Talk to the Ear: How Not to Address Employee Feedback

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Terry Young

A colleague recently told me about a large drawing of an ear hanging on the wall in her daughter’s preschool room. The teacher directs the kids to “talk to the ear” if they have a gripe about Jacob not sharing his toy or some other preschool drama. The teacher makes it clear that unless they are hurt or bleeding, the ear is their first stop.

At first glance, this seems like dereliction of duty — a pre-K version of the dismissive “talk to the hand.” But according to the teacher, more often than not, the child wanders off happily after unloading on “the ear.”

Apparently, a five-year-old suffers a multitude of injustices throughout the day and many of them are easily resolved by simply walking up to the ear on the wall and pleading his or her case. Otherwise, the teacher is inundated with the incessant protestations of her cherubic charges who feel compelled to “tell” on offending classmates.

I wondered if this was an isolated practice, so I Googled it and found examples of this approach at preschools across the country.

So why does it work? Is it just that preschoolers are gullible enough to fall for the old “talk to the ear” trick?

Apparently there’s more going on here than meets the eye. By sharing their grievances, even with an inanimate ear, children seem to talk themselves through potential plans and actions, as described in Speaking and Listening for Preschool Through Third Grade, a book on oral language development:

Research shows that during free-play settings, about 40 percent of children’s talk is not directed to socializing with other children but to guiding their own behavior or thinking. This “talking to one’s self,” or thinking out loud, helps to guide cognitive processes…

Let’s just hope the plan of attack concocted doesn’t involve going back and biting Jacob.

This made me think of the methods corporations put in place to solicit feedback from employees. Unless companies are sincere and diligent about how they ask for and act on input, they’re simply creating elaborate processes to tell the workforce to “talk to the ear.”

And employees are not as easily appeased as five-year-olds.

In a society used to providing immediate feedback by “liking” things on Facebook or ranting about risotto that was too loose on chowhound.com, the days of putting suggestion boxes next to the water cooler are over. Two effective methods of engaging the workforce are employee surveys and face-to-face communication with executives.

Employee surveys

An annual employee opinion survey is a powerful tool that can provide trend data from year to year. But there are a few principles that must be applied to ensure success:

Anonymity is essential. Employees are naturally skeptical and without assurances feedback is anonymous, their responses may be tempered — or they may simply refuse to participate. While maintaining anonymity, it’s also important to structure the survey in a way that breaks down results by major department to see where pockets of dissatisfaction exist.

Use closed and open-ended questions. Providing an opportunity for employees to write in responses may appear to be an invitation for disgruntled employees to harp on their particular pet peeves, but mining this data can reveal significant nuggets for improvement.

Share the results. There must be a commitment to demonstrate employee feedback has been heard and acted upon. Companies must clearly communicate when changes are the result of feedback. Otherwise, employees simply won’t connect the dots. When communicating changes based on employee feedback, some companies create a graphic icon to accompany announcements about upcoming changes. Harking back to the earlier preschool example, sometimes that icon is an ear.

Face-to-Face Forums
Another method of engaging employees is providing opportunities for direct interaction with company executives. While time intensive and potentially daunting for leaders, these forums are highly valued by employees since it provides a direct line of communication to decision makers. Again, a few simple guidelines can make the most of these sessions:

Spend as much time listening as talking. While it’s important for a leader to use this setting to deliver key messages, it’s equally important to hear from the workforce. This includes building in ample time for employee comments and questions. Recognizing some employees may be reluctant to speak up, augment the question-and-answer period with questions submitted in advance.

Don’t be afraid to say you don’t know. It’s not possible to know the specifics of every issue an employee might raise. If leaders don’t know the answer to a question, they should be willing to say, “I don’t know. I’ll find out and get back to you.” And then do it.

Manage expectations. Inevitably, some employee feedback will not be acted upon. Is a company really going to build air conditioned pavilions for smokers? Not likely. And it’s important to address those kinds of issues head on.

Companies have repeated the mantra that “employees are our most important asset” so often it has become a cliché. Sincere efforts to solicit feedback from the workforce can make those words ring true again. And the improvements to a company’s bottom line will follow.

An Argentinian proverb says it best: He who speaks, sows; he who listens, reaps.

Are You a Fan?

Posted on October 24, 2011 by Terry Young

As I write this, the St. Louis Cardinals and the Texas Rangers are tied at two games apiece in the World Series.

Game Three will long be remembered for the performance of Albert Pujols, who hit three home runs Saturday – making him one of only three people to do that in a single World Series game. Any time you share a record with Babe Ruth, you know you’re doing something right.

As Chief Justice Earl Warren once said, “I always turn to the sports page first, which reports people’s accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man’s failures.”

Growing up 90 miles south of St. Louis, I come from a long line of Cardinals fans (my grandpa Herman, my uncle Rick, my great aunt Mabel). And it’s no wonder. The Redbirds are second only to the Yankees for the number of World Series championships won since the competition began in 1903.

But as any fan knows, it’s not winning seasons that connect you to a team – just ask any of the devoted fans of the Cubs who haven’t won a World Series since 1908. Their fans continually flock to Wrigley to drink Old Style and to cheer on their perennially losing Cubbies.

As a kid, I recall being a little afraid of the loud Cubs fans who descended on Busch Stadium for games against the Cardinals. I learned early how we got the word “fan” from “fanatic.”

Although I haven’t lived in Missouri in almost 30 years, I remain devoted to the Cardinals. So this latest World Series has me pondering what it means to be a fan.

For some, being a fan means painting your face – or your belly – with your team’s logo. For others, it means making a pilgrimage to the sports Mecca of your choice, whether it’s Camden Yards, Augusta National or Wimbledon.

And for a few, it takes the form of being an anti-fan, hence the classic line, “I root for my team and whoever is playing the Yankees.”

Here’s an example of that. My wife is from Kansas City, and at the disappointing end of the 1985 World Series between the Cardinals and the Royals (dubbed the “I-70 Series”), she bought me a t-shirt to commemorate the event. And to gloat.

The t-shirt had a replica of the Cardinals logo, but instead of two cardinals perching on a baseball bat, they were hanging upside down, lifeless, with the inscription “St. Louis Deadbirds.”

Much has been written about the psychology of why normal, well-adjusted people become raving maniacs on the weekend rooting for their teams. There is a catharsis that comes from screaming coaching advice at the television screen – and researchers have found that some fans feel such a connection to their teams they actually experience physiological changes, including hormonal surges, while watching games. A study at the University of Kansas further suggests that these emotional releases actually result in sports fans suffering fewer instances of depression than the rest of the population.

Fewer instances of depression? Not for the 11-year-old boy watching the Kansas City Chiefs playoff game on Christmas Day in 1971. My hero, soccer-style placekicker Jan Stenerud, missed a 31-yard field goal with 31 seconds left in regulation time. A successful kick would have beaten the Dolphins and sent the Chiefs to the Super Bowl for the third time in six seasons. I was one of the 41 million people watching that game, which the Dolphins won in a second overtime. It still holds the record for the longest NFL game ever played — and the Chiefs never trailed until Garo Yepremian’s game-ending field goal.

At the end of the game, physically spent and emotionally distraught, I ran to my bedroom, threw myself onto the bed and cried – underneath a poster of Chiefs’ wide receiver Otis Taylor, number 89.

I heard a similar story from a friend who is an avid Mets fan who has passed along his passion to his young son. He described a crucial plate appearance by Mets slugger Carlos Beltran in Game 7 of the 2006 National League Championship Series against the Cardinals. With two outs, the Mets were trailing 3-1 in the bottom of the ninth with bases loaded.

My friend’s son looked at his dad with wide-eyed assurance and said he knew Beltran was going to hit a home run. After three successive pitches, Beltran struck out.

The devastated young Mets fan marched out into the backyard and cried in the dark. My friend’s wife looked up and said to him, “You know this is your fault, right?”

But being a fan only goes so far.

On a summer afternoon 40 years ago, my baseball buddy David Brockes came over to my house to hit the ball around our front yard. The only baseball I could find was the one I had gotten autographed by St. Louis ace pitcher Steve Carlton, who would later win four Cy Young awards on his way to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

My parents had driven me to a grocery store in a town 30 miles away to get the autograph from the famed left-hander.

I think you may sense where this story is headed.

Well, we hadn’t been playing long before one of us hit the ball into the neighbor’s cow pasture and – despite searching for a long time – we never found it.

My only regret? That our afternoon game was cut short.

On Scorpions and Operating Experience

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Terry Young

Last week, my wife was stung by a scorpion. It was a bark scorpion, a small critter with venom that packs a wallop. It’s the only species of scorpion whose venom can be lethal. Lea’s fine now, but the pain scorpions inflict is inversely proportional to their size.

We’ve only seen two scorpions in our house since we moved to Arizona in 2007, which is cause for some celebration. I know people who have moved into houses on “The Scorpion Trail,” migratory paths that aren’t altered just because someone decides to plop a house in the way. For them, seeing several scorpions a week is common.

It’s a fact of desert life that just about every living thing out here is designed to sting, bite or prick you. From the tiny bark scorpions to cactus to the thorns of sweet acacia and honey mesquite trees — the flora and fauna of the desert are evolutionary examples of “the best offense is a good defense.”

When Lea got stung, she called the National Poison Control Center which, consistent with the previous paragraph, is based in Phoenix. Jason, our scorpion sting answer man, called back every couple of hours to check on Lea and to share advice about what to do next. They have a wealth of operating experience to share on what to do when scorpions attack. (Okay, that was a little melodramatic. The scorpion didn’t really attack; Lea actually just stepped on it. But something about scorpions calls for hyperbole.)

After a traumatic experience, it’s natural to want to learn from the event — but it’s important to learn the right lesson.

As Mark Twain once observed:

A cat who sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again. But he won’t sit on a cold stove, either.

One example of learning the right lesson from our scorpion operating experience is that I have started wearing shoes around the house, especially when it’s dark — because our pointy-tailed arthropod friends are nocturnal.

But like the cat in Mark Twain’s quote, I have been spotting imaginary scorpions everywhere in the mottled-brown pattern of our tile floors ever since Lea got stung. It’s a little unsettling to live in a space you’re convinced is infested with scorpions, so I got out my trusty black light flashlights (one in each hand) to go scorpion hunting. Since scorpions literally glow in the dark, they give you black light flashlights when you close on a house. (I made that last part up.)

I went through every room in the dark with my flashlights feeling a little like Dexter looking for blood splatter. I even shined the lights underneath tables and chairs because — if I haven’t instilled a morbid fear of scorpions yet, add this to the mix — bark scorpions can climb walls and hang upside down.

The celebratory result of my scorpion search? Zero. The only one I saw was the dead scorpion Lea whacked with a shoe after getting stung. And under the black light, it shined like a full moon.

The reason I am such a strong advocate for sharing and learning from operating experience is that my entire career has been devoted to the nuclear industry where the sharing of operating experience is truly unprecedented within corporate America. Electric utilities that guard their intellectual property fiercely in other areas share their nuclear operating experience openly. It has a lot to do with the fact that mistakes at one nuclear plant affect all the others — that we are, in essence, hostages of each other.

This was eloquently stated by Pat Haggerty, who was president and CEO of Texas Instruments when he served on the presidential commission that investigated the Three Mile Island accident in 1979:

There always exists, even though the probability of occurrence is very low, the potential for a catastrophic accident from a nuclear generating plant. Every licensee, from a safety standpoint is the captive of every other licensee, because poor safety procedures at any plant resulting in an accident will have immediate detrimental consequences on the management and operation of every other plant.

Another field where the sharing of operating experience could have a major positive impact is within the medical community. But the fear of litigation is so strong that medical professionals are reluctant to openly share their mistakes and near misses. And that’s why human error is still unacceptably high in our hospitals as discussed in Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science, a disturbingly frank book written by Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

But even when operating experience is shared, it’s difficult to get people to heed the message. Dr. Zack T. Pate, a former boss of mine who is chairman emeritus of the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations and the World Association of Nuclear Operators, had this to say about the difficulty of getting people to truly learn from operating experience:

Do not underestimate the difficulty of using and internalizing operating experience. We all have a strong tendency to read some form of operating experience and say, ‘Gee, this is a good lesson for those folks, but I would never make that dumb mistake….. That is such a powerful, instinctive reaction that it is worth writing this principle to keep in mind the difficulty of getting people to internalize operating experience.

One final learning from our scorpion experience that I hope you internalize? No pesticide can deter them. In fact, scorpions — along with cockroaches — were found to survive nuclear test blasts. So the best way to keep them at bay is to eliminate their food source — crickets.

The Terminix guy arrives today.

Hats Off to Hat Wearers

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Terry Young

On a flight from St. Louis to Phoenix last week, a most remarkable thing happened. A man boarded the plane wearing…a hat. It wasn’t a cowboy hat or the ubiquitous ball cap or a doo rag.

It was a fedora.

It felt like I had been transported to an episode of the new ABC show, Pan Am, about the golden age of air travel in the 1960s.

Back in those days, a hat was simply part of the uniform of business. It added an air of seriousness and it implied competence. But as the 1956 film,The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, revealed, sometimes that uniform was a matter of style over substance, as reflected in this exchange:

Tom Rath (Gregory Peck): I don’t know anything about public relations.

Bill Hawthorne: Who does? You’ve got a clean shirt and you bathe everyday. That’s all there is to it.

That, and a fedora with a crisp brim.

And wearing a hat came with a code of etiquette, as evidenced by the drawings from a 1950s civility manual which provide guidance on how to handle a hat.

I caught a glimpse of this in an episode of Mad Men, an AMC show about the Madison Avenue advertising world in the 1960s. Ad exec Don Draper rides an elevator with two younger colleagues, one wearing a hat, who continue a risqué conversation when a woman gets onto the elevator. Disgusted, Draper levels his gaze at the offender and says, “Take your hat off.” When he doesn’t, in an act of chivalry, Draper roughly removes it for him.

Fedoras, trilbies, derbies, homburgs, bowlers, cloth caps, busbies, gatsbies, top hats, boaters, panamas…

They also seemed to have disappeared at, well, at the drop of a hat.

Although “throwing your hat in the ring” and “passing the hat” remain in our vernacular, what caused this “de-cap-itation?”

The demise of the hat is often attributed to John F. Kennedy was said to have broken with tradition by not wearing a hat at his inauguration. Kennedy actually did wear the traditional black silk top hat during most of the 1961 inaugural proceedings (and there are lots of photos to prove it), but he was hatless in that defining shot as he took the inaugural oath. That’s the image preserved in memory.

It was actually a bareheaded Lyndon Johnson who completely broke tradition at his inauguration in 1965. Although there are plenty of images of LBJ in a cowboy hat throughout his presidency.

If all this discussion has you pondering whether you need to a hat, here’s a useful website that takes the guesswork out of the kind of hat you should wear, based on the shape of your face — although they all look a little like gangsters from the Dick Tracy comic strip.

Still on the fence? Let me leave you listening to this tune from Peter Mayer’s latest CD, Heaven Below. His tribute to the hat-wearing man called, The Hat Song, is an encouragement to bring back the hat.