The week of 10 January I was in Northern Virginia. It was my second week at work in my new job. My new boss and I were meeting organizations that could be potential partners in the federal market. We met with companies having as few as seventy employees as many as forty-three thousand. We also got to meet with individuals trying hard to launch new companies.
What was most surprising in our meetings was the wide variety of employee attitudes that we experienced in our visits. We saw everything from completely tuned out employees to folks who were completely engaged in their jobs while fully embracing the company's mission and ethics.
We also saw a company so inwardly focused, that it is no surprise that partnering with them is very difficult. Their internal processes are so focused on internal politics that it is often hard to work with them and apparently even hard to be their customer.
Often the tip off on what type of business associate a company will make is the attitude of the front line employees. The company's willingness to share information with potential partners, customers, and line employees is a big clue as to the culture of the company.
Companies with an open style of management likely will be easier to work with in the long run. Will they also be better places to work?
"There are workplaces where people have, slowly over a long period of time, become silenced, cowed and fearful. Places where, at the beginning of the day, individuals don cloaks of near invisibility and take vows of silence to be sustained until day's end. They endure the day, politely and silently. If they have an opinion, thoughts or questions, they don't offer them - except through fearful whisper or furtively passed notes."
Date: Roanoke Times, January 12, 2005 Section: BUSINESS Page: C7
Column: Working It Out, by Camille Wright Miller
Having worked with open and closed organizations, I have a distinct preference for open organizations. The teams that I have built over the years have always been as open as allowed within the company culture. It is very possible to have an open management style in a secretive company.
Unfortunately one organization or team based on open communication in a large secretive corporation probably makes little difference in the company's culture. Most large organizations usually are very intolerant of behavior that does not fit the company norm. This is true even if the organization with the different style is showing fantastic results for the company.
There are even some greater downsides to a secretive company. Odds are the "knowledge is power" attitude that often feeds a secretive corporate culture also has created an impaired decision-making capability within the company.
I once attended a seminar for Directors in my last company. The seminar leader, who came from an external company, was amazed that the whole decision making process seemed to short circuit above a certain level in our company. All our Directors knew from experience that all important decisions had to be made by a very few people. No one was willing to stick their neck out and risk the danger of reversal.
In fact much of the quiet discussion centered around how many people in our company of 14,500 could really make a decision. There were guesses from one to six. Obviously having a Fortune 500 company where only a handful of people can really make decisions leads to some choke points which can have a devastating impact these days when decisions often need to move at Internet speed. It also leads to frustration to those trying to get a critical decision.
Unfortunately impaired decision making often goes hand in hand with retribution for making a "wrong" decision. Really good companies encourage risk taking, controlling secretive ones do not.
Having just a few people making decisions can make for a very focused company. Being very focused can make for very successful companies. However, just because a company is successful using external measures does not guarantee that the organization will be a good place to work.
Likely decision making confined to just a few people also means the real rewards for success are also confined to the same few people.
Being very focused and dependent on the decisions of a few individuals can put a company at risk. As long their decisions are right, the company will be on track. If however, they make a mistake because of their isolation and their lack of trust of other individuals, it can cause some serious bumps in the corporation's path. Often the question is not "if a mistake will be made" but "when the mistake will be made."
Corporations that matter over the long term are more likely built on the model of employee empowerment and trust. A model of open communication leads to an organization that becomes a large intelligence gathering body for the good of the whole company. Information is shared readily both up the organization and down to the troops. That does not mean there are no secrets, it just means that there is a lot of respect for opinions and that individuals have the opportunity to build up a tremendous amount of credibility even if they are not high in the organization.
While potentially being part of a very successful though secretive corporation can be very exciting, it is important to gauge your potential work environment. Unfortunately getting an employee from a secretive company to come clean with a potential employee can be a real challenge.
Keeping employees uninformed can easily lead to "tuned out employees" like we ran into this week. Over time this type of environment leads to people who spend more time focused internally trying to build processes to replace organizational trust. What needs to be done to be successful with customers can end up with little focus.
Because there is so little trust, micromanagement often rears its ugly head along with what I like to term "mushroom management." Which if you know anything about mushroom farming means you spend a lot of your time in the dark and get a lot of manure dumped on you.
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