that Ford was losing money on every car it made in North America. He argued that Ford had only three options: keep losing money and go out of business, move production offshore, or get a union contract that would let them build cars in the United States. The union reluctantly bought the argument, and after many rounds of bargaining and some last-minute high drama, company and union agreed on a deal that enabled Ford to build more cars in America. Still another critical political challenge was getting the support of Ford’s senior executives, including some who had hoped to become CEO. The proud, intensely competitive group of longtime Ford veterans was initially unimpressed with the new chief. To some, Mulally seemed like a smiling, overgrown Boy Scout who lacked the smarts, toughness, and gravitas to run Ford. He apparently didn’t even know how to dress, showing up in a dark-suit culture wearing a sport coat and olive pants. Many in the room felt that the auto industry was too tough for Mulally to understand, and Ford’s technical officer put it to him directly: “We appreciate you coming here from a company like Boeing, but you’ve got to realize that this is a very, very capital-intensive business with long product development lead times. The average car is made up of thousands of different parts, and they all have to work together flawlessly.” “That’s really interesting,” Mulally replied, with his usual genial smile and unflappable aura. “The typical passenger jet has four million parts, and if just one of them fails the whole thing can fall out of the sky. So I feel pretty comfortable with this.” This quieted naysayers for the moment, but Mulally knew that much of his team still wondered if he could do the job. Instead of trying to convince them directly, he turned to structural changes to bring clarity and focus to the top team as well as Ford’s global operations. Mulally quickly concluded that Ford needed a major overhaul of a “convoluted management structure riddled with overlapping responsibilities and tangled chains of command.” He implemented what had worked for him at Boeing, a matrix structure that crisscrossed the strong regional organizations with upgraded global functional units (as described in Chapter 4). Mulally knew that the structure would work only if the top executives came together as a team. He pulled out another structural device he had developed at Boeing: the Business Plan Review (BPR). He replaced dozens of high-level gatherings with one key meeting—same time, same place, every week. Attendance was required, in person or via video hookup, for everyone who reported to him. He put in new rules. In the old days, no one wanted to admit that anything was going wrong, so executives ritualistically came to meetings with thick binders and a bevy of assistants to help them hide problems under a blizzard of details. Executives now had to make their own 5-minute reports, using a standard format, on progress against plan. Mulally asked lots of questions but told them it was okay if someone didn’t know an answer. “Because we’ll all be here again next week, and I know you’ll know by then.” Every item in each report had to be color coded: green for on track, yellow for needs attention, and red for anything that was off plan or behind schedule. “This is the only way I know to operate,” he told them. “We need to have everybody involved. We need to have a plan. And we need to know where we are on the plans.” The head of Ford’s international operations, Mark Schultz, had hoped to be CEO himself and didn’t like the new rules. He dug in his heels. At the first BPR meeting, he said he wanted his chief financial officer to report for him. When Mulally told Schultz to do it himself, he tried, but was obviously unprepared. After a few minutes, Mulally had heard enough and tried to cut him off, but it took four tries before Schultz got the hint. After the meeting an angry Schultz told Mulally that he would not be able to attend all the BPR meetings because he had important work to do in Asia. With his usual smile, Mulally told him he didn’t have to come to meetings—but couldn’t stay on the team if he didn’t. Schultz figured he could play by his own rules because his longtime fishing buddy, Bill Ford, would protect him. That was a misjudgment. When Mulally eliminated his job and offered him a smaller one, Schultz retired rather than accept the demotion. Other executives got the message: Mulally was in charge, and Bill Ford was solidly behind him. As executives began to fall in line, Mulally was able to turn his attention to two pressing human resource issues: talent at the top and morale throughout the company. He respected Ford’s executive talent and felt that the company needed continuity rather than massive turnover in the senior leadership. He asked his HR chief to develop retention plans for all key executives. If Mulally heard that one of them was thinking about leaving, he would drop by his or her office to ask directly, “Are you going to stay?” Usually the executive did. Mulally’s major HR challenge was rebuilding the commitment and morale of Ford’s workforce in a time of downsizing and dismal business results. At headquarters, he was a master of leading by wandering around. He often skipped the executive dining room to eat in the company cafeteria, standing in line with his tray and chatting up accountants or sales analysts. He popped into meeting where he wasn’t expected, asking, “What are you guys talking about?” Lifers who had waited forever for a CEO who would listen started sending e-mails to Mulally. He answered them all and sometimes followed up with a telephone call. One engineer showed up at Mulally’s office with a pile of schematics, including drawings for more than a dozen different hood structures. He wanted to show the new chief just how muddled Ford’s design and engineering were. The drawings confirmed what Mulally already suspected. He asked if there was a way to reduce the complexity. When the engineer said yes, Mulally put him in charge of the effort. To reach the thousands of employees beyond Detroit, Mulally traveled to locations around the world, asking questions and reinforcing the message that Ford was coming back. He issued every employee a wallet card that carried the essence of the plan going forward: “One Ford. One Team. One Plan. One Goal.” Symbolically, Mulally’s biggest challenge was to change the perception that Ford was on a path to oblivion because it had become too bloated, bureaucratic, and self-absorbed to understand or adapt to the realities of the twenty-first century. As he sought a more hopeful story about the future, he followed the lead of wise symbolic leaders such as Lou Gerstner at IBM. He looked to the past. Mulally combed Ford’s corporate archives, believing that a key to Ford’s future was a return to the principles that had make it great in the first place. He hit pay dirt with an ad that Henry Ford had run in 1925 in the Saturday Evening Post (America’s most widely read publication at the time). Under a picture of an American family standing atop a grassy knoll next to their Model T, the caption read, “Opening the highways to all mankind.” In the text, Henry Ford outlined his vison: “A wholehearted belief that riding on the people’s highways should be within easy reach of all the people.” That ad gave Mulally the touchstone he was looking for. He wrote stream-of-consciousness notes about what needed to happen: pull stakeholders together, form tight relationships with the board and the Ford family, respect the heritage, implement reliable discipline and a business plan, and include everyone. Then he took another sheet of paper and sketched his “Alan Legacy.” Bottom line: “One Ford,” anchored on a glorious past, moving toward a future that replaced chaos and infighting with simplicity, teamwork, and unity—worldwide. How Frames Can Improve the Odds Comparing the stories of change at 3M, JC Penney, and Ford illustrates an iron law: Limited, top-down thinking almost always fails. Changes that are more employee driven and comprehensive have a better chance. Organizations today face a persistent dilemma. Changes in leadership or the environment pressure them to adapt, yet the more they try to change, the more often their reach exceeds their grasp (Nickerson and Silverman, 2003; Barnett and Freeman, 2001). Ormerod (2007) argues that “things usually fail” because decision makers don’t understand their circumstances well enough to anticipate the consequences of their actions. They march blindly down their chosen path ignoring warning signs that they are headed in the wrong direction. In studying scores of innovations, we continue to see managers whose strategies are limited because their thinking is employs only one or two cognitive lenses. Think about the challenges of rebuilding Iraq. The architects of the U.S. invasion foresaw a relatively quick and painless transition to democratic stability. Instead, eliminating the Saddam Hussein regime opened a Pandora’s box of political and symbolic issues seething beneath the surface (as happened subsequently in Libya, Egypt, and many other nations that have undergone cataclysmic regime change). It is much better to spot quicksand before rather than after you’re mired in it. The frames can help change agents see pitfalls and roadblocks ahead, thereby increasing their odds of success. Changing an organization is a complex, systemic undertaking. It rarely works to retrain people without revising roles or to revamp roles without retraining. Planning without broad-based participation that gives voice to the opposition almost guarantees stiff resistance later on. Change alters power relationships and undermines existing agreements and pacts. Even more profoundly, it intrudes on deeply rooted symbolic forms, traditional ways, icons, and rituals. Below the surface, an organization’s cultural tapestry begins to unravel, threatening time-honored traditions, prevailing cultural values and ways, and shared meaning. Too many change efforts fail, but there are bright spots that offer hope. Arnold (2015) cites five cases of dramatically successful change. One was Santander, the giant Spanish bank, which entered the U.K. market by buying two old-line British banks. The two were very different from one another and neither had much in common with Santander in terms of culture, systems, and practices. Santander needed to establish a common brand and to get both banks to align with its cultural values of “Simple, Personal, and Fair.” Santander’s change process emphasized both people and systems, including extensive opportunities for involvement and training. Reading between the lines of such case descriptions, one can detect the importance of the four frames in approaching change. In the remainder of the chapter, we look more closely at the human resource, structural, political, and symbolic aspects of organizational change and integrate them with Kotter’s model of the change process. Exhibit 18.1 summarizes the views of major issues in change that each frame offers. The human resource view focuses on needs, skills, and participation; the structural approach, on alignment and clarity; the political lens, on conflict and arenas; and the symbolic frame, on loss of meaning and the importance of creating new symbols and ways. Each mode of thought highlights a distinctive set of barriers and offers some possibilities for making change stick.
CHAPTER 19 REFRAMING ETHICS AND SPIRIT For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? —Mark 8:36 (King James Version) Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz asked that question in a memo to his company’s leadership team in 2007, wondering if the stores had lost the soul of the past. But for many business leaders around the globe, soul has no place in business, and ethics comes down to the slippery concept of “the morals of the marketplace”—meaning “Anything for a buck,” or “If other people do it, it must be okay.” That was how German electronics giant Siemens approached the question, “Should we pay someone a bribe if that will help us bring in business?” Under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, it has been illegal since 1977 for U.S. businesses to pay bribes to government officials, but in Germany bribes were a legal and deductible business expense until 1999. Like many other German firms, Siemens routinely paid bribes in foreign countries whenever that seemed to be the local custom. When German law changed in 1999, Siemens changed too—not by stopping bribes, but by finding creative ways to hide them. It wasn’t easy to hide more than $1 billion in slush money spread around the globe: $5 million to the prime minister’s son in Bangladesh, $12.7 million to officials in Nigeria (government contracts), $14 million in China (medical equipment), $16 million in Venezuela (urban rail lines), $20 million in Israel (power plants), and $40 million in Argentina (a $1 billion contract to produce national identity cards). The $1.7 million to Saddam Hussein and his cronies was modest by comparison. But Siemens leadership was resourceful in hiding the money trail. They stashed funds in hard-to-trace offshore bank accounts and hired local “consultants” with ties to government officials whose job was to put cash into the right hands. To heap camouflage atop the camouflage, Siemens established a toothless monitoring process—which was supposed to ensure that no bribes were being paid—and even ordered Siemens managers who oversaw the bribery to sign pledges attesting that they had not done what they and their bosses knew they had done (Schubert and Miller, 2008). Reinhard Siekaczek, a former midlevel Siemens executive, was not surprised when German police woke him up early one November morning in 2006. He and his colleagues at Siemens had occasionally joked that they might someday share a jail cell and a deck of cards. Siekaczek had been assigned to move millions of dollars into front companies and offshore bank accounts to support the bribery program. He got the job because of his integrity and loyalty to Siemens—he was honest, the kind of man who could be trusted not to take a cut for himself. He knew he was breaking the law, and he suspected that the police would show up sooner or later. He even kept personal copies of financial records to ensure that when he went down, he wouldn’t be alone. Siemens ultimately wound up paying $1.6 billion in fines and at least another $1 billion to clean up the mess. Several executives went to jail (Schubert and Miller, 2008). But the biggest cost for Siemens was the undermining of its image as a company that customers could trust to obey the law and act with integrity. Siemens’ story is far from unique. The sordid history of Walmart’s Mexican subsidiary, as recounted in the New York Times, makes Siemens look almost respectable by comparison: “Wal-Mart de Mexico was not the reluctant victim of a corrupt culture that insisted on bribes as the cost of doing business. Nor did it pay bribes merely to speed up routine approvals. Rather, Wal-Mart de Mexico was an aggressive and creative corrupter, offering large payoffs to get what the law otherwise prohibited. It used bribes to subvert democratic governance—public votes, open debates, transparent procedures. It used bribes to circumvent regulatory safeguards that protect Mexican citizens from unsafe construction. It used bribes to outflank rivals” (Barstow and Xanic von Bertrag, 2012, p. 1). As at Siemens, the bribes went well beyond pocket change—eight bribes totaling $341,000 to get permits for a Sam’s Club in Mexico City and nine bribes totaling $765,000 to build a distribution center in an environmentally sensitive flood basin north of the city. Was it a case of rogue executives ignoring the parent company’s ethical stance? Would the executives back at headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, have tolerated such blatantly unethical and illegal action? Maybe not, but after a lawyer in the Mexican subsidiary briefed top executives on the bribes, Walmart first investigated—and then squelched the investigation: “They did so even though their investigators had found a wealth of evidence supporting the lawyer’s allegations. The decision meant authorities were not notified. It also meant basic questions about the nature, extent and impact of Wal-Mart de Mexico’s conduct were never asked, much less answered” (Barstow and Xanic von Bertrag, 2012, p. 1). As we write in 2017 amid ongoing investigations and shareholder lawsuits, the ultimate consequences of this case are still unknown, but Walmart has altered its compliance practices and spent hundreds of millions of dollars in trying to clean up the mess. Over the years, similar corporate ethics imbroglios (including the Volkswagen and Wells Fargo scandals discussed in Chapter 1) have recurred around the world. What can managers and organizations do about this abysmal state of moral lapse? We argue in this chapter that ethics must reside in soul, a sense of bedrock character that anchors core beliefs and values. We discuss why soul is important and how it sustains spiritual conviction and ethical behavior. We then present a four-frame approach to leadership ethics. Soul and Spirit in Organizations Medtronic states its core purpose as serving patients rather than shareholders. Its CEO from 1989 to 2001, Bill George, was an outspoken advocate of authentic leadership and a vocal critic of short-term thinking. His position on Medtronic’s mission was clear: “Medtronic is not in business to maximize shareholder value. We are in business to maximize value to the patients we serve.” This principle was rooted in Medtronic’s original mission statement, developed by founder Earl Bakken in the 1960s. To reinforce the message, Bakken created the “Mission and Medallion Ceremony.” He met personally with every new employee, reviewed the mission, shared stories of how it played out in practice, and gave the employee a bronze medallion with an image of a patient rising from the operating table and walking into a full life. The tradition continued even as Medtronic grew much larger. During his term as CEO Bill George conducted medallion ceremonies for thousands of employees around the world—sometimes at 2 AM for night shift workers. Do such noble sentiments make a difference in practice? George thought so. Shortly after he promoted a talented executive to head Medtronic’s European operations, George learned that the individual was maintaining a secret account in a Swiss bank, apparently for making payments to doctors. At Siemens, this might have been just a line item, and the executive argued that American values shouldn’t be imposed in Europe. Not American values, George responded, but Medtronic values, and these were the same everywhere. Though it was painful, he asked the executive to resign immediately, released details to regulators in both the United States and Europe, and publicized the incident so that people inside and outside of the company clearly understood Medtronic’s unyielding ethical position. How did this squeaky-clean approach work out for shareholders? During George’s tenure, Medtronic’s share price increased at a rate of 36 percent per year, and its market capitalization rose from $1 billion to $60 billion. Other fast-growth companies in the same period, such as Enron and WorldCom, also shot up very fast—only to crash into bankruptcy. Medtronic, in contrast, had an orderly CEO transition and kept growing. Some people have such strong ethical convictions that it matters little where they work, but most of us are at greater risk—like Reinhard Siekaczek, the honest Siemens executive. His integrity and company loyalty led to a conviction for corruption in one of the biggest ethics scandals in German business history. We are social beings, attuned to cues and expectations from our workplace and our colleagues about what to do and not to do. In recent years one organization after another has lost its soul in the race for innovation, growth, and a rising share price. A company that loses track of any redeeming moral purpose doesn’t provide credible ethical guardrails for its employees. The result is often a spiritual and financial disaster. Many would scoff at the notion that organizations possess soul, but there is growing evidence that a bedrock sense of values and identity is a critical element in long-term success. A dictionary definition of soul uses terms such as “animating force,” “immaterial essence,” and “spiritual nature.” For an organization, group, or family, soul can also be viewed as a resolute sense of character, a deep confidence about who we are, what we care about, and what we deeply believe in. Siemens lost it and had to struggle to regain it. Walmart is still struggling. Medtronics deploys a chief ethics and compliance officer and mandatory training in corporate integrity to buttress continuing commitment to its core values of customer focus, candor, trust, respect, courage, and accountability. Why should an organization—a company, a school, or a public agency—be concerned about soul? Many organizations and management writers discount or scoff at the idea. As an example, two best sellers on strategy, Treacy and Wiersema’s The Discipline of Market Leaders (1995) and Hamel and Prahalad’s Competing for the Future (1994), linked the enormous success of Southwest Airlines to its strategic prowess. But founder Herb Kelleher offered a very different explanation for what made Southwest work, one that featured people, humor, love, and soul. “Simply put, Kelleher ‘cherishes and respects’ his employees, and his ‘love’ is returned in what he calls ‘a spontaneous, voluntary overflowing of emotion’” (Farkas and De Backer, 1996, p. 87). At Southwest, soul and the “Southwest spirit” are shared throughout the company. Kelleher claimed that the most important group in the company was the “Culture Committee,” a 70-person cross-section of employees established to perpetuate the company’s values and spirit. His charge to the committee was to “carry the spiritual message of Southwest Airlines” (Farkas and De Backer, 1996, p. 93). There were plenty of skeptics, and a competing airline executive grumbled, “Southwest runs on Herb’s bullshit” (Petzinger, 1995, p. 284). But, as we write in 2017, Southwest is the only airline in the industry that has turned a profit for 44 consecutive years. A growing number of successful leaders embrace a philosophy much like Kelleher’s. Ben Cohen, cofounder of the ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, observes: “When you give love, you receive love. I maintain that there is a spiritual dimension to business just as there is to the lives of individuals” (Levering and Moskowitz, 1993, p. 47). Howard Schultz of Starbucks echoes those sentiments in his emphasis on culture and heart. Evidence suggests that tapping a deeper level of human energy pays off. Collins and Porras (1994) and De Geus (1995) both found that a central characteristic of organizations that succeeded over the long haul was a core ideology emphasizing “more than profits” and offering “guidance and inspiration to people inside the company” (Collins and Porras, 1994, pp. 48, 88). When they are authentic and part of everyday life, such core ideologies—love at Southwest, maximizing value to patients at Medtronics—give a company soul. Soul and ethics are inextricably intertwined. Recent decades have regularly produced highly public scandals of major corporations engaging in unethical, if not illegal, behavior. It happened in the 1980s, a decade of remarkable greed and corruption in business. It happened again with the spate of scandals in 2001 and 2002 (Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and the like), and in the subprime mortgage mess of 2007–2008. In recent years, the rogues’ gallery included Toyota (cooking the books), FIFA (bribery and fraud in connection with marketing rights to soccer games), Volkswagen (cheating on emissions tests), Wells Fargo (fake sales of “solutions”) and two health care giants that put profits ahead of patients: Johnson & Johnson (dubious marketing and defective products) and Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) (inducing patients to undergo unnecessary and dangerous cardiac procedures). Efforts to do something about the ethical void in management have ebbed and flowed as dishonor comes and goes. One proposed remedy is a greater emphasis on ethics in business schools and training programs. A second proposed remedy is corporate ethics statements. A third is stronger legal and regulatory muscle, such as the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (signed by more than 140 nations), and “SOX”—the controversial Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 20021—which mandated a variety of measures to combat fraud and increase corporate transparency. These are important and useful initiatives, but they only skim the surface. Solomon calls for a deeper “Aristotelian ethic:” There is too little sense of business as itself enjoyable (the main virtue of the “game” metaphor), that business is not a matter of vulgar self-interest but of vital community interest, that the virtues on which one prides oneself in personal life are essentially the same as those essential to good business—honesty, dependability, courage, loyalty, integrity. Aristotle’s central ethical concept, accordingly, is a unified, all-embracing notion of “happiness” (or, more accurately, eudaimonia, perhaps better translated as “flourishing” or “doing well”). The point is to view one’s life as a whole and not separate the personal and the public or professional, or duty and pleasure (1993, p. 105). Solomon settled on the term Aristotelian because it makes no pretense of imparting the latest cutting-edge theory or technique of management. Rather, he reminds us of a perspective and debate reaching back to ancient times. The central motive is not to commission a new wave of experts and seminars or to kick off one more downsizing bloodbath; rather, “It is to emphasize the importance of continuity and stability, clearness of vision and constancy of purpose, corporate loyalty and individual integrity” (1993, p. 104). Solomon reminds us that ethics and soul are essential for living a good life as well as managing a fulfilling organization. Since the beginning, humanity’s philosophical and spiritual traditions have proffered wisdom to guide our search for better ways to accomplish both. We have emphasized the four frames as cognitive lenses for understanding and tools for influencing collective endeavors. Our focus has been the heads and hands of leaders. Both are vitally important. But so are hearts and souls. The frames also carry implications for creating ethical communities and for reviving the moral virtues of leadership. Exhibit 19.1 summarizes our view. Exhibit 19.1. Reframing Ethics. Frame Metaphor Organizational Ethic Leadership Contribution Structural Factory Excellence Authorship Human resource Extended family Caring Love Political Jungle Justice Power Symbolic Temple Faith, Belief Significance The Factory: Excellence and Authorship One of our oldest images of organizations is that of factories engaged in a production process. Raw materials (steel, peanuts, or five-year-olds) come in the door and leave as finished products (refrigerators, peanut butter, or educated graduates). The ethical imperative of the factory is excellence: ensuring that work is done as effectively and efficiently as possible to produce high-quality yields. Since the 1982 publication of Peters and Waterman’s famous book, almost everyone has been searching for excellence, although flawed products and mediocre services keep reminding us that the hunt does not always bring home the quarry. One source of disappointment is that excellence requires more than pious sermons from top management; it demands commitment and autonomy at all levels of an enterprise. How do leaders foster such dedication? As we’ve said before, “Leading is giving. Leadership is an ethic, a gift of oneself” (Bolman and Deal, 2011, p. 122). Critical for creating and maintaining excellence is the gift of authorship: Authorship turns the classic organizational pyramid on its side and provides space within boundaries. Leaders increase their influence and build more productive organizations. Workers experience the satisfactions of creativity, craftsmanship, and a job well done. Authorship transcends the traditional adversarial relationship in which superiors try to increase control while subordinates resist them at every turn. Trusting people to solve problems generates higher levels of motivation and better solutions. The leader’s responsibility is to create conditions that promote authorship. Individuals need to see their work as meaningful and worthwhile, to feel personally accountable for the consequences of their efforts, and to get feedback that lets them know the results (Bolman and Deal, 2011, pp. 128–129). Google provides a contemporary example of the power of authorship. Among the many ways that Google supports both the expression and development of talent is its 70/20/10 time allocation model—10 percent of an engineer’s time is allocated for “innovation, creativity, and freedom to think,” and 20 percent is for “personal development that will ultimately benefit the company.” In terms of revenue per employee, Google’s staff are among the most productive on the planet. Internet retailer Zappos has a different approach. Zappos’ core value #3 is “create fun and a little weirdness,” followed by #4, “be adventurous, creative, and open-minded.” Does Zappos take those values seriously? Maybe, but they definitely take them playfully. Where else do employees in the finance department do a weekly parade around the office performing random acts of kindness? How many companies encourage their people to create video musicals and skits that can be posted on the website? Zappos believes that a culture of fun and family underpins core value #1, “deliver WOW through service.” The business results support their faith. The Family: Caring and Love Caring—one person’s compassion and concern for another—is both the primary purpose and the ethical glue that holds a family together. Parents care for children and, eventually, children care for their parents. A compassionate family or community requires servant-leaders concerned with the needs and wishes of members and stakeholders. This creates a challenging obligation for leaders to understand and to provide stewardship of the collective well being. The gift of the servant-leader is love. Love is largely absent from most modern corporations. Most managers would never use the word in any context more profound than their feelings about food, family, films, or games. They shy away from love’s deeper meanings, fearing both its power and its risks. Caring begins with knowing; it requires listening, understanding, and accepting. It progresses through a deepening sense of appreciation, respect, and ultimately love. Love is a willingness to reach out and open one’s heart. An open heart is vulnerable. Confronting vulnerability allows us to drop our mask, meet heart to heart, and be present for one another. We experience a sense of unity and delight in those voluntary, human exchanges that mold “the soul of community” (Whitmyer, 1993, p. 81). At Southwest Airlines, they talk openly about love. Former president Colleen Barrett reminisced, “Love is a word that isn’t used often in corporate America, but we used it at Southwest from the beginning.” The word love is woven into the culture. They fly out of Love Field in Dallas; their symbol on the New York Stock Exchange is LUV; the employee newsletter is called Luv Lines; and their twentieth anniversary slogan was “Twenty Years of Loving You” (Levering and Moskowitz, 1993). They hold an annual “Heroes of the Heart” ceremony to honor members of the Southwest family who have gone above and beyond even Southwest’s high call of duty. There are, of course, ups and downs in any family, and the airline industry certainly experiences both. Through life’s peaks and valleys, love holds people—both employees and passengers—together in a caring community. The Jungle: Justice and Power Woody Allen captured the political frame’s competitive, predator-prey imagery succinctly: “The lion and the calf shall lie down together, but the calf won’t get much sleep” (Allen, 1986, p. 28). As the metaphor suggests, the jungle is a politically charged environment of conflict and pursuit of self-interest. Politics and politicians are routinely viewed as objects of scorn—often for good reason. Their behavior tends to prompt the question: Is there any ethical consideration associated with political action? We believe there is: the commitment to justice. In a world of competing interests and scarce resources, people are continually compelled to make trade-offs. No one can give everyone everything they want, but it is possible to adhere to a value of fairness in making decisions about who gets what. Solomon (1993, p. 231) sees justice as the ultimate virtue in corporations, because the perception that employees, customers, and investors are all getting their due is the glue that holds everyone together. Justice is never easy to define, and disagreement about its application is inevitable. The key gift that leaders can offer in pursuit of justice is sharing power. People with a voice in key decisions are far more likely to feel a sense of fairness than those with none. Leaders who hoard power produce powerless organizations. People stripped of power look for ways to fight back: sabotage, passive resistance, withdrawal, or angry militancy. Giving power liberates energy for more productive use. If people have a sense of efficacy and an ability to influence their world, they are more likely to direct their energy and intelligence toward making a contribution rather than making trouble. The gift of power enrolls people in working toward a common cause. It also creates difficult choice points. If leaders clutch power too tightly, they activate old patterns of antagonism. But if they cave in and say yes to anything, they put an organization’s mission at risk. During the Reagan administration, House Speaker “Tip” O’Neill was a constant thorn in the side of the president, but they carved out a mutually just agreement: They would fight ferociously for their independent interests but stay civil and find fairness wherever possible. Their rule: “After six o’clock, we’re friends, whatever divisiveness the political battle has produced during working hours.” Both men gave each other the gift of power. During one acrimonious public debate between the two, Reagan reportedly whispered, “Tip, can we pretend it’s six o’clock?” (Neuman, 2004, p. 1). Power and authorship are related; autonomy, space, and freedom are important in both. Still, there is an important distinction between the two. Artists, authors, and craftspeople can experience authorship even working alone. Power, in contrast, is meaningful only in relation to others. It is the capacity to wield influence and get things to happen on a broader scale. Authorship without power is isolating and splintering; power without authorship can be dysfunctional and oppressive. The gift of power is important at multiple levels. As individuals, people want power to control their immediate work environment and the factors that impinge on them directly. Many traditional workplaces still suffocate their employees with time clocks, rigid rules, and authoritarian bosses. A global challenge at the group level is responding to ethnic, racial, and gender diversity. Gallos, Ramsey, and their colleagues get to the heart of the complexity of this issue: Institutional, structural, and systemic issues are very difficult for members of dominant groups to understand. Systems are most often designed by dominant group members to meet their own needs. It is then difficult to see the ways in which our institutions and structures systematically exclude others who are not “like us.” It is hard to see and question what we have always taken for granted and painful to confront personal complicity in maintaining the status quo. Privilege enables us to remain unaware of institutional and social forces and their impact (1997, p. 215). Justice requires that leaders systematically enhance the power of excluded or vulnerable groups—ensuring access to decision making, creating internal advocacy groups, building diversity into information and incentive systems, and strengthening career opportunities (Cox, 1994; Gallos and Ramsey, 1997; Morrison, 1992). All this happens only with a rock-solid commitment from top management, the one condition that Morrison (1992) found to be universal in organizations that led in responding to diversity. Justice also has important implications for the increasingly urgent question of “sustainability:” How long can a production or business process last before it collapses as a result of the resource depletion or environmental damage it produces? Decisions about sustainability inevitably involve trade-offs among the interests of constituencies that differ in role, place, and time. How do we balance our company’s profitability against damage to the environment, or current concerns against those of future generations? Organizations with a commitment to justice will take these questions seriously and look for ways to engage and empower diverse stakeholders in making choices. The Temple: Faith and Significance An organization, like a temple, can be seen as a hallowed place, an expression of human aspirations and beliefs, a monument to faith in human possibility. A temple is a gathering place for a community of people with shared traditions, values, and beliefs. Members of a community may be diverse in many ways (age, background, economic status, personal interests), but they are tied together by shared faith and bonded by a sanctified spiritual covenant. In work organizations, faith is strengthened if individuals feel the organization is characterized by excellence, caring, and justice. Above all, people must believe that the organization is doing something worth doing—a calling that adds something of value to the world, making a difference. Significance is partly about the work itself but even more about how the work is embraced. This point is made by an old story about three stonemasons giving an account of their work. The first said he was “cutting stone.” The second said that he was “building a cathedral.” The third said simply that he was “serving God.” Temples need spiritual leaders. This does not mean promoting religion or a particular theology; rather, it means bringing a genuine concern for the human spirit. The dictionary defines spirit as “the intelligent or immaterial part of man,” “the animating or vital principle in living things,” and “the moral nature of humanity.” Spiritual leaders help people find meaning and faith in work and help them answer fundamental questions that have confronted humans of every time and place: Who am I as an individual? Who are we as a people? What is the purpose of my life, of our collective existence? What ethical principles should we follow? What legacy will we leave? Spiritual leaders offer the gift of significance, rooted in confidence that the work is precious, that devotion and loyalty to a beloved institution can offer hard-to-emulate intangible rewards. Work is exhilarating and joyful at its best, arduous, frustrating, and exhausting in less happy moments. Many adults embark on their careers with enthusiasm, confidence, and a desire to make a contribution. Some never lose that spark, but many do. They become frustrated with sterile or toxic working conditions and discouraged by how hard it is to make a difference, or even to know if they have made one. Tracy Kidder puts it well in writing about teachers: “Good teachers put snags in the river of children passing by, and over time, they redirect hundreds of lives. There is an innocence that conspires to hold humanity together, and it is made up of people who can never fully know the good they have done” (Kidder, 1989, p. 313). The gift of significance helps people sustain their faith rather than burn out or retire from a meaningless job and end up wondering if their work made any difference at all. Significance is built through the use of many expressive and symbolic forms: rituals, ceremonies, stories, and music. An organization without a rich symbolic life grows empty and barren. The magic of special occasions is vital in building significance into collective life. Moments of ecstasy are parentheses that mark life’s major passages. Without ritual and ceremony, transition remains incomplete, a clutter of comings and goings; “life becomes an endless set of Wednesdays” (Campbell, 1983, p. 5). When ritual and ceremony are authentic and attuned, they fire the imagination, evoke insight, and touch the heart. Ceremony weaves past, present, and future into life’s ongoing tapestry. Ritual helps us face and comprehend life’s everyday shocks, triumphs, and mysteries. Both help us experience the unseen web of significance that ties a community
CHAPTER 20 BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER CHANGE AND LEADERSHIP IN ACTION We can’t always control the music life plays for us but we can choose how we dance to it. —Anonymous Life’s daily challenges rarely arrive clearly labeled or neatly packaged. Instead, they come upon us in a murky, turbulent, and unrelenting flood. The art of reframing uses knowledge and intuition to read the flow and to find sensible and effective ways to channel the incoming tide. In this chapter, we illustrate the process by following a new principal through his first week in a deeply troubled urban high school. Had this been a corporation in crisis, a struggling hospital, or an embattled public agency, the basic leadership issues would have been much the same. Our protagonist is familiar with the frames and reframing. How might he use what he knows to figure out what’s going on? What strategies can he mull over? What will he do? Read the case thoughtfully. * Ask yourself what you think is going on and what options you would consider. Then compare your reflections with his. Robert F. Kennedy High School On July 15, David King became principal of Robert F. Kennedy High School, the newest of six high schools in Great Ridge, Illinois. The school had opened two years earlier amid national acclaim as one of the first schools in the country designed and built on the “house system” concept. Kennedy High was organized into four “houses,” each with 300 students, 18 faculty, and a housemaster. Each house was in a separate building connected to the “core facilities”—cafeteria, nurse’s room, guidance offices, boys’ and girls’ gyms, offices, shops, and auditorium—and other houses by an enclosed outside passageway. Each had its own entrance, classrooms, toilets, conference rooms, and housemaster’s office. The building was widely admired for its beauty and functionality and had won several national architectural awards. Hailed as a major innovation in urban education, Kennedy High was featured during its first year in a documentary on a Chicago television station. The school opened with a carefully selected staff of teachers, many chosen from other Great Ridge schools. At least a dozen were specially recruited from out of state. King knew that his faculty included graduates from several elite East Coast and West Coast schools, such as Yale, Princeton, and Stanford, as well as several of the very best Midwestern schools. He knew, too, that the racial mix of students had been carefully balanced so that blacks, whites, and Latinos each made up a third of the student body. And King also knew—perhaps better than its planners—that Kennedy’s students were drawn from the toughest and poorest areas of the city. Despite careful and elaborate preparations, Kennedy High School was in serious trouble by the time King arrived. It had been racked by violence the preceding year—closed twice by student disturbances and once by a teacher walkout. It was also widely reported (although King did not know whether this was true) that achievement scores of its ninth- and tenth-grade students had declined during the preceding two years, and no significant improvement could be seen in the scores of the eleventh and twelfth graders’ tests. So far, Kennedy High School had fallen far short of its planners’ hopes and expectations. David King David King was born and raised in Great Ridge, Illinois. His father was one of the city’s first black principals. King knew the city and its school system well. After two years of military service, King followed in his father’s footsteps by going to Great Ridge State Teachers College, where he received B.Ed and M.Ed degrees. King taught English and coached in a predominantly black middle school for several years, until he was asked to become the school’s assistant principal. He had been in that post for five years when he was asked to take over a large middle school of 900 pupils—believed at the time to be the most “difficult” middle school in the city. While there, King gained a citywide reputation as a gifted and popular administrator. He was credited with changing the worst middle school in the system into one of the best. He had been very effective in building community support, recruiting new faculty, and raising academic standards. He was also credited with turning out basketball and baseball teams that had won state and county championships. The Great Ridge superintendent made it clear that King had been selected for the Kennedy job over several more senior candidates because of his ability to handle tough situations. The superintendent also told him that he would need every bit of skill and luck he could muster. King knew of the formidable credentials of Jack Weis, his predecessor at Kennedy High. Weis, a white man, had been the superintendent of a small local township school system before becoming Kennedy’s first principal. He had written one book on the house system concept and another on inner-city education. Weis held a PhD from the University of Chicago and a divinity degree from Harvard. Yet despite his impressive background and ability, Weis had resigned in disillusionment. He was described by many as a “broken man.” King remembered seeing the physical change in Weis over that two-year period. Weis’s appearance had become progressively more fatigued and strained until he developed what appeared to be permanent dark rings under his eyes and a perpetual stoop. King remembered how he had pitied the man and wondered how Weis could find the job worth the obvious personal toll it was taking on him. History of the School The First Year The school’s troubles began to manifest themselves in its first year. Rumors of conflicts between the housemasters and the six subject-area department heads spread throughout the system by the middle of the year. The conflicts stemmed from differences in interpretations of curriculum policy on required learning and course content. In response, Weis had instituted a “free market” policy: subject-area department heads were supposed to convince housemasters which course to offer, and housemasters were supposed to convince department heads which teachers should be assigned to their houses. Many felt that this policy exacerbated the conflicts. To add to the tension, a teacher was assaulted in her classroom in February of that first school year. The beating frightened many of the staff, particularly older teachers. A week later, eight teachers asked Weis to hire security guards. This request precipitated a debate in the faculty about the desirability of guards in the school. One group felt that the guards would instill a sense of safety and promote a better learning climate. The other faction felt that the presence of guards in the school would be repressive and would destroy the sense of community and trust that was developing. Weis refused the request for security guards because he believed they would symbolize everything the school was trying to change. In April, a second teacher was robbed and beaten in her classroom after school hours, and the debate was rekindled. This time, a group of Latino parents threatened to boycott the school unless better security measures were implemented. Again, Weis refused the request for security guards. The Second Year The school’s second year was even more troubled than the first. Financial cutbacks ordered during the summer prevented Weis from replacing eight teachers who had resigned. As it was no longer possible for each house to staff all of its courses with its own faculty, Weis instituted a “flexible staffing” policy. Some teachers were asked to teach a course outside their assigned house, and students in the eleventh and twelfth grades were able to take elective and required courses in other houses. One of the housemasters, Chauncey Carver, publicly attacked the new policy as a step toward destroying the house system. In a letter to the Great Ridge Times, he accused the board of education of trying to subvert the house concept by cutting back funds. The debate over the flexible staffing policy was heightened when two of the other housemasters joined a group of faculty and department heads in opposing Carver’s criticisms. This group argued that interhouse cross-registration should be encouraged, because the 15 to 18 teachers in each house could never offer the variety of courses that the schoolwide faculty of 65 to 70 could. Further expansion of the flexible staffing policy was halted, however, because of difficulties in scheduling fall classes. Errors cropped up in the master schedule developed during the preceding summer. Scheduling problems persisted until November, when the vice principal responsible for developing the schedule resigned. Burtram Perkins, a Kennedy housemaster who had formerly planned the schedule at Central High, assumed the function on top of his duties as housemaster. Scheduling took most of Perkins’s time until February. Security again became an issue when three sophomores were assaulted because they refused to give up their lunch money during a shakedown. The assailants were believed to be outsiders. Several teachers approached Weis and asked him to request the board of education to provide security guards. Again Weis declined, but he asked Bill Smith, a vice principal at the school, to secure all doors except for the entrances to each of the four houses, the main entrance to the school, and the cafeteria. This move seemed to reduce the number of outsiders roaming through the school. In May of the second year, a fight in the cafeteria spread and resulted in considerable damage, including broken classroom windows and desks. The disturbance was severe enough for Weis to close the school. A number of teachers and students reported that outsiders were involved in the fight and in damaging the classrooms. Several students were taken to the hospital for minor injuries, but all were released. A similar disturbance occurred two weeks later, and again the school was closed. Against Weis’s advice, the board of education ordered a temporary detail of municipal police to the school. In protest to the assignment of police, 30 of Kennedy’s 68 teachers staged a walkout, joined by over half the student body. The police detail was removed, and an agreement was worked out by an ad hoc subcommittee composed of board members and informal representatives of teachers who were for and against a police detail. The compromise called for the temporary stationing of a police cruiser near the school. King’s First Week at Kennedy High King arrived at Kennedy High on Monday, July 15, and spent most of his first week individually interviewing key administrators (see box). On Friday, he held a meeting with all administrators and department heads. King’s purpose in these meetings was to familiarize himself with the school, its problems, and its key people. Administrative Organization of Robert F. Kennedy High School Principal: David King, 42 (black) B.Ed., M.Ed., Great Ridge State Teachers College Vice principal: William Smith, 44 (black) B.Ed., Breakwater State College; M.Ed., Great Ridge State Teachers College Vice principal: Vacant Housemaster, A House: Burtram Perkins, 47 (black) B.S., M.Ed., University of Illinois Housemaster, B House: Frank Czepak, 36 (white) B.S., University of Illinois; M.Ed., Great Ridge State Teachers College Housemaster, C House: Chauncey Carver, 32 (black) A.B., Wesleyan University; B.F.A., Pratt Institute; M.A.T., Yale University Housemaster, D House: John Bonavota, 26 (white) B.Ed., Great Ridge State Teachers College; M.Ed., Ohio State University Assistant to the principal: Vacant Assistant to the principal for community affairs: Vacant King’s first interview was with Bill Smith, a vice principal. Smith was black and had worked as a counselor and then vice principal of a middle school before coming to Kennedy. King knew Smith’s reputation as a tough disciplinarian who was very much disliked by many of the younger faculty and students. King had also heard from several teachers whose judgment he respected that Smith had been instrumental in keeping the school from “blowing apart” the preceding year. It became clear early in the interview that Smith felt that more stringent steps were needed to keep outsiders from wandering into the buildings. Smith urged King to consider locking all the school’s 30 doors except for the front entrance so that everyone would enter and leave through one set of doors. Smith also told him that many of the teachers and pupils were scared and that “no learning will ever begin to take place until we make it so people don’t have to be afraid anymore.” At the end of the interview, Smith said he had been approached by a nearby school system to become its director of counseling but that he had not yet made up his mind. He said he was committed enough to Kennedy High that he did not want to leave, but his decision depended on how hopeful he felt about the school’s future. As King talked with others, he discovered that the “door question” was highly controversial within the faculty and that feelings ran high on both sides of the issue. Two housemasters in particular—Chauncey Carver, who was black, and Frank Czepak, who was white—were strongly against closing the house entrances. The two men felt such an action would symbolically reduce house “autonomy” and the feeling of distinctness that was a central aspect of the house concept. Carver, master of C House, was particularly vehement on this issue and on his opposition to allowing students in one house to take classes in another house. Carver contended that the flexible staffing program had nearly destroyed the house concept. He threatened to resign if King intended to expand cross-house enrollment. Carver also complained about what he described as “interference” from department heads that undermined his teachers’ autonomy. Carver appeared to be an outstanding housemaster, from everything King had heard about him—even from his many enemies. Carver had an abrasive personality but seemed to have the best-operating house in the school and was well liked by most of his teachers and pupils. His program appeared to be the most innovative, but it was also the one most frequently attacked by department heads for lacking substance and ignoring requirements in the system’s curriculum guide. Even with these criticisms, King imagined how much easier running the school would be if he had four housemasters like Chauncey Carver. During his interviews with the other three housemasters, King discovered that they all felt infringed upon by the department heads, but only Carver and Czepak were strongly against locking the doors. The other two housemasters actively favored cross-house course enrollments. King’s fourth interview was with Burtram Perkins, also a housemaster. Perkins, mentioned earlier, was a black man in his late forties who had served as assistant to the principal of Central High before coming to Kennedy. Perkins spent most of the interview discussing how schedule pressures could be relieved. Perkins was currently developing the schedule for the coming school year until a vice principal could be appointed to perform that job (Kennedy High had allocations for two vice principals and two assistants in addition to the housemasters). Two bits of information concerning Perkins came to King during his first week at the school. The first was that several teachers were circulating a letter requesting Perkins’s removal as a housemaster. They felt that he could not control the house or direct the faculty. This surprised King because he had heard that Perkins was widely respected within the faculty and had earned a reputation for supporting high academic standards and for working tirelessly with new teachers. As King inquired further, he discovered that Perkins was genuinely liked but was also widely acknowledged as a poor housemaster. The second piece of information concerned how Perkins’s house compared with the others. Although students had been randomly assigned to each house, students in Perkins’s house had the highest absence rate and the greatest number of disciplinary problems. Smith had told him that Perkins’s dropout rate the preceding year was three times that of the next highest house. While King was in the process of interviewing his staff, he was called on by David Crimmins, chairman of the history department. Crimmins was a native of Great Ridge, white, and in his late forties. Though scheduled for an appointment the following week, he had asked King whether he could see him immediately. Crimmins had heard about the letter asking for Perkins’s removal and wanted to present the other side. He became very emotional, saying that Perkins was viewed by many of the teachers and department chairmen as the only housemaster trying to maintain high academic standards; his transfer would be seen as a blow to those concerned with quality education. Crimmins also described in detail Perkins’s devotion and commitment to the school. He emphasized that Perkins was the only administrator with the ability to straighten out the schedule, which he had done in addition to all his other duties. As Crimmins departed, he threatened that if Perkins were transferred, he would write a letter to the regional accreditation council decrying the level to which standards had sunk at Kennedy. King assured Crimmins that such a drastic measure was unnecessary and offered assurance that a cooperative resolution would be found. King knew that Kennedy High faced an accreditation review the following April and did not wish to complicate the process unnecessarily. Within 20 minutes of Crimmins’s departure, King was visited by Tim Shea, a young white teacher. He said he had heard that Crimmins had come in to see King. Shea identified himself as one of the teachers who had organized the movement to get rid of Perkins. He said that he liked and admired Perkins because of the man’s devotion to the school but that Perkins’s house was so disorganized and that discipline there was so bad that it was nearly impossible to do any good teaching. Shea added, “It’s a shame to lock the school up when stronger leadership is all that’s needed.” King’s impressions of his administrators generally matched what he had heard before arriving at the school. Carver seemed to be a very bright, innovative, and charismatic leader whose mere presence generated excitement. Czepak came across as a highly competent though not very imaginative administrator who had earned the respect of his faculty and students. Housemaster John Bonavota, age 26, seemed smart and earnest but unseasoned and unsure of himself. King felt that with a little guidance and training, Bonavota might have the greatest promise of all; at the moment, however, the young housemaster seemed confused and somewhat overwhelmed. Perkins impressed King as a sincere and devoted person with a good mind for administrative details but an incapacity for leadership. King knew that he had the opportunity to make several administrative appointments because of the three vacancies that existed. Indeed, should Smith resign as vice principal, King could fill both vice principal positions. He also knew that his recommendations for these positions would carry a great deal of weight with the central office. The only constraint King felt was the need to achieve some kind of racial balance among the Kennedy administrative group. With his own appointment as principal, black administrators outnumbered white administrators two to one, and Kennedy did not have a single Latino administrator, even though a third of its pupils were Hispanic. The Friday Afternoon Meeting In contrast to the individual interviews, King was surprised to find how quiet and conflict-free these same people seemed in the staff meeting he called on Friday. He was amazed at how slow, polite, and friendly the conversation was among people who had so vehemently expressed negative opinions of each other in private. After about 45 minutes of discussion about the upcoming accreditation review, King broached the subject of housemaster–department head relations. There was silence until Czepak made a joke about the uselessness of discussing the topic. King probed further by asking if everyone was happy with the current practices. Crimmins suggested that the topic might be better discussed in a smaller group. Everyone seemed to agree—except for Betsy Dula, a white woman in her late twenties who chaired the English department. She said that one of the problems with the school was that no one was willing to tackle tough issues until they exploded. She added that relations between housemasters and department heads were terrible, and that made her job very difficult. She then attacked Chauncey Carver for impeding her evaluation of a nontenured teacher in Carver’s house. The two argued for several minutes about the teacher and the quality of an experimental sophomore English course the teacher was offering. Finally, Carver, by now quite angry, coldly warned Dula that he would “break her neck” if she stepped into his house again. King intervened in an attempt to cool both their tempers, and the meeting ended shortly thereafter. The following morning, Dula called King at home and told him that unless Carver publicly apologized for his threat, she would file a grievance with the teachers’ union and take it to court if necessary. King assured Dula that he would talk with Carver on Monday. King then called Eleanor Debbs, a Kennedy High math teacher he had known well for many years, whose judgment he respected. Debbs was a close friend of both Carver and Dula and was also vice president of the city’s teachers’ union. Debbs said that the two were longtime adversaries but both were excellent professionals. She also reported that Dula would be a formidable opponent and could muster considerable support among the faculty. Debbs, who was black, feared that a confrontation between Dula and Carver might stoke racial tensions in the school, even though both Dula and Carver were generally popular with students of all races. Debbs strongly urged King not to let the matter drop. She also told him that she had overheard Bill Smith, the vice principal, say at a party the night before that he felt King didn’t have the stomach or the forcefulness to survive at Kennedy. Smith said that the only reason he was staying was that he did not expect King to last the year, in which case Smith would be in a good position to be appointed principal. David King inherited a job that had broken his predecessor and could destroy him as well. His new staff greeted him with a jumble of problems, demands, maneuvers, and threats. His first staff meeting began with an undercurrent of tension and ended in outright hostility. Sooner or later, you may encounter a chaotic situation like this that leaves you feeling confused and overwhelmed. Nothing makes any sense, and good options are hard to find. Can King avoid disaster? There is one potential bright spot. As the case ends, King is talking to Eleanor Debbs on a Saturday morning. She is a supportive colleague. He also has some slack—the rest of the weekend—to regroup. Where should he begin? We suggest that he start by actively reflecting and reframing. A straightforward way to do that is to examine the situation one frame at a time, asking two simple questions: From this perspective, what’s going on? And what options does this view suggest? This reflective process deserves ample time and careful thought. It requires “going to the balcony” (see Heifetz, 1994) to get a panoramic view of the scene below. Ideally, King would include one or more other people—a valued mentor, principals in other schools, close friends, his spouse—for alternative perceptions in pinpointing the problem and developing a course of action. We present a streamlined version of the kind of thinking that David King might entertain. Structural Issues and Options King sits down at his kitchen table with a cup of coffee, a pen, a fresh yellow pad, and his laptop computer. He starts to review structural issues at Kennedy High. He recalls the “people-blaming” approach (Chapter 2), in which individuals are blamed for everything that goes wrong. He smiles and nods his head. That’s it! Everyone at Kennedy High School is blaming everyone else. He recalls the lesson of the structural frame: We blame individuals when the real problems are systemic. So what structural problems does Kennedy High have? King thinks about the two cornerstones of structure: differentiation and integration. He sees immediately that Kennedy High School has an ample division of labor but weak overall coordination. He scribbles on his pad, trying to sketch the school’s organization chart. He realizes that the school has a matrix structure—teachers have an ill-defined dual reporting relationship to both department chairs and housemasters. He remembers the downside of the matrix structure: It’s built for conflict (teachers wonder which authority they’re supposed to answer to, and administrators bicker about who’s in charge). The school has no integrating devices to link the approaches of housemasters like Chauncey Carver (who wants a coherent, effective program for his house) with those of department chairs like Betsy Dula (who is concerned about the schoolwide English curriculum and adherence to district guidelines). It’s not just personalities; the structure is pushing Carver and Dula toward each other’s throats. Goals, roles, and responsibilities are all vaguely defined. Nor is there a structural protocol (say, a task force or a standing committee) in place to diagnose and resolve such problems. If King had been in the job longer, he might have been able to rely more heavily on the authority of the principal’s office. It helps that he’s been authorized by the superintendent to fix the school. But so far, he’s seen little evidence that the Kennedy High staff is endorsing his say-so with much enthusiasm. King’s musings are making sense, but it isn’t clear what to do about the structural gaps. Is there any way to get the school back under control when it is teetering on the edge of irrational chaos? It doesn’t help that his authority is shaky. He is having trouble controlling the staff, and they are having the same problem with the students. The school is an underbounded system screaming for structure and boundaries. King notes, ruefully, that he made things worse in the Friday meeting. “I knew how these people felt about one another,” he thinks. “Why did I push them to talk about something they were trying to avoid? We hadn’t done any homework. I didn’t give them a clear purpose for the conversation. I didn’t set any ground rules for how to talk about the issue. When it started to heat up, I just watched. Why didn’t I step in before it exploded?” He stops and shakes his head. “Live and learn, I guess. But I learned these lessons a long time ago—they served me well in my last school. In the confusion, I forgot that even good people can’t function very well without some structure. What did I do the last time around?” King begins to brainstorm options. One possibility is responsibility charting: Bring people together to define tasks and responsibilities. It has worked before. Would it work here? He reviews the language of responsibility charting, a technique for clarifying roles and relationships. The acronym CAIRO (Consulted, Approves, Informed, Responsible, and Omitted) helps him remember. Who’s responsible? Who has to approve? Who needs to be consulted? Who should be informed? Who doesn’t need to be in the loop, and so can be omitted? As he applies these questions to Kennedy High, the overlap between the housemasters and the department chairs is an obvious problem. Without a clear definition of roles and relationships, conflict and confusion are inevitable. He wonders about a total overhaul of the structure: “Is the house system viable in its current form? If not, is it fixable? Maybe we need a process to look at the structure: What if I chaired a small task force to examine it and develop recommendations? I could put Dula and Carver on it—let them see firsthand what’s causing their conflict. Get them involved in working out a new design. Give each authority over specific areas. Develop some policies and procedures.” It is clear from even a few minutes of reflection that Kennedy High School has major structural problems that have to be addressed. But what to do about the immediate crisis between Dula and Carver? The structure helped create the problem in the first place, and fixing it might prevent dustups like this in the future. But Dula’s demand for an immediate apology didn’t sound like something a rational approach would easily fix. King is ready to try another angle. He turns to the human resource frame for counsel. Human Resource Issues and Options “Ironic,” King muses. “The original idea behind the school was to respond better to students. Break down the big, bureaucratic high school. Make the house a community, a family even, where people know and care about each other. But it’s drifted off course. Everyone’s
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