In my opinion, Mr. O’Keefe met
with employees in an effort to show outside entities that he was attempting to
promote cultural changes in NASA. Due to the shuttle tragedy, my supposition is
that he felt pressure from inside and outside the organization to find a cause
and outline a plan for change to ensure that this does not happen again. As the
leader of the organization, he is putting himself in front of the employees as
a poster child for this change. His goal, it would seem, is to convince
employees that the problems have been identified and unite them in efforts to
fix those problems.
As for the believability factor of
Mr. O’Keefe, as I was watching the video, I went back and forth between buying
into what he was saying and thinking he was a used car salesman attempting to
make us believe what he was telling us, but not really believing it himself. It
is essential that organizational stakeholders believe him to form a trusting
relationship that will be the springboard for change. Norman, Aviolo, and Luthans
(2010) argue that in order to be trustworthy, leaders must be transparent and a
true sharing of ideas and information must be present. If Mr. O’Keefe truly
means what he is saying, he will (and, in fact, should have already) dialogue
with his people in a frank and open manner at all levels on a daily basis. At
the moment, the fact that the survey results identify an issue with
communication indicates that is not happening. Until there is a genuine effort
by management to do what he is saying, there will be little change. Employees
have to believe him. In my research about believable leaders, I read an
interesting analogy. Tom Skinner (1974) illustrates how to determine if someone
trusts you by using a story about a husband and wife:
To illustrate this, let’s consider the story of the
top businessman who is at a big meeting out west. He calls his wife to tell her
he’ll be home by six thirty that evening. However, at the airport he gets a
call telling him to return that evening for an important executive committee
meeting. He has no time to call his wife. The meeting lasts all night and he
comes walking into the house at two a.m. His wife meets him at the door and
says, “Where have you been?” He explains why he is late. “Do you mean
you’ve been at a meeting until two o’clock in the morning? Now who’s going to
believe that?” This woman is closed-minded. Let’s take the same situation
only this time his wife, who has fallen asleep on the couch waiting for him,
gets up and says, “Where have you been?” After he explains she asks, “Who
were you with?” “Bob, Ray and John were there,” he replies. “Well,
we’re going over to Ray’s house for dinner next week and I’m going to ask him
about that meeting.” She doesn’t quite say, “I don’t believe you,”
but she’s at least open-minded and will check out his story. Another time the
wife comes to the top of the stairs as the businessman comes in and calls down,
“Where have you been?” He explains where he was and who was there. She
says, “You know the next time we see them I’m going to ask them why they
always keep you up at night solving their problems in the business. Like the
business can’t run without you.” She never questions his story. She’s at
the level of having confidence in him.
I do not think
that the employees of NASA are at the point of trusting leadership. At this
point, his speech is all lip service and employees are at the “now who’s going
to believe that?” stage. Leaders will
have to walk the walk in order to move toward the trusting stage. They have
done a lot of analysis of the problem and statistical breakdown of the survey
results but the trick for them with be implementing the changes across the
board and earning the trust of their employees.
O’Keefe attempts
to unite the organization by discussing values and prompting employees to
compare their behavior to the values that they think they subscribe to and
determine if they match. The issue I see here is that the values that employees
espouse may not align with those of the organization as a whole. It would be
helpful to employees to have him clarify expectations and values that are
relevant to the organization. The make these even more meaningful to employees,
they should be included in the identification process to ensure that there is
agreement across the organization.
On the other
hand, Mr. O’Keefe has points in his speech that entice me to believe in him and
get on board with his plan. One of the statements that Mr. O’Keefe makes that
adds to his credibility for change is that he wants to promote a “yes….if”
rather than a “no….because” attitude. In other words, he wants leaders within
the organization to evaluate and determine the obstacles to an idea or thought presented
by an employee instead of immediately saying that it cannot be done. There are
also several instances where he mentions that employees need to start treating
others as they would want to be treated themselves. The Golden Rule is always
one that should be considered, in my opinion, but if you have to tell people to
do this, there may be bigger issues that need to be addressed. He might need to
consider team building activities or informal social gatherings for the
employees so that they begin to get to know and respect one another on a
different level than they currently do.
This presentation
is a reminder to me that, as a leader, culture should never be taken for
granted. Just because outward appearances lead one to believe that the
organization is doing well, there may be underlying issues that need to be
handled before there is a major catastrophe in the organization. Although you
do not want to go to great expense nor over survey people to death, it might be
helpful to survey employees annually to assess the general feeling of the
organization and be able to adapt as needed rather than having to react in the
face of necessity.
Norman, S. M., Avolio, B. J., &
Lufthans, F. (2010). The impact of positivity and transparency on trust in
leaders and their perceived effectiveness. The
Leadership Quarterly, 21(3),
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2010.03.002.
O'Keefe, S., & Jennings, J. (2004). Nasa cultural changes[Web].
Retrieved from http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/SACu
No comments:
Post a Comment