FLOW AMONG DEPARTMENTS
[Controlling Assisted Suicide In The Company]

When an assisted suicide is unfolding in the company, do you know? Can you identify its features? And what do you do about it? By assisted suicide we mean employees playing on a fellow employee’s weakness, helping him fail and then standing by as he implodes.
Sometimes assisted suicide is active, in the form of many subtle roadblocks to trip the person. Sometimes it’s passive, standing by when just a little help would have made the difference. This behavior violates a number of our 18 Flow-Of-Work factors. At the broadest level, it is competition turned against the company, rather than focused outward. It’s a domination of personalities within the company’s walls, rather than the desired domination of the marketplace.

The owner of a firm employing over three hundred people was dealing with a worsening situation. One department was adversely affecting the productivity of the other ten. The company was behind schedule on a large job, and although there was no danger of defaulting, this delay might affect new contracts that were being negotiated.

Interview with the Owner

The owner started the company and built it up over the course of three decades. He had an easy and collegial relationship with his staff. He had handpicked each department head and was satisfied with everyone’s performance. Problems began when a manager who had been with him from the early years went into retirement. The owner hired a new person, whose department created a stubborn bottleneck in short order.

The owner was dealing with this remarkably well, considering the situation, and we commented on his poise. He’d faced problems before and hired consultants who had helped. He wasn’t worried. Further, he told us how his outside interests lifted and pleased him. He was very proud of accomplishments in two separate areas of competition, and discussed his successes with us. He balanced gratifying wins against potential disappointments.

Observations in the Company

Staff worked diligently in the departments. Everyone had something to do and activities matched the job descriptions. If there was a slowdown in one department, it wasn’t immediately noticeable. The effect was picked up at the end of the work cycle, as projects stretched weeks beyond schedule.

The department head we were supposed to talk to was in and out. He seemed rushed all the time, and gave us different reasons why he couldn’t set a time to meet. He sure set himself up to be “the problem.” But if we had limited our focus to this man, we would have missed the rich interplay that was giving rise to the bottleneck. It was the larger system that held the answer to what was going on and what it would take to fix things.

No employee in the company fell below a middle range on any of our 18 measures. We did know that the new department head was having serious problems and we were interested in whether the following Flow-Of-Work factors were being observed with him:

• A pattern of cues and reinforcers to help him identify the most successful aspects of his performance and work on them (Factor 18, Before and After)

• A task analysis to break down some of the more difficult aspects of his job responsibilities for easier absorption and learning (Factor 7, Bite-Sized Pieces)

• Giving more frequent and more pointed support in the beginning for a necessary skill not yet strong in the man’s repertoire (Factor 8, Little Steps)

The manager was cutting himself off from his peers, not reaching out for support, and he was avoiding us. He must know the potential consequences of not finding time to work with consultants hired by the owner. We decided to meet early with the owner and give him an interim report. But before we did, we attended a department head meeting.

All the managers were there except the one who was in trouble. The group talked about him and their inability to pick up the pace because of his poor performance. These accomplished and highly skilled men and women seemed very confident, barely taking notice of us and talking freely among themselves.

We had observed these people in their own departments, and in this meeting they repeated the Flow-Of-Work behaviors they demonstrated with their staff:

• Interacting in ways that encouraged F-O-W attitudes and feelings while avoiding those confrontations and challenges that would provoke resistance and stoppage (Factor 6, Emotional Intelligence)

• Using feedback often and in a positive way to keep things flowing (Factor 3, Praise)

• Arousing F-O-W by their presence, suggesting the history of good experiences the staff members had accrued with them (Factor 11, Positive Presence)

Their reaction to the new manager seemed out of character with their day-in, day-out performance. This manager may have problems, but how might we separate what belonged to this individual, and what belonged to the system at large? We developed a theory and planned to check it out. We might be witnessing an assisted suicide.

Report to the Owner

We shared the scores of our behavioral assessment with the owner, and told him we would like to sit in on another two or three department head meetings before we submitted our final report. We told him what we had seen so far, but did not share the resistance of the identified manager just yet, and we did not tell him our theory about assisted suicide.

He was interested in the middle to very high scores throughout the company on our assessment, and how the bottleneck in the targeted department did not stand out in any clear relief. We were interested in that as well. The whole system was slowed. The department heads blamed the new manager. We wanted to find out more. He sent us back into the company.

We did not want to tip our hand. If the managers caught on to our thinking, there was a likelihood that they would try to prove us wrong by making their “weak brother” look even worse. It would suffice to observe the ongoing process in the department head meetings.

When the Observation is the Implementation

The next meeting with the managers took a slightly different course. People critiqued the work of the missing manager for a bit, but then went on to other issues. The owner called us in to ask what we had found. We spoke highly of the ten managers and their value to the company. We specifically described the proficiencies of the individuals that attended the meeting.

News travels fast. At our third meeting the managers found us interesting, engaged us in conversation and talked about the company and their hopes for it. When the meeting convened a consensus was reached to help the missing manager. Everyone had something to contribute. The stalemate was over. They had decided to let him live. We handed in a report about the dissolving of the bottleneck and the company got back on schedule. The young manager had successfully avoided us, and for a few brief moments in the hall, we never saw him again.

Conclusion

“Let us all hang together,” Ben Franklin told fellow colonists on the eve of the Revolutionary War, “because we will most assuredly hang separately.” A company is an entity, and our Flow-Of-Work research has shown us that behaviors of employees at every level of the company affect the behaviors of fellow employees. If F-O-W is low, you get blockage and logjams. If everyone pulls together, you get Flow. There is untold strength in employees tying their fates to one another.
The owner had hired a new person for a high position. It was a good time to remind the other managers how special they all were. This was a given, but sometimes the obvious needs to be said. Frustration was expressed in the assisted suicide of the new guy. We had to tread carefully, because no one was going to admit to this subtle process of letting an employee commit hara kiri (remember those World War II movies?).

When we paid full attention to the successes and skills of the ten managers and dutifully reported our findings to the owner, the scale was tipped in the opposite direction. The ten relented in their assisted suicide attempt, and the company returned to a Flow that got them to meet their production schedules.

If we told the managers what we thought, they might have hotly contested our view. That didn’t bother us; we don’t mind people contesting us. The give-and-take that follows always leads to good things. Our worry was a different one: we might be so right that the new manager would be sacrificed, of course largely by his own hand. We never told the man we helped and we would bet he was so caught up in the welter of company activity he missed the real action. The owner would have gotten it if we explained to him, but such findings are lightning-hot. It’s like leaving a thunderbolt in someone’s hand and walking away. We preferred to use our influence on behalf of Flow in a way that would give the best results with the least potential backlash.

We have identified assisted suicide as one of the elementary flow-blockers in a company. It happens all the time and everywhere. It is so important a phenomenon that it demands its own name and a careful approach. The person about to destroy his standing in the company is in a strategically dangerous position. He has either painted himself into a corner or allowed others to put him there, and in desperation he loses the ability to use all his mental faculties. We know that when we teach companies to relent in this practice, retention increases, needless emotionality drops to tolerable levels and Flow-Of-Work increases.