It Doesn’t Make Any Difference How Nice the Boss Is

Deming wrote his book, Out of Crisis, 40 years ago.  Why is it still so hard to convince managers that they must drive fear out of the workplace?  One problem is that managers, like all of us, are born into a culture of blame and most of them are never able to separate blame from accountability.  This is the story that I tell new managers to explain the difference:

*We had just figured out how to retrieve a wrench out of a blender.  Louie had dropped the wrench into the blender.  Fortunately, he had reported it before the blender agitator came on in its automatic sequence.  That would have been catastrophic in any plant, let alone the pharmaceutical plant we were starting up for the first time.

We were leaving the conference room and I could see that Louie was worried.  Even though he had come up with a creative way to prevent the problem from ever occurring again, he feared repercussions. 

My boss had told me that we should ensure that the workers felt free to let us know when any problems occurred.  Being new to management I had no idea how to make that happen.  One thing I did know was that I would have very few opportunities to create a first impression for the culture I wanted to instill in the plant.

“Louie,” I blurted out.  “Are you going over to Andy’s Bar after shift today?”  Andy’s Bar was down the street from the plant and it was the watering hole that everyone stopped at after their shift; maybe before, too, but nobody talked about that.

Louie looked at me the way a prisoner looks at an unlocked gate.  Is it a trap?  “Maybe.”

“Well, I’ll be there.  If you’re there, I’d like to buy you a drink.”

“I…I’ll have to check with my wife,” he said.

Andy’s Bar

Within hours, word had gotten around the plant like a virus.  Fifteen minutes after the end of day shift Andy’s Bar had filled to overflowing. Everybody was there to see if the new production manager would, in fact, buy a drink for someone who had just dropped a wrench into the machinery.

I stepped into Andy’s.  It smelled of beer and old grease.  Did it get quiet when I walked in?  Hard to tell.  Everyone purposely didn’t particularly notice me.  You didn’t want to suck up to the boss in front of your friends; just a few cursory nods.

I looked around.  No Louie.  Maybe I’d go down in flames. 

Then the door opened again and Louie entered.  “How are you doing, Louie?” I said.

“Ok.”

Now you could hear the football game on the TV.  “What are you drinking today, Louie?”

“Beer.”

“A beer for Louie,” I told the bartender, pulling out some cash.  The bartender drew the beer and I handed it to Louie.  “Better relax now, because I hear we’ve got a bunch of orders in the pipeline."

The buzz in Andy’s filled back in.  The bartender was inundated with orders and I swear that I saw money exchange hands.  Somebody had won and someone else had lost.

I didn’t stay long; ten million things to do.  As I threaded my way to the door, I overheard somebody with his back to me say, “I’ve never seen a place like this.  You f*** up and the boss buys you a drink!”

You might ask why I felt I had to make such a graphic statement to my new department.  Maybe I went a little overboard.  Let me just say that I felt that doing nothing was not an option.  The result, as I said in the prequel, was a quality culture that allowed every worker to develop poka yoke solutions to the problems they saw in the plant.

Deming’s eighth point:  Management Must Drive Out Fear

So few words; so much meaning.  Let’s parse these words.  Who has to drive out fear? Answer:  Management.  The reason is that management controls the workplace.  If management doesn’t do it, nobody can.

Why does Deming say “drive out”?  Why not “eliminate?  Or “don’t create”?  Answer:  “drive out” is active.  It’s positive.  A manager once asked, “Why do you say that I have to drive out fear?  I’m a nice guy.  I’m not going to cause fear.”

But it doesn’t make any difference how nice the manager is.  Fear is generated by the structure of the boss/worker relationship.  The boss can hire and fire, set raises, and give promotions.  Management must actively drive fear out of the organization or it will stay and fester.

Why is fear so bad?  Answer:  fear inhibits truthful reporting.  When bad things happen, the workers hesitate to report it.  They fear that the messenger will get shot.  Eventually the facts will become apparent to management.  But by then it may be too late to prevent catastrophe. 

The prototypical example of this was body counts during the Vietnam War.  But it can happen anywhere.  As Deming said, “Fear invites wrong figures. Bearers of bad news fare badly. To keep his job, anyone may present to his boss only good news.”

Management can only be as good as the data inputs to its decisions.  Garbage in, garbage out.

Skepticism

Deming wrote his book, Out of Crisis, 40 years ago.  Why is it still so hard to convince managers that they must drive fear out of the workplace?  Perhaps it’s because we quality and management consultants are being recursive.  When we tell managers that they need to drive out fear, aren’t we blaming the managers?

The problem is that managers, like all of us, have been raised from birth in an environment of blame.  When Sally spilled her milk on the floor in kindergarten, she got blamed.  Every news editorial demands a head to be lopped for the latest government scandal.  Yet we expect managers to easily rise above their origins and walk the fine line between worker accountability to achieve an assigned job and blame when something goes wrong.

My boss had been clear that we don’t blame workers when they fall into potholes in the road.  However, we hold ourselves accountable as a department to correct those potholes so that nobody falls the next time.

So, the question for us is how to get the message out in a non-threatening way.  You’ve just seen my attempt.  Let me know how it worked.  Comment below.

*The prequel to these events appears here.  I’ve never had the courage to tell the bar part of this story until now.

Image: wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Francisco_de_Goya,_Saturno_devorando_a_su_hijo_(1819-1823)_crop.jpg