Learning the Truth
How to hear what people won't tell you
A perennial challenge for top leaders is understanding what their employees really think about them or important actions that need to be taken. Employees don’t want to be the bearer of bad news or been viewed as critical because they don’t want to risk harming their relationship with their superiors. What’s a leader to do to find out what people really think?
Michael Beer and Russell Eisenstat of Harvard Business School and True Point consulting have an answer. They developed an approach they call the strategic fitness process (SFP) which they have applied at Becton Dickinson and other organizations around the world. In a nutshell, it goes like this.
The CEO or leadership team identifies 10 trusted individuals one layer below the senior team. These individuals are asked to interview 10 people each. That’s a sample of 100 employees, which is large enough to be representative of employees’ opinions. The interviews can be general in nature – “What are your thoughts about how the company/leadership is doing?” or they can be more targeted concerning a specific topic of interest – “What do you think about our new strategy?” The people interviewed are either randomly selected or the group of 10 interviewers does some thinking about which people would provide the best input. The identity of those interviewed should remain confidential so that they can speak freely.
What makes this better than an employee survey or focus group is the intimacy of the one-to-one interview. Unlike a survey, the interviewer can dig deeper to find out what is behind the interviewee’s feelings and in contrast to a focus group, there aren’t other people listening who might make the discussion feel less safe or take the conversation in another direction.
After the interviews are completed, the interviewers meet to summarize what they have heard and prepare a presentation for the CEO or executive team. The presentation takes the form of a discussion among the ten interviewers, covering the main points of what they heard. To make it even safer, during the presentation, the interviewers sit in a circle while the CEO and senior leaders sit around them in an outer circle, listening but not interrupting. Never do the interviewers mention the names of the people they interviewed. It is made clear that the information being shared is what was learned from the interviews, not the opinions of the 10 interviewers themselves.
Once the presentation is finished, the two groups switch places. The leadership team becomes the inner circle and the interviewees sit outside them. The leadership team summarizes what they have heard and the interviewees can interject if the leaders get it wrong or miss something important. The leaders can also ask questions for clarification, but not anything that would identify the source of the input or force an interviewer to offer their own opinions on the topic. The exchange should be carefully facilitated to make certain the rules are not violated.
Following the sharing of information from the interviews, the effort shifts to the leadership team. Depending on the breadth, depth and importance of the issues, the leadership team might meet anywhere from a few hours to a few days to consider what they have heard and how to respond. Beer and Eisenstat recommend that the team meet over a weekend, so that there is adequate time for reflection and discussion but not too many business days before leadership responds.
This time, the leadership starts in the inner circle with a recap of what they heard and the messages they wish to convey to the organization as a result. The interview team sits on the outside and listens, then convenes in another room to prepare feedback for the leadership team. The interview team returns, sits in the middle, and goes over the discussion they just had among themselves, avoiding anyone speaking in the first person or identifying who said what. The feedback they offer should help the leaders improve the clarity of the messages they are about to send and understand how their actions are likely to be received.
As with any effort to collect input from employees, it’s important to let people know that they have been heard and what will be done to address any concerns. Transparency is key; it’s quite likely that some concerns will not be addressed for cost or feasibility reasons. If leaders have an alternative to propose, that’s fine but it’s also possible that some concerns will simply not be handled. That’s not a bad thing, as long as the rationale for the decision is shared. Research conducted by Alan Church and others shows that the only thing worse than not sharing the input that is received after doing interviews or surveys is to share what was heard and then do nothing. That makes people think their input doesn’t matter and leads to greater dissatisfaction with leadership rather than more appreciation for their effort to listen.
There are many times when it would be good for leaders to know what their people think. Beer and Eisenstat have worked with organizations that repeat the strategic fitness process multiple times, usually whenever there’s an important change to be made that employees might care about. The time to use the process is after making an announcement that something is under consideration but before it has been finalized. The additional insights the process produces can result in minor improvements or, if called for, an abrupt about face.
Once people become familiar with the process, it becomes less threatening and more a part of the culture. With enough success, leaders wonder how they have lived without it. The title of the Harvard Business Review article that Beer and Eisenstat wrote about the strategic fitness process was, “How to have an honest conversation about your business strategy.” Doesn’t that sound like something we all could use?