A couple of themes that we regularly visit when consulting with companies are those of power-over versus power-to, and of the underutilized potential of common goals. In the lead up to Independence Day, these two themes again came to mind.
As is characteristic of most institutionally important characters, the stories of our founding fathers have been rendered as mythology. The generalized morals and values that we wish to perpetuate as inherent in our national character are played up, and the untidy, vulgar humanity of the founders is sanitized. Too bad, because the historical facts that surround the relationship of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson are both informative as well as confounding.
Adams and Jefferson were men of different backgrounds, different temperaments and held polar opposite views on the balance of power between the Federal government and the State governments. One was an arrogant, elitist New England farmer. The other was an erudite Virginia plantation master, architect, engineer and man of letters. And they were friends.
United by the common goal of breaking free of the perceived tyranny of King George, these two were assigned to the five person Independence Committee of the Continental Congress, and as a pair were assigned the action of drafting a statement declaring the secession and independence of the united American colonies. Their work in articulating a broadly accepted and admired Declaration of Independence, and their positions in the conduct of the subsequent war and in the formation of the unique democratic experiment in government that resulted, established between them a deep respect for the purity of each other’s motives and a deep personal friendship.
Adams and Jefferson were ballot rivals when George Washington chose not to run for a third term. Adams ran as a Federalist, Jefferson as a Democratic-Republican and Adams won by three electoral votes. By quirk of how elections were conducted at that time, Jefferson from the competing party served as Adams’ vice president. The friendship that united them brought civility to their political disagreements. Specifically, they debated whether the federal government should control and build a dominant centralized power or whether it should distribute power to the states.
This debate continues to be played out today in the private sector as geographically dispersed corporations struggle with the balance point between the necessary controls maintained by headquarters and the degree of autonomy allowed to the distributed sites. Our personal bias is on the side of distributed management authority and autonomy in recognition that local effectiveness is in large measure contingent upon local control.
The mudslinging that characterizes modern politics and that makes the run up to elections so off putting is not modern at all. The election of 1800 in which Jefferson defeated Adams in his attempt to secure a second term was so harsh with negative rumor and innuendo that it ruptured the bond between the two and bitterness filled the space between them. These civil rivals became bitter rivals.
For eighteen years there was very little communication between Adams and Jefferson, but when Abigail, Adam’s wife of 54 years, died, a sympathetic exchange of letters opened up a ‘normalization of relationships’ between Jefferson and Adams. As the two again engaged in regular communication, the rivalry of their politics and their world views continued, but their exchanges were once again characterized by measured civility and respect.
As Adams and Jefferson became the sole survivors among the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Adams volunteered that he was determined to live to see the 50th anniversary of the signing in 1826. The human will is an amazingly powerful tool. When applied to control others the common result is a war of wills, and we often find that the ends are suboptimal, skewed by the confrontational means. But when our will power is turned on ourselves in acts of commitment and determination, it is astounding what can be achieved.
Willing himself to live to 90 years of age, at a time when such longevity was rare, Adams did survive to see the 50th anniversary of the signing. Astonishingly, he lived to reach the 50th anniversary, but he died on that day. His last words were a competitive lament that ‘Thomas Jefferson survives’. Unknown to the dying Adams was the fact that Jefferson had passed away earlier that same day. That these two polar rivals among the founding fathers, the two assigned drafters of the Declaration of Independence and the last survivors among its signers both passed away on its 50th anniversary astounds.
In our modern world and our focused segment of product development, the balance point between control and distributed authority remains an important consideration in the pursuit of business success. And the use of will to motivate ourselves to high achievement supersedes its misapplication in attempts to control the behavior of others. The lessons from the relationship of Adams and Jefferson are instructive. Perhaps most valuable amongst them are that civility can exist in the discourse of diametrically opposed views, and that the great strength of the bonds built on the successful pursuit of common goals, once shattered, can be gracefully repaired by the recovery of humanity and the application of good will.
In some organizations that call on us for help, there is abundant frustration over the divisiveness that strangles the organization. These organizations are divided into fiefdoms and issues and problems that arise are considered from the perspective of what is best for one’s individual group. The point of view on an issue is just that, the view from a single point.
The Japanese have an interesting expression, Tama Mushi. A tama mushi is an iridescent beetle and this simple expression means that things look differently depending upon the angle from which you view them. In divisive organizations, rather than working to get a 360 degree understanding of a problem, individuals defend the position of their group, failing to consider, and even to hear the legitimacy of the position of other stakeholders. Issues dissolve into internal win-lose competitions and energy goes into winning for one’s group rather than into understanding the actual problem.
An organization’s ability to manage in the face of this kind of political environment is critically hampered. Many companies go backwards, and in the interest of maintaining some level of peace they devolve into faux-consensus organizations. Faux-consensus organizations are characterized by an over commitment to get everyone on board with a plan before moving forward. They often arrive at a situation known as the veto of one, where any member — a representative of a functional group with a ‘point of view’ — can stop a project in its tracks. Critical issues go unresolved as the stakeholders invest time wooing the veto holder onboard.
Even as organizations mature, the prospect of internal politics gumming up fluid and flexible execution hovers nearby. This can be seen even in companies mature enough to use the 8D process to manage crisis situations. At its simplest, 8D is divided into parts, the containment and the follow up corrective action. Those two parts reflect what Covey divides into the urgent — the crisis management of the containment phase, and the important — the corrective action which has root cause discovery followed by the execution of a resolving plan. In the containment action, a team deals with a critical customer-effecting flaw and rallies all hands to keep the problem in house and from negatively effecting customers further. The clear goal and the crisis mentality focus the team on accomplishing this first step.
The second part of the process, the corrective action is vulnerable to political divisiveness. This phase starts with root cause discovery, and most commonly deploys the team that was formed to perform containment. Though the worst of the crisis has passed, the situation is usually still charged with stress. Having lost the focusing power of the crisis and with perhaps a growing sense of defensiveness to the stress generating messages coming into the team from outside, a splintering of the team into factions is a not unlikely outcome. Team based root-cause discovery gets subverted into fault finding and an unhealthy situation leads to a significantly sub-optimal solution.
Demonstrated by the proverbial horse designed by a committee, investigation and planning are activities best served as individual responsibilities. So in the case of the 8D process, we recommend an hourglass shape to the process. Deviating from common practice where the 8D team is formed early and kept intact until the conclusion of the process, we see it as more effective and less vulnerable to a flare up of politics if the containment team turns over root cause discovery and planning to a single responsible individual. And when the root cause is determined and a corrective plan is to be executed, an execution team is formed.
In general, teams operate best when project needs can be subdivided into individual responsibilities, or when a crisis situation helps to glue the team together. But to fully mature, an organization needs to develop the situation in which teams work well together, even outside of crisis mode. In fact they need teams to collaborate early to avoid as much as possible the creation of crises.
While siloes divide the horizontal landscape of a company, hierarchy separates the organization into layers. This vertical segmentation of the company creates communication barriers between the strategic, managerial and individual contributor ranks of the company.
As organizations solve the communication problem between layers, they often discover the added benefit of the weakening of the silo culture. For this to happen, it is critically important that the communication apparatus have something vital to transmit. And that vital transmission would be a clear articulation of what the company is trying to accomplish, the goals of the organization.
The number of organizations that operate without defining goals is astonishing. And many organizations that have done the strategically difficult work of forming shared goals, fail to communicate them to and throughout the organization. A shared understanding of goals can inform all the decisions being made and all the work being undertaken in the company, at all levels. It enables teams to cooperate, without the necessity of a crisis gluing them together. When everyone in the company is trying to put a man on the same moon, silos crumble and internal politics are reduced from disabling to merely annoying.
If your own organization is crippled by politically charged infighting and narrow view points, look to the creation of shared goals as a lever to lift the company out of the muck. Getting to credible, agreed upon, vitally important goals is the first order of business for companies who seek to uproot the unhealthy politics that rob them of energy and profit.
