The “Openness” Myth

John was sitting on a weekly departmental “all hands” phone call when the question was asked by the general manager, “How valuable did you find the 2-hour web training session that was conducted yesterday by the IT department?” After some brief hesitation by all the participants, someone eventually pipes up to say that he thought the training was quite well done and very valuable for all of the participants. You smile to yourself because you know that the training was horrible: the trainer failed to present the material cogently and succinctly; the trainer offered no context for the material being presented; and, the material seemed to be presented disjointedly, in random order, without observations about the relative importance of different elements, and with little explanation as to its use cases. What do you do now? Should you say something?

Well, what you do depends largely on the culture of your organization. If it’s permissible to be honest and open about how you felt, diplomatically of course, you voice your concerns over what you think was missing from the training and make suggestions on how to improve it. You also acknowledge your appreciation for the effort made, but suggest concrete ways in which it could have provided greater benefit to you.

If it’s not permissible to be open and honestly critical of the effort made by another employee, then you simply parrot the same positive refrain issued by the first commenter and let it go at that. In fact, to do otherwise might be viewed as openly challenging or confrontational by the first commenter, who might therefore be offended by your “flagrant” contradiction. So, you refrain from saying what you think; you try to figure out what to say and how to say it so as not to offend the original speaker or the trainer. Or maybe you just waffle and slur some comments in ways that make them largely indecipherable.

Many companies take great pride in what they consider to be their open and honest work environments. But underneath management’s affirmations of these core values and beliefs--honesty and openness--often lies much withholding of sincere dialogue, innovative ideas, suggestions for process improvements, and valid criticisms of current process and policies. People ultimately disengage from the company meetings and supervisor dialogues for three primary reasons: (1) they know that their comments and suggestions will largely be ignored; (2) they realize that their ideas and contributions will be dismissed without explanation or exploration, because that’s what has always happened, or (3) they come to resent management’s “air” of indifference and condescension for anything that challenges the norm. Without the ability to make open and sincere contributions to the company’s body of knowledge and to influence how things are done, people will eventually withdraw from making such offerings. Once this happens, the company loses not only the immediate opportunities for individual and collective performance improvements, but it begins to stifle the development of its employees’ potential through their disengagement from improving the organization and any real long-term organizational learning.

In all honesty, ask yourself the following questions: How often does you manager solicit ideas and feedback from you and others about what's happening inside the organization? In what ways specifically do your supervisor and senior managers work to create a climate of openness, honesty, and trust with respect to the feedback they solicit? Do they then comment directly on the observations, criticisms and recommendations you make; give them due consideration and provide you with their perceptions and conclusions in return; or simply listen and then ignore everything you’ve said, with no explanation? What kinds of dialogues are held around your offerings? How are people rewarded and recognized for such contributions? How does your supervisor react when people’s recommendations or comments appear to contradict the mainstream thinking? Depending on your answer to these questions, your organization may be learning a lot or nothing at all.