Corporate Communications Gap Keeps Executives, Lower Ranks in the Dark
Top executives often are clueless about what goes on at the lower levels of their organizations, and the consequences can be disastrous.
One of the most tragic examples is the 1986 Challenger space shuttle accident that killed all seven crew members. It was blamed, in part, on the failure of headquarters officials with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to find out what some agency engineers already knew about potential safety hazards.
In other cases, ignorance in the executive suite leads to financial fiascoes. General Electric Co. executives brought out a new refrigerator model in the late 1980s, unaware that low-level technicians suspected that the product’s compressors were defective. The result: GE took a $450-million pretax charge to cover its losses after the compressors started breaking down.
Every day, ordinary workers receive baffling corporate memos or sit in on surreal staff meetings resembling the ones lampooned in the Dilbert comic strip. “The disconnect between rhetoric and reality is why Scott Adams is a millionaire,” said USC management professor Warren Bennis, referring to Dilbert’s creator.
Experts attribute the communications gap partly to the perception among many working people that it is professional suicide to challenge their bosses. The truth is that many top executives simply don’t want to hear bad news.
Even though a legion of companies over the last decade adopted practices such as total quality management that purported to “empower” employees, many of these initiatives “really haven’t made a dent,” said John J. Parkington, an expert in organizational psychology with Washington-based management consultants Watson Wyatt & Co.
He cited a 1997 Watson Wyatt survey of more than 9,000 American workers that found only 29% of those polled say their companies act on their suggestions.
Marietta Baba, a professor of anthropology at Wayne State University in Detroit and a frequent consultant to businesses dealing with corporate culture problems, added that the typical management hierarchy “doesn’t permit very much communication between the top and the bottom. There’s a middle filter that’s been put in there deliberately. Even though there’s been downsizing in the middle ranks, they’re still there.”
The corporate communications gap isn’t just a one-way problem. Just as important information often fails to move up from the lower rungs of the organization, many messages from top executives and managers never seep down to mid-level or lower-level workers.
Experts say that a lack of trust often is to blame. When executives get bonuses after cutting costs by firing workers, “where is the basis for trust?” Baba said.
Baba cited an effort by the sales chief of a manufacturing company she once advised to streamline its work processes. She said the sales chief genuinely wanted to bring about a “bottom-up restructuring,” relying on the suggestions of lower-level workers to make operations more efficient.
The initiative went nowhere, however. One of the main reasons: Employees were reluctant to spell out in detail their job duties and work procedures, Baba said, out of fear that the information later would be used to justify firing them.
To spur healthy dissent and comment from the lower ranks, Bennis urges companies to conduct “qualming sessions” to encourage staffers to voice their concerns about pending decisions. Another approach, he said, is for top executives to appoint an official “contrarian” responsible for raising legitimate questions and criticisms before the company makes a key decision.
“Give people license to tell the truth,” Bennis said. “It’s a way of stopping the folly of ‘group-think.’ ”
Repetitive-Motion Injuries
The enforcement of California’s first-in-the-nation program to curb repetitive-motion injuries in the workplace has begun.
Cal/OSHA officials have issued their first citations under the state standard. They accuse Ampco Parking of failing to devise workplace design changes or to provide training to prevent injuries among cashiers at the company’s parking booths at San Francisco International Airport.
The airport also was accused of failing to adopt design changes, and both employers are trying to negotiate a settlement with Cal/OSHA officials.
At least eight cashiers have reported repetitive-motion injuries, mainly arm ailments involving tendinitis or carpal tunnel syndrome.
The citations come as repetitive-motion injuries and related cumulative trauma disorders, after skyrocketing in the 1980s and early 1990s, are declining across the country. Still, the problems remain widespread, and Cal/OSHA officials are expected to cite more ergonomics violations over the next few months.
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Times staff writer Stuart Silverstein can be reached by phone at (213) 237-7887 or by e-mail at stuart.silverstein@latimes.com.
