Government Executive - Authors - Annette Simmons

Dangerous Truths

Annette Simmons — Thu, 01 Apr 1999 00:00:00 -0500

ou want the truth? I'll tell you what the real problem is. But we need to find a place where it's safe to talk. Hang on, let me close the door. Or maybe I should just call you later, from home."

In many federal offices, speaking the truth about how operations really work is viewed as simply too dangerous to risk. Government employees expect that if they say what's really going on in their agencies, they'll be subject to public humiliation, intimidation, isolation and recriminations on the job. They aren't completely wrong, either. You can have the right to free speech and still be afraid to exercise it. As one senior manager says, with nervous laughter, "You wouldn't dare tell the truth around here." Another is even more blunt: "They may say you have the right to speak your mind, but just do it and you will find yourself in a career death trap."

Many federal employees are angry, frustrated and confused. One senior manager, asked to draw a color-coded graph of his emotional state on an average day, drew a bell curve, the large middle hump thickly colored with solid blazing red indicating frustration running from 7 a.m. to quitting time. Another manager showed a line graph of her typical day-calm green interspersed with wild fluctuations of red spikes. The red? "Oh, those are meetings."

These are not "problem employees." They are some of the government's top performers-people with a burning passion for excellence, who throw their hearts and souls into their jobs. They are beginning to feel powerless-and worse, they are beginning to act that way.

At the heart of this frustration is the conviction that if they were to speak the truth as they see it, their careers would be over. Why? What sort of truths would they tell?

Don't Cover Up

Demanding only positive thoughts and attitudes from employees does not remove the negative. It simply makes the negative invisible and harder to access.

Truth, unpleasant as it might be, is best dealt with openly, honestly and quickly. Ignoring it, dragging it out or pretending it doesn't exist not only does not solve the problem, it spreads it like a virus.

What are the dangerous truths that are sabotaging efforts to improve government operations? Most involve a person or group of people claiming that some other person or group is blocking progress. Middle managers blame top managers, saying they are unwilling to release control of fiefdoms that make them feel important and give them power over others. Top managers, in turn, say middle managers are resistant to change, not very smart or simply lazy.

Employees tend to label any efforts at improvement as the new "flavor of the month" and assume that efforts to improve productivity will simply add more work to people who are already overworked. Meanwhile, they argue, duplicative operations are covered up with labels like "dissimilar redundancies" to keep them from being eliminated.

Managers, employees, legislators and the public-all have their dangerous truths. And all of these groups are both exaggerating the problems and making very good points at the same time. If people aren't given a safe place to express opinions they perceive to be dangerous, those opinions will become self-fulfilling prophecies. But when frustrations are aired in a truly open and honest forum, the cynicism that usually accompanies them is transformed into a heightened sense of shared responsibility.

Airing dangerous truths under an "I'll listen to yours if you listen to mine" arrangement demands that both the speaker and the listener make tough decisions and mutual sacrifices in the name of fundamental change. Denying people a voice, on the other hand, lets them remain victims, powerless to improve their lot-wasting time, energy and money in a senseless tug of war.

So how can leaders of agencies, offices and programs provide a safe place for dangerous truths? It takes more than just putting people together in the same room and letting them vent their feelings.

One facilitator's trick to avoid this situation is to ask people to draw pictures describing how they view their workplaces. This has two key advantages. First, the people who would dominate discussions of such topics if they were held out in the open are submerged in a more democratic process. Second, allowing people to use metaphors in the drawings enables them to express complex perceptions that are lost in linear language.

The pictures and descriptions listed in the left hand column of this page were drawn from recent experiences involving groups of federal executives, managers and employees. They show how providing a forum for all sides to tell the truth, however dangerous, can lead to real changes in the way people perceive their jobs and their agencies.

Annette Simmons of Group Process Consulting in Greensboro, N.C., is author of A Safe Place for Dangerous Truth: Using Dialogue to Overcome Fear and Distrust (AMACOM, 1999). She can be reached at AnnetteGPC@aol.com.

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An Explosive Situation

Annette Simmons — Thu, 01 Apr 1999 00:00:00 -0500

ate last year, 30 employees and managers of one agency gathered for a five-day planning session. A glance around the room at the beginning of the session revealed crossed arms, cynical smiles and eyes that rolled at the very mention of "teamwork." Incongruous bursts of anger bubbled up about insignificant items-the order of the eight priorities under discussion, the agenda-even when to break for lunch. People were either overreacting with attacks or underreacting with apathetic disdain.

They sat grouped in cliques. Invisible lines divided union from management and field from headquarters. Real progress on an action plan was impossible. And yet an open invitation to air grievances would have led to a tiresome replay of their particular version of "Spar Wars." This unproductive replay is one of the fundamental reasons telling the truth is not encouraged. Without a safe place that invites new voices and new outcomes, the risk of making things worse is too high. Dangerous truths require special handling.

For some people at the session, tensions had reached explosive levels-as shown by this drawing, done by a field office employee. Across the boundary between management and the field lies enough dynamite to blow up both sides. The fuse is lit, and the scissors that might cut the fuse and avoid disaster are laid on the side of management.

Another picture from the union side of this group was even more graphic. It portrayed the department as a boat with a hole in it, slowly filling up with water. A worker was bailing it out as fast as he could. To his right stood a manager, fly unzipped, um . . . well, filling the boat back up again.

Pictures on the management side were no more hopeful. One manager showed herself running in circles. Another depicted himself in a car driving around a target, linked to his destination by four streets, all marked "one-way" heading away from the desired goal.

A psychiatrist might diagnose this group with a bad case of "learned helplessness." A consultant might conclude the agency suffered from a culture of cynicism. But whatever the diagnosis, previously unspoken dangerous truths were sabotaging management's efforts to make progress. Continuing to pretend everything was just fine or that a new program of the month would solve everything was more dangerous than getting all sides together and letting them tell the truth as they saw it.

This group braved the risks and used their pictures to each tell their side of the story, in turn. It was tense-particularly when the guy who drew the boat picture stood up. But the relief of having spoken the unspeakable cleared the tension from the room.

Talking about things doesn't change the facts, but it can change perceptions. Contrary to what you might expect, sharing the gallery of disillusionment, frustration and blame described above ended up having a positive effect on all present.

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The Big Picture

Annette Simmons — Thu, 01 Apr 1999 00:00:00 -0500

iecing lots of smaller pictures together inevitably delivers a big-picture view. And with a bigger picture, dangerous truths become less dangerous and even less true. "Many dangerous truths are just assumption bubbles that, once exposed, can be tested to see if they pop," says one federal official.

"When we don't talk about what we think we see, we build up assumptions that are way off base," says one executive. "We end up constructing a maze-everyone in their own part of the maze, no one going in the same direction, and no one understanding the bigger picture."

The picture here was drawn by one of the employees who report directly to this executive. Prior to the meeting in which the drawing was created, complaints by the participants centered exclusively on territorial maneuverings between organizations within an agency. There were accusations that other organizations were, as one participant put it, "stealing our resources, sabotaging our relationships with top management and downplaying our successes."

Here you see eight "mesas," on which stand different parts of the agency. "We are all so busy in our tug-of-war over resources, responsibilities, access to customers and information that we can't see that it is futile," says the creator of the drawing. "No one is going to win here. In fact, if one of us does win, it pulls the others off their mesas and their weight will pull us all down-we will all lose."

The picture was designed to show that managers who traditionally protected their jobs and their organizations by hoarding resources and hogging recognition are courting disaster. Yet most of them are blindly doing what they've always done. None is willing to take the first step and share resources, for fear the favor won't be returned. They stay trapped in a "you go first" standoff.

Most dangerous truths start out blaming someone else. But as genuine dialogue develops, every truth-teller's "white hat" status invariably fades due to a sobering realization that there is always more than one way to look at things. The villains who obstruct all your efforts at progress usually consider themselves trapped by other villains. Many federal employees believe they are oppressed, but oppression depends on your point of view.

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Beyond Victimization

Annette Simmons — Thu, 01 Apr 1999 00:00:00 -0500

his picture was drawn by a woman who was a member of two warring organizations who had met for a two-day planning session. It shows a person caught in a vise that is being tightened by the employees of each of the organizations.

When the creator of the drawing lifted it up, there was a hush of recognition across the group. "This is me in the vise," she said. "But it could be any of us, really. We are all taking turns. All of these people are just waiting for their turn. When we aren't getting screwed, we are busy helping to turn the ropes and screwing each other."

The emotional content of this picture is powerful. Verbally, this group had described their problem as too much work and not enough resources or support. The picture shows more of the story. It reveals how everyone in the group contributed to their own misery.

It is rare to talk to a government employee who doesn't feel as if his or her hands are tied. Many feel like victims of the system-trapped by legislation, led by fools or surrounded by idiots and predators. Silence is the perfect breeding ground for this victim mentality. People who are forbidden to discuss their piece of the picture lose their curiosity to discuss anyone else's piece-much less the bigger picture.

Without genuine dialogue, most people believe that their dangerous truths are really true. Training them to pretend that they don't see what they think they see just makes things worse. For this group, continued sermons preaching cooperation and empowerment only increased their cynicism. They needed to speak their own dangerous truths before they could embrace this bigger picture.

Other drawings from this group showed more one-sided views of the situation. One depicted a garden, with one manager as the sun and another as a cloud. Another person drew a boat splitting down the middle as the two divisions rowed in different directions, with one group looking happy and the other sad. But the picture of the vise holds up a mirror that is big enough to show a deeper truth. It reveals that all of the problems weren't simply caused by "good" and "bad" senior managers. Even if senior management had provided the vise, it was the people in the room who had turned the screws on each other. Those who embraced the message of this drawing embraced responsibility for improving their lot-and relinquished their victim status.

Not everyone in the session was moved by this picture. Some people clung too tightly to their status as victims. The directors of the two organizations represented at the meeting were noticeably absent from this effort to air dangerous truths-each presumably boycotting the day for their own reasons. Another dangerous truth is that some people don't want things to improve.

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A Safe Place For Dangerous Truths

Annette Simmons — Thu, 01 Apr 1999 00:00:00 -0500

lthough many people think drawing is only for the artistically talented or the mentally deficient, the exercise of creating pictures is a sophisticated tool for analyzing complex situations. It enables a group to see context at the same time as content. Unlike overhead slides with bullet points, drawings are not limited to sequential representation. They can show relational aspects, reveal irrational interactions and describe emotions. Dressed in metaphor, dangerous truths are much safer than naked truths. If you want to use this exercise with your work group, here are a few steps that will help.

Create trust.
Your group will intuitively know that this is a self-disclosure process that can be abused. Let them see you are interested in a mutually beneficial discovery process-not a manipulation process.
Stimulate hope.
Tell a few dangerous truths of your own that will demonstrate how serious you are. Talk about what your group could accomplish if everyone really worked together.
Preempt blame and feelings of defensiveness.
Talk about how blame and negative feelings are natural reactions to stress and uncertainty. Acknowledge that too few resources and too many priorities are bound to result in feelings of frustration. Help the group anticipate that most people will be blaming someone else for their problems.
Make it safe.
Make agreements on such issues as confidentiality and respect for all points of view to make the exercise safe. You may even need to agree to shred the pictures after
the meeting.
Instill confidence with clear directions.
Ask participants to draw pictures that are metaphors for their organization-at least one level bigger than their day-to-day interactions. Explain that their drawing is going to be a piece of the puzzle that only they can see. Give them lots of ideas for metaphors: bridges, walls, gardens, cityscapes, ships, islands, golf courses, whatever. Then let them draw whatever they want, without judgment.
Give everyone a chance to tell his or her story.
Assure participants that they don't have to talk about their drawings if they don't want to. Ask the most willing to show their pictures to the group and describe their metaphors without making judgments or naming names. Humor is your ally. There are always funny pictures. Encourage a sense of fun. Invite questions of clarity only. Ensure questions stay within the safety of the metaphor.
Let the increased understanding do its work.
Don't try to solve dangerous truths in one session. The benefit comes not from traditional solutions or action plans, but from increased understanding. This is the sort of thing that needs time to seep in. It may be two weeks before people really "get it."

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