Culture has become an easy explanation for organizational problems that seem impervious to correction. Unfortunately, consultants assume, because anthropologists seek commonalities that characterize cultures, that different cultures will respond to the same influences in the same ways. They argue an approach proven in one company will work in another.
The two places I worked where culture consultants were hired had serious safety incidents while I was employed. Their responses were very different. At GM, three men wore safety harnesses to work on a roof on a weekend. One slipped over the edge; his weight pulled over a second man. The third managed to save himself, but the others died.
When I came in Monday morning, the news left a collective sense of being kicked in the gut. It created one of those cracks in time when, for a brief moment, people relieve their anxieties about dangers of the job by talking about previous accidents. No doubt, investigations were done, but those of us who had no direct involvement heard no more. It wasn’t covered up, so much as handled by the appropriate people.
At the last place I worked, an electrician drilled into conduit protecting live wires and survives in a vegetative state. People heard the news with the same detachment they exhibited when they heard the name of the person killed in the morning commute. It was personal: if one knew the man or his family, the response was sympathetic; if not, it was simply news.
A few weeks later, my supervisor told me we were in trouble because our customer’s customer was angry at being embarrassed by questions about the electrocution. When that was followed by other serious incidents, our customer had all its employees and subcontractors watch videos by the accident investigation teams.
Embarrassment is a social response, not an empathetic one. At the GM plant, everyone immediately sensed the horror of the accident, but was not involved in the investigation. At the other place, few were touched by the accident, but management involved us all in its aftermath. The first was a spontaneous shared cultural emotion, the other an imposed social experience.
GM plants hired consultants to address quality problems because it was suddenly less competitive; the other hired them to change the safety culture to counter bad publicity. GM is a conformist environment. No new car ever made it from the drawing board to the showroom without many people working together over time. In my last job, our customer succeeded on the work of talented individuals who had team support, but each team member was biding his or her time until he or she could lead his or her own team to make his or her own contribution.
Problems in the one place were seen as having group solutions; when men groused privately, men on the line blamed engineers, who blamed bean counters, who blamed the next group, and so on up the organization, until the unions were blamed. At the other place, the problem would always be traced to a single individual who needed to be punished. Any patterns in problems were dismissed as coincidence.
The GM plants hired trainers to help small groups think differently about something employees recognized as critical. At the latter place, managers brought in consultants to change the ways individuals behave to solve problems many saw as peripheral to the company’s purpose.
At GM, quality training for salaried employees took a few hours on several days. At the other, all salaried employees sat through three consecutive days of safety management. The one accommodated attendees who still had regular work to do. The other preempted work. Many had to return to their desks and put in unpaid overtime to keep critical work flowing. Resentment existed before the first word was spoken.
The safety consultants took the words "shared beliefs" as their gospel text, and suggested the way to deal with the culture problem was to break down barriers between groups by bringing us together in classes that deliberately mixed us with our customers, secretaries with managers. Much of time was spent in small-group, team building sessions whose only purpose seemed to be to stretch a thin presentation. They compounded their error when they included a video by a man who caused a refinery fire when he didn’t follow procedures.
Their solutions failed the common sense test. They suggested procedures for governing dangerous employees’ behavior, so it would be safe to work with them. Everyone who’d ever worked with such men had a simpler answer: keep them off my job. Customers would tell us people we could never send to their area again, and, no doubt, ways were found within the unions to isolate those seen as accidents waiting to happen.
GM is highly stratified, but its along class lines. It’s been decades since a man rose from the shop floor to the fourteenth, and many think people at the top are increasing isolated from the realities of the market. Still, it’s possible for the son of a union man to rise within the organization, to make a big jump in two generations.
My last employer had a caste structure. No one ever rose from a skilled trades job to a high administrative one; few children rose into the ranks of technocrats. Each layer drew its members from different schools, different communities. The only mobility was from the trades to low level clerical or technician’s jobs, or from high level technocrats to higher level administrators.
The consultants’ root problem was confusing anthropologists with sociologists, who would have identified groups then targeted training for them, thereby flattering their importance. Once the training was done with the wrong methods to solve the wrong problem, there was no way management could salvage the situation except to change its approach. Instead, it confused ego with effectiveness, and asserted it had to be right.
When security problems were perceived as analogous to safety ones, its only answer was to raise the stakes by bringing someone in with the directive to make it happen or else. That man left a meeting where he’d been humiliated by questions about security to hold a video conference for our customers and us. He berated us for an hour, but offered no analysis of our problems and proposed no solutions. When people complained about the style, his supporters said our expectations for common courtesy were part of the culture that had to be changed.
When our customer’s managers conflated two kinds of problems, the one critical to the survival of the organization, the other important but tangential, they doomed everyone, themselves and their employees, to perpetuating responses that didn’t work - more training met more resistence, resulting in more distrust and more frustration.
When new people come in with assignments to reform an organization, people want to know if they’re serious. GM asked "can he walk the walk?" At the more individualistic place, people waited to see if anyone was fired. Earlier, when a new man came into our subcontract and offered an open door, he got an earful, and responded he wasn’t just going to fire people. No one bothered him again.
When the customer did fire people, complaints increased because department heads were held responsible, not individual miscreants. When men actually went to jail, they were dismissed as rare bad apples, not genuinely representative of the organization. Then the man who instituted the removals was himself removed, because his tactics had further embarrassed his customer.
We were back where we started, with problems without solutions, but saddled with people vindicated by resistence to change. Within its closed world, our customer is like GM when it removed Robert Stemple in 1992, and like GM then it has an increasingly unhappy customer who will find other ways
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