Page 167 - The Power to Change Anything

156 INFLUENCER

informant. He didn’t want anyone to know he was making this
horrible indictment. People weren’t very productive, but this just
wasn’t something you said aloud. He even swore us to secrecy.
Over the next few years we interviewed hundreds more peo-
ple at the facility and surfaced dozens of other issues, but the first
fellow had it right. He was dead on when he suggested that if you
stated aloud that people weren’t working hard, it would put you
in an awkward position. People would accuse you of being bit-
ter, unfair, and insensitive. People would accuse you of being dis-
respectful of American workers. They might even threaten you.
To make matters worse, the public discourse at this
time was very different. Every voting year, politicians would
actually stand in front of cameras and brag about the American
workforce and its unparalleled work ethic. The people we
worked with would roll their eyes in disgust with each pro-
nouncement, but they wouldn’t openly disagree. Nobody could
actually say such heresies aloud. When we suggested to the lead-
ership team that the influence strategy we had in mind would
directly deal with low productivity, they told us that we had to
couch the problem in different terms: We would teach leaders
“how to hold people accountable.” So we did. Of course, when
leaders held people accountable, they only dealt with safety,
cost, and quality problems because they couldn’t talk about pro-
ductivity. This issue was still totally undiscussable.
The next year when the labor contract came up for renewal,
we begged the HR professionals who were going to sit at the
big table during negotiations to bring up the productivity issue.
They did, repeatedly, but to no avail. Eventually they were told
by the union and company leaders to drop the subject. It was
just too divisive, too volatile. They couldn’t talk about produc-
tivity anymore.
In a place where productivity was the elephant in the liv-
ing room, nobody on the change team could talk about it. So
we didn’t. We worked on dozens of different problems, teach-
ing a variety of skills, and making dozens of changes, but we