Actions speak louder than words. Every follower on the planet understands that perfectly. From time-to-time leaders need to be reminded of that simple truth. Consider this yours.
That’s not to say that words don’t matter. They just don’t matter as much as leaders wish they did. If it were otherwise, one good speech or the perfect letter to all employees would guarantee everyone goes home, alive and well at the end of every single day. Wouldn’t that be nice. And easy.
As you move up the chain of command, leaders increasingly rely on their words. Their circumstances leave them with little choice but to do that. That reveals one of the many advantages leaders at the front line have over their corporate counterparts.
The root of that is simple: the separation between leaders and their followers has never been greater. The forces and factors of organization size, span of control, time zones, location of offices and operations, languages, and social distancing conspire to create a degree of difficulty unmatched since the height of the British Empire.
That regime did not end well.
To avoid a similar fate, organizations need solutions that actually create motivated followers. I’ll leave it to you to rate the effectiveness of email, Teams, text messaging, video, voicemail, and Zoom. If you really understand the communication process – which by my observation would be unusual – the evaluation is not yours to make. The wise approach would be to ask your followers what they think. Prepare yourself for answers you might not like.
Which makes the second point in this edition of the News: when it comes to communicating, those on the receiving end have the only votes that matter.
Blah, Blah, Blah
Today’s reality is that followers are inundated by communications from their leaders, in all the different forms they come. With so many words flying around the workplace, you would think that followers would pay little to no attention to any of them. That used to be called “tuning out.”
There’s an element of truth in that. Then, something seemingly inconsequential is said or written that’s a bit off the mark, and all heck breaks loose. What just happened?
I see it all the time on the business news and in the financial press: some lame excuse for poor performance or political comment gets the financial analysts circling like sharks in the water. Management spends their time trying to dig out of the hole they created.
Some genius tabbed it, “walking back the statement.” Like they can rewind the video, erase their misspoken words, and it never happened. Who’s kidding whom? The audience is not being fooled.
You’ve probably seen this play out in your practice of leadership. You’re left scratching your head, trying to figure out why everyone got so worked up about some remark you made at the morning safety meeting. Why was that such a big deal?
Get burned a time or two – seems we all have – and the smart strategy would be to just lay low. Don’t give anyone anything that can be disagreed with. Stick to words that are safe, uncontroversial, inarguable. Point out all the viewpoints, and don’t take sides. Sugarcoat criticism with plenty of positives.
Blah, blah, blah.
It’s a popular strategy: I hear and see it all the time. But is it a wise move?
Management Science
As important as that question is to effective leadership, most leaders are just too busy leading and managing to invest their precious time in figuring out the answer. Many are sure they already know the right answer; others reflexively answer the question at the moment of truth when they communicate, operating on what amounts to gut feel.
Besides, isn’t this just a matter of opinion?
Not if you are of the view that the processes by which to run a business constitute a science: management science. What separates art from science are objective and quantifiable principles: science is observable, measurable, and systematic.
That being the case, when in doubt, there are two rather obvious places to look for good answers. One is to observe the practices followed by those who are the best at what they do: that’s known as role modelling. The other is to seek out hard research on the question. There are plenty of academics to be found who construct experiments designed to objectively determine the truth about any given subject or question.
As it turns out, two business school faculty conducted research on the very question we are posing: for subjects that are sensitive and controversial in business, is it the better practice to try to please both sides? By virtue of posing the question in that simple way, I would suspect you have figured out what they learned.
The two, Aviva Phillip-Muller and Joseph Siev reported their findings in the July 23rd edition of the Wall Street Journal. You would do well to read the article and understand for yourself how they set up an experiment to measure the relative impact of “saying nice things about both sides” as opposed to what might best be described as “shooting straight.” The latter being a term of art that’s been around about as long as I have.
Long story short:
Taking both sides of a controversary – “… ambivalence reduced the respect from those who agreed with them while providing no benefit to those who disagreed. So, even though people expected that expressing ambivalence would help them be more liked and respected, instead it had no upside, only downsides.”
Hardly a shocking development, isn’t it? If you’re like me, as you were ruminating on the question, you thought about the leaders you respected and admired the most: what did they do?
Seems obvious. Is to me. Another case where the research confirms the best practice. Or, alternatively, the best practice squares with the research.
But then, we are thinking like followers, aren’t we?
In Practice
As you know, our principal interest and focus here in The NEWS is managing safety performance. Managing safety is unlike all other duties and responsibilities: the cost of failure is measured in human blood and treasure, with collateral damage to everything important to anyone. Success is measured by the absence of failure – in a word, zero – making the measurement process stunningly simple.
But simultaneously difficult in determining in the short term whether the cause of zero harm is brilliant leadership or dumb luck. In the long term, it’s always evident: “You are who your record says you are.”
The principles of effective management communication – using words – apply to all the ways leaders speak to their followers: from town halls to toolbox safety meetings; from executive staff meetings in world headquarters to correcting behavior out on the shop floor. Words – spoken and written – perform essential management functions such as explain – what we are doing at this very moment as you are reading these words – to exciting – aka, motivating.
To the extent you might actually be motivated by reading these words, the question now becomes, “How do I put this understanding into practice?”
That would be what we like to call a Darn Good Question. Simply thinking about your communication as the leader to your followers from their vantage point instead of yours would be a huge step. It will change your approach for the better.
A second step would be to very carefully listen to your words as they are heard by your followers when it comes to either giving praise for good safety behavior or correcting their behavior when it is unsafe. Do your words of praise principally reflect safety? Do your words when correcting behavior focus specifically on safety: the unsafe behavior and the potential consequences from that behavior? No ambivalence: safety must come first. Period.
Aka, shooting straight.
If those suggestions strike you as nothing new or common sense, I would not disagree. I would point out that neither of them are, by my years of first hand observation, common practice.
But they are the best practice.
Paul Balmert
July 2024