A meeting of a top committee of General Motors was about to conclude, when President of GM Alfred P. Sloan Jr. said, “Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here.” Everyone around the table nodded assent.
Then Sloan continued, “I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting, to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain understanding of what the decision is all about.Story from Peter Drucker’s 1973 book
Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices
Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. became President of GM in 1923, and Chairman of the Board in 1937. He was renowned for his leadership and innovative approach to management. In his view, it was essential to explore various perspectives and challenge assumptions before settling on a course of action.
His goal was to prevent conformity and ‘groupthink’ from resulting in poor decisions. He saw two significant benefits to dissent: It shielded decision-makers from becoming trapped by the organization’s perspectives, and it provided alternative options to a decision. Both led to better-informed choices.
Clearly, Sloan did not view dissent as an obstacle. Rather, he facilitated open discussions and encouraged individuals to voice their concerns and different viewpoints. In doing so, he created a culture where dissent was not seen as disruptive but as a valuable tool for improvement.
In part because of this, GM became one of the largest and most successful automakers until his retirement in 1956.
There is evidence that the fostering of dissent did not outlive Sloan’s leadership. In 1972, James O’Toole, Professor of Management at the University of Southern California, was granted access to the senior levels of leadership at GM. O’Toole identified ten Operating Assumptions that drove decisions for senior leaders…a list that today reads like a Letterman Top Ten.
A few highlights:
- Cars are primarily status symbols. Styling is therefore more important than quality to buyers who are, after all, going to trade up every year.
- The U.S. car market is isolated from that of the rest of the world. Foreign competitors will never gain more than 15% of the domestic market.
- Energy will always be cheap and abundant.
These assumptions — strongly held by leadership — are striking examples of conformity and ‘groupthink’…exactly what Sloan was trying to prevent. An example how this was reinforced is yet another of their assumptions:
- Managers should be developed from inside.
It didn’t take long for the steadfast belief that these assumptions were correct to be shattered. In 1972 GM was the biggest company on the planet, with revenue of $22.8 billion (nearly $170 billion in today’s dollars). Just two years later, GM’s earnings were down 60%.
What causes leaders to view dissent negatively? Perhaps it’s a belief that conformity equals cohesiveness, that dissent equals disharmony, and dissenters are obstructionists and not ‘team players’. Or maybe it’s a belief that as leaders they are responsible for coming up with the best ideas, and it’s everyone else’s job to make them work.
Or maybe it’s fear.
Psychotherapist Fritz Kunkel identified four Fatal Fears that humans experience: Being Wrong, Failure, Rejection, and Emotional Discomfort. He termed them “Fatal” because when we are experiencing them, we often act as if are protecting ourselves from emotional death.
Leaders (being human) are not immune from these Fears. They have shareholders and stakeholders who are depending on them to be right. Therefore, they may feel enormous pressure to never be wrong or to fail. They may view any dissent or alternative ideas as indications that they are wrong, they are failures, or they are being rejected. Therefore, contradiction must be resisted at all costs.
Leaders in the grip of these fears may evaluate others’ ideas based not on their value, but rather their risk to the leader’s own emotional comfort.
The goal of leaders must surely be to find the best ideas possible to make the best decisions possible. To that end, it’s important to recognize that being wrong is not failure. In fact, it is a step toward better understanding.
And since we all make mistakes (several per day in my case) we each are faced with a choice: Be terrorized by the fear of making a mistake or make mistakes our allies in the hunt for better decision-making.
Neil deGrasse Tyson identified one of the great challenges in this world is knowing enough about a subject to think you’re right, but not enough about the subject to know you’re wrong.
Like Sloan, the courageous leader seeks to avoid ‘groupthink’ by encouraging and facilitating dissent to pressure-test all ideas.
In our book Conversations for Clarity: Critical Questions Leaders Must Ask Themselves, my co-authors and I perhaps left one out: Does your organization have too much agreement and not enough dissent?
“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” — Thomas Paine
Ronn Lehmann advises organizations and leaders on the human factors that determine their culture. Lehmann developed the Cultural Audit Process, which is designed to provide an outside perspective of an organization’s culture: what’s important, what’s rewarded and punished, what the rules are, and how people “show up.”
Success Authorities’ book, “Conversations for Clarity: Critical Questions Leaders Must Ask Themselves” is available now at Amazon!
