Courageous Followers – Part 2

We know the characteristics of Groupthink, and we know the strategies that a leader can employ to discourage Groupthink. We have tools as facilitators and OD consultants to help group members deal with this phenomenon. At the same time, some people have dived deeper into this issue, and looked at it from the perspective of the individual participants: What leads people to obey leaders, even when they promote bad ideas? Are there people who tend to speak up or dissent, for whom it comes more easily? If so, where does that ability come from? Is this something we can teach people, to not follow leaders who will mislead them (think Jim Jones in Guyana)? Can we train people to voice their doubts, in companies (NASA), in the community (Guyana), in society (civil rights movement)?

In the famous Milgram experiments on obedience to authority, the research participants were ordered to give shocks to people (subjects) who gave incorrect answers on a test that the participant administered; the subjects were in another room but their comments were audible to the test administrators. The subjects were play-acting, screaming in pain as if they were receiving the shocks, but in fact nothing was happening to them. It was astonishing to see the results of the experiments: “We know that two thirds of people will follow the orders of authority even when they feel them to be destructive and they are not under duress to do so. There is an absence of data about what about the other third is different. Yet this is the most important aspect for us to understand if we are to encourage and develop those characteristics.” (Ira Chaleff)

Courageous Followers

A few months ago I heard a talk by Ira Chaleff, author of “The Courageous Follower: Standing Up To and For Our Leaders.” In his book, Ira recommends that leaders create conditions in which “it is easier for followers to speak the truth as they see it and for leaders to give appropriate consideration to what they are being told.” The results of leaders not giving that consideration have led to bad decisions, big and small. In NASA, not listening to the opinions of the engineers led to the Challenger disaster. In one company, told by an employee who lost his job, not including the voice of doubters led to bankruptcy. The Bay of Pigs fiasco resulted from not creating an environment where people felt safe speaking up. So it’s great to have recommendations for leaders on how to create such an environment.

This resonates with the suggestions put forward in “Why Great Leaders Don’t Take YES for an Answer”. In this book, Michael Roberto explains how leaders can and should create the conditions for a diversity of opinions: to include experts with differing opinions, to include the naysayers, and to remove the influence of the leader in the process (by absenting himself from the discussion initially) – all of which raise the quality of decisions. Roberto and Chaleff separately agree that we need to teach leaders about the phenomenon of Groupthink, which played a critical role in the disasters listed above. But what do we do in the absence of enlightened leadership? How do we empower followers in the face of bad leaders?

Setting Yourself up to Influence

I have been puzzling recently over this issue: the difference in having one’s opinions and expertise valued as an internal employee/consultant vs. as an external consultant. In some organizations or in some contexts, an external consultant’s expertise is perceived as valuable and something to pay attention to – whereas for an internal, his/her expertise may not be as highly valued, and not heeded. For external consultants considering returning to work as an employee, how do you deal with this issue?

To me, this is about being able to influence the system, which I think this is a large part of our work as change agents – to find ways to influence, using different modes of influencing: expertise, relationship, persuasion. We also need to try to educate the system, to offer other ways of seeing a problem, providing other perspectives and suggesting alternate solutions.

Mike Halperin (Halperin Consulting) shared his wisdom on this issue with me: when you go into an organization, you have a honeymoon period, during which time it’s useful to establish yourself and the value of your contributions. It’s the time to build relationships with people who are well-placed or well-connected in the company, so that you build a foundation for being able to influence the system. If you squander that period, you will likely have less influence going forward. As a new employee, ask your manager to identify the ten most influential or well-connected people in the company so that you can seek them out and begin to build a relationship with them.

It also occurs to me that we OD consultants bring the gift of our ability to put forward different or unpopular ideas, or to raise undiscussables, in a spirit of curiosity and collaboration, which can gain us credibility – and I know that Mike would agree with that!