All of us have our own theories about how relationships, careers and life are supposed to work. Typically, they are implicit, but they are just as powerful when we don’t recognize them. As I noted in a recent blog, theories sneak up on all of us. Our theories impact reality in profound ways that most never see, never think about or are even willing to believe. But our social theories profoundly influence how we think about ourselves, how we think about our world and how we act, even when a theory is now obsolete.
One of the most classic theories about work and pay was destroyed back in the 1930s by Henry Ford. The theory was that you should pay your worker as little as possible and expect 12 hours work a day. The old man looked at the Model T that he was making and trying to sell for $500 and decided that theory would no longer work. His market was limited by the poor salaries he paid his employees. Much to the chagrin of American business and Wall Street, Ford nearly tripled the salaries of his employees overnight, putting them on an eight hour day just so they could buy the car they built and have the time to drive it around. Wallah! There you have it. Ford became one of the richest men in the world almost overnite. . .
One of the most significant business theories that has become obsolete in this 21st century is the role of organizational communication. You don’t have to be a communications and rhetoric person to understand that. Boris Groysberg, who’s on the Harvard Business School faculty and an org behavior guy gets it. In a number of studies that eventually culminated in his book with Michael Slind, Talk, Inc. they asked several questions:
What are the current activities and norms, the prevailing aims and objectives, that characterize the way that companies manage the flow of information to, from, and among employees?
- How have those activities and aims changed in recent years?
- Are their developments in this area that qualify as being particularly innovative?
As they relate their story, they discovered that something was changing both substantively and faster than they expected. To put it in their terms, the field known as “communication,” which had long been a discrete institutional function, was evolving at many companies into a constellation of practices that extends across the entirety of organizational life. Their findings revealed a drastic shift from corporate communication to organizational conversation.
In their later HBR article they concluded that “leadership is a conversation.” I have no disagreement with that other than to point out that their conclusion, like many from academia, was too cautious. It didn’t go far enough. To put it in our own terms, the real business of business is conversation. That’ll stand business theory on its head.
To get off on the right foot, I wanted to share their rationale for the conclusion. It also fits our conclusion. Their findings revealed that the shift from corporate communication to organizational conversation has occurred because of several long-term changes that have affected the business world profoundly. First, there is economic change. As service industries become more economically significant than manufacturing industries, and as knowledge work supplants other kinds of labor, the need for sophisticated ways to process and share information grows more acute.
Second, there is organizational change. As companies become flatter and less hierarchical in structure, and as frontline employees become more pivotally involved in value-creating work, lateral and bottom-up communication comes to be no less important than top-down communication.
Third, there is global change. As workforces become more diverse and more widely dispersed, the challenge of navigating across lines of cultural and geographic division entails modes of interaction that are fluid and complex.
Fourth, there is generational change. As millennials and other younger workers gain a foothold in organizations, they bring an expectation that peers and authority figures alike will communicate with them in a dynamic, two-way fashion.
Fifth, there is technological change. As digital networks make instant connectivity the norm of business life, and as social media platforms grow more powerful and more ubiquitous, a reliance on older, less conversational channels of organizational communication ceases to be tenable.
Finally, there is the brute fact that all of these changes have steeply accelerated the pace at which business gets done today. As the time available for decision making becomes shorter and shorter, a commitment to engaging employees in that process becomes a make-or-break imperative for leaders. . .
Smart leaders understand that they can’t avoid that conversation for very long. Nor can they fully control it. But if they engage with it in the right way, they have the potential to unleash organizational energy of a sort that no leader could ever command.
Translate the rationale from leaders to all employees and the issues become still more challenging. Indeed, the kind of conversations that take place in today’s world leaves most employees at sea. Your basic college communication course won’t begin to handle the needs of flattened hierarchy and 21st century technology. It’s going to be back to school--if you can find a school--for those who desire success.
For the past 15 years I’ve regularly encountered two questions: How do you say that? And, sometimes more important, Can I really say that? Obviously, the old theory about communication within the organization no longer works.