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Researchers have established that trust is critical to organizational effectiveness. Being trustworthy yourself, however, does not guarantee that you are capable of building trust in an organization. That takes old-fashioned managerial virtues like consistency, clear communication, and a willingness to tackle awkward questions. It also requires a good defense: You must protect trust from its enemies. Any act of bad management erodes trust, so the list of potential enemies is endless. Among the most common enemies of trust, though, are inconsistent messages from top management, inconsistent standards, a willingness to tolerate incompetence or bad behavior, dishonest feedback, a failure to trust others to do good work, a tendency to ignore painful or politically charged situations, consistent corporate underperformance, and rumors. Fending off these enemies must be at the top of every chief executive’s agenda. But even with constant vigilance, an organization and its leaders will sometimes lose people’s trust. During a crisis, managers should enlist the help of an objective third party—chances are you won’t be thinking clearly—and be available physically and emotionally. If you “go dark” in the face of a crisis, employees will worry about the company’s survival, about their own capacity to cope, and about your abilities as a leader. And if trust has broken down so badly that your only choice is to start over, you can do so by figuring out exactly how the breach of trust happened, ascertaining the depth and breadth of the loss, owning up to the loss instead of downplaying it, and identifying as precisely as possible the specific changes you must make to rebuild trust. INSET: Curmudgeon's Corner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a case study on remote working arrangements (telecommuting) using a fictional company named Vallia Energy, and it mentions recommendations regarding return-to-office policies, a distributed-first remote work model, and employer-employee communication. Labor productivity and employee discontent are addressed, as well as flexible work arrangement and the ability of executives to rethink their business plans.

In more than 30 essays for Harvard Business Review, Peter Drucker (1909-2005) urged readers to take on the hard work of thinking--always combined, he insisted, with decisive action. He closely analyzed the phenomenon of knowledge work--the growing call for employees who use their minds rather than their hands--and explained how it challenged the conventional wisdom about the way organizations should be run. He was intrigued by employees who knew more about certain subjects than their bosses or colleagues but who still had to cooperate with others in a large organization. As the business world matured in the second half of the twentieth century, executives came to think that they knew how to run companies--and Drucker took it upon himself to poke holes in their assumptions, lest organizations become stale. But he did so sympathetically, operating from the premise that his readers were intelligent, hardworking people of goodwill. Well suited to HBR's format of practical, idea based essays for executives, his clear-eyed, humanistic writing enriched the magazine time and again. This article is a compilation of the savviest management advice Drucker offered HBR readers over the years--in short, his greatest hits. It revisits the following insightful, influential contributions: "The Theory of the Business" (September-October 1994) "Managing for Business Effectiveness" (May-June 1963) "What Business Can Learn from Nonprofits" (July-August 1989) "The New Society of Organizations" (September-October 1992) "The Information Executives Truly Need " (January-February 1995) "Managing Oneself" (March-April 1999, republished January 2005) "They're Not Employees, They're People" (February 2002) "What Makes an Effective Executive" (June 2004). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Too many organizations descend into underperformance because they can't confront the painful gap between their strategy and the reality of their capabilities, their behaviors, and their markets. That's because senior managers don't know how to engage in truthful conversations about the problems that threaten the business--and because lower-level managers are afraid to speak up. These factors lie behind many failures to implement strategy. Indeed, the dynamics in almost any organization are such that it's extremely difficult for senior people to hear the unfiltered truth from managers lower down. Beer and Eisenstat present the methodology they've developed for getting the truth about an organization's problems (and the truth is always embedded within the organization) onto the table in a way that allows senior management to do something useful with it. By assembling a task force of the most effective managers to collect data about strategic and organizational problems, the senior team sends a clear message that it is serious about uncovering the truth. Task force members present their findings to the senior team in the form of a discussion. This conversation needs to move back and forth between advocacy and inquiry; it has to be about the issues that matter most; it has to be collective and public; it has to allow employees to be honest without risking their jobs; and it has to be structured. This direct feedback from a handful of their best people moves senior teams to make changes they otherwise might not have. Senior teams that have engaged in this process have made dramatic changes in how their businesses are organized and managed--and in their bottom-line results. Success that begins with honest conversations begets future conversations that further improve performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many times, often with the best of intentions, people at work decide it's more productive to remain silent about their differences than to air them. There's no time, they think, or no point in going against what the boss says. But as new research by the authors shows, silencing doesn't smooth things over or make people more productive. It merely pushes differences beneath the surface and can set in motion powerfully destructive forces. When people stay silent about important disagreements, they can begin to fill with anxiety, anger, and resentment. As long as the conflict is unresolved, their repressed feelings remain potent, making them increasingly distrustful, self protective, and all the more fearful that if they speak up they will be embarrassed or rejected. Their sense of insecurity grows, leading to further acts of silence, more defensiveness, and more distrust, thereby setting into motion a destructive "spiral of silence." Sooner or later, they mentally opt out--sometimes merely doing what they're told but contributing nothing of their own, sometimes spreading discontent and frustration throughout the workplace that can lead them, and others, to leave without thinking it through. These vicious spirals of silence can be replaced with virtuous spirals of communication, but that requires individuals to find the courage to act differently and executives to create the conditions in which people will value the expression of differences. All too often, behind failed products, broken processes, and mistaken career decisions are people who chose to hold their tongues. Breaking the silence can bring an outpouring of fresh ideas from all levels of an organization--ideas that might just raise the organization's performance to a whole new level. INSETS: When to Zip It;Speed Trap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cardiac surgery is one of medicine's modem miracles. In an operating room no larger than many household kitchens, a patient is rendered functionally dead while a surgical team repairs or replaces damaged arteries or valves. Each operation requires incredible teamwork--a single error can have disastrous consequences. In other words, surgical teams are not all that different from the cross-functional teams that have become crucial to business success. The challenge of team management these days is not simply to execute existing processes efficiently. It's to implement new processes--as quickly as possible. But adopting new technologies or new business processes is highly disruptive, regardless of industry. The authors studied how surgical teams at 16 major medical centers implemented a difficult new procedure for performing cardiac surgery. The setting was ideal for rigorously focusing on how teams learn and why stime learn faster than others. The authors found that the most successful teams had leaders who actively managed the groups' learning efforts. Teams that most successfully implemented the new technology shared three essential characteristics. They were designed for teaming; their leaders framed the challenge so that team members were highly motivated to learn; and an environment of psychological safety fostered communication and innovation. The finding that teams learn more quickly if they are explicitly managed for learning poses a challenge in many areas of business. Team leaders in business tend to be chosen more for their technical expertise than for their management skills. Team leaders need to become adept at creating learning environments, and senior managers need to look beyond technical competence and identity leaders who can motivate and manage teams of disparate specialists. INSETS: A New Way to Mend a Broken Heart;A Tale of Two Hospitals;Becoming a Learning Leader. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stressful conversations are unavoidable in life, in business, they can run the gamut from firing a subordinate to, curiously enough, receiving praise. But whatever the context, stressful conversations carry a heavy emotional load. Indeed, stressful conversations cause such anxiety that most people simply avoid them. Yet it can be extremely costly to dodge issues, appease difficult people, and smooth over antagonisms; avoidance usually only worsens a problem or a relationship. Using vivid examples of the three basic stressful conversations that people bump up against most often in the workplace, the author explains how managers can improve those interactions unilaterally. To begin with, they should approach the situations with greater self-awareness. Awareness building is not about endless self-analysis; much of it simply involves making tacit knowledge about oneself more explicit. It is important for those who are vulnerable to hostility, for example, to know how they react to it. Do they clam up or do they retaliate? Knowing how you react in a stressful situation will teach you a lot about your trouble areas and can help you master stressful situations. The author also recommends rehearsing difficult conversations in advance to fine tune your phrasing and tone. And the best way to keep from being thrown off balance by difficult conversations that crop up unexpectedly is to develop a few hip-pocket phrases that you can pull out on the spot. We all know from past experience what kinds of conversations and people we handle badly. The trick is to have prepared conversational tactics to address those situations. INSETS: The Gap Between Communication and Intent;The DNA of Conversation Management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a hypothetical case study, in which experts offer advice on how to revive morale at a successful but troubled company that has laid off employees. Bob Peixotto of L.L. Bean suggests that the company's chief executive officer should stabilize key people, allow people to help him, and build trust by communicating with employees. Jim Emshoff of IndeCap Enterprises thinks the CEO should reward employees with stock options, rebuild his senior management team, and create a communication program for all employees. Consultant Richard Manning thinks the CEO needs to be honest and forthright with employees. Gun Denhart of Hanna Andersson Corporation believes the CEO should rebuild employees' trust in him and the company. Management psychologist Saul Gellerman believes the company's board of directors are more at fault than the CEO.

Planning a major change in your organization? If so, chances are you have arranged a huge rally, rousing speeches, videos, and special editions of the company paper. Stop. This sort of communication is not working. If you want people to change the way they do their jobs, you must change the way you communicate with them. Drawing on their own research and the research of other communication experts from the past two decades, the authors argue that senior managers--and most communication consultants--have refused to hear what frontline workers have been trying to tell them: When you need to communicate a major change, stop communicating values, communicate face-to-face, and spend most of your time, money, and effort on frontline supervisors. Frontline employees don't want to find out about a change by watching a video. Nor do they want to read about it in a company publication, which they know is untrustworthy and usually incomprehensible. Large meetings won't do the trick, either. Change may be acceptable to employees, but empty slogans won't be. Despite research showing that frontline employees prefer to receive information from their supervisor--the person to whom they are closest--companies continue to depend on charismatic executives to inspire the troops. Why doesn't this work? Because frontline supervisors are the real opinion leaders in any company. Senior managers must discuss a change face-to-face with supervisors, who will pass information along to their subordinates. Communication between frontline supervisors and employees counts the most toward changed behavior where it matters the most: at the front line. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most managerial work happens through talk--discussions, meetings, presentations, negotiations. And it is through talk that managers evaluate others and are themselves judged. Using research carried out in a variety of workplace settings, linguist Deborah Tannen demonstrates how conversational style--that is, how we communicate--often overrides what we say, affecting who gets heard, who gets credit, and what gets done. Tannen's linguistic perspective provides managers with insight into why there is so much poor communication. We all think the way we talk is "natural," but in fact language is learned social behavior, and therefore what is natural depends on where and how you were raised. Gender plays an important role. Boys and girls learn different linguistic norms through play with other children of the same sex. The result is that women and men tend to have different speaking styles, much like people who grew up in different cultures. Tannen traces the ways in which women's styles can undermine them in the workplace, making them seem less competent, confident, and self-assured than they are. She analyzes the underlying social dynamic created through talk in common workplace interactions--for example, when ideas are exchanged in meetings, when people take credit or give feedback, or when managers try to establish their authority. She argues that a better understanding of linguistic style will make managers better listeners and more effective communicators, allowing them to develop more flexible approaches to a full range of managerial activities--such as how they run or participate in meetings, how they mentor or advance the careers of others, and how they evaluate performance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

HBR regularly reprints a "classic" article that is at least 15 years old and has demonstrated enduring value. This article, first published in the July-August 1952 HBR, is also one of the top-selling reprints of all time. In part one, psychotherapist Carl R. Rogers looks at what he believes is the main barrier to communication: the tendency to evaluate-to approve or disapprove of-what another person is saying. This natural urge can trip up communication between two people or two countries. The gateway to communication, then, is to check this evaluative tendency-to listen with understanding. This means empathizing with what another person is feeling and not just saying; it means looking at an issue from his or her point of view. What's more, listening requires courage because it means running the risk of being influenced or changed by someone else. In part two, industrial psychologist F.J. Roethlisberger comes to similar conclusions in his sketches of two bosses, Smith and Jones, and their attempts to talk with an employee, Bill. For Roethlisberger, communication breakdowns are a result of misleading assumptions: that conversations are essentially logical (and not emotional); that words mean something in themselves (apart from the person speaking); and that the purpose of a conversation is to get the other person to see things from your point of view. Smith holds these assumptions and thus chooses to explain to Bill, who becomes defensive and noncommunicative. Jones, however, chooses to listen to Bill, who feels free to talk openly. In a retrospective commentary, Harvard Business School professor John Gabarro looks at how these ideas have endured over the years-and why listening is still a challenge for business professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Richard Johnson, newly appointed president of Century Airlines, knew the company's survival depended on customer service, which in turn depended on motivated employees. So he created the Century Spirit program to build team spirit by encouraging employee participation, individual initiative, and open communication. Among the program's early successes was a newspaper started by a group of flight attendants. The Plane Truth published information about benefits and work conditions as well as feature stories and humorous articles. It quickly became popular not only with flight attendants but also with pilots, machinists, and baggage handlers. As time went on, though, the Plane Truth began to run articles critical of the company. When management cut back workers' hours, the newspaper questioned what sacrifices the executives were making. When technical services released figures showing long turnaround times, the paper questioned the machinists' work ethic. Worried that customers might see the newspaper, Richard Johnson wanted to cancel it. The president of the flight attendants union also wanted to see it go because it was stirring up trouble with the machinists. Joan Raffin, Century's human resources director, was asked to stop the publication. But she hesitated. She knew that employee morale was on the brink, but she didn't know whether the newspaper was venting workers' frustrations and reinforcing team spirit or stirring up old animosities and bringing the whole company down. Was it creating more tension than unity or vice versa? Experts on organizational change, motivation, and management analyze the situation and make recommendations for what Joan Raffin should do. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

HBR regularly reprints "classic" articles that are at least 15 years old and that have demonstrated enduring value. In this issue, we present a thoughtful analysis of what the manager really does. Originally printed in the July-August 1975 issue, Henry Mintzberg's study continues to speak to readers' needs. Requests for reprints for the last two years alone total more than 22,000. Henry Mintzberg asks, "What do managers do?" After conducting his own study of five CEOs and analyzing other studies of managers and how they work, he concludes that managerial work involves interpersonal roles, informational roles, and decisional roles. These roles require a number of skills: developing peer relationships, carrying out negotiations, motivating subordinates, resolving conflicts, establishing information networks and disseminating information, making decisions with little or ambiguous information, and allocating resources. The author uses his own and other research to present a series of documented facts that debunk myths about managers and how they work. Finally, he argues that a good manager is an introspective manager and offers a series of questions designed to help managers analyze themselves and their jobs. Mintzberg also contributes a commentary outlining his perspective 15 years later. INSETS: Research on managerial work; Retrospective commentary, by H...;Retrospective Commentary;Self-Study Questions for Managers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One thing that a seasoned manager might not know anything about is what he or she can do, legally, when faced with a decertification campaign on the part of the company's employees. In a survey of managers who had been faced with at least one decertification effort, the author of this article discovered that many managers assume that there is nothing they can do, and most do not take an active part in decertification elections. There are things managers can do, however, among the most successful being holding meetings with employees and using legal assistance. The author discusses tactics that unions use as well and ends his article on a cautionary note. Rather than encouraging managers to embark on the campaign trail, he warns them that the cost of eliminating the union may be greater than anticipated at the outset and should be carefully analyzed before starting a campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article refers to the lack of effective communication in industrial relations and discusses strikes in the United States. Factors contributing to labor disputes are low wages that lead to dissatisfaction in the workplace, inadequate working conditions that affect employee morale and efficiency, and tension between labor unions and management due to poor communication. The resulting hostility prevents cooperation between workers and management. Topics include a strike involving Tool and Die Makers Lodge 1176 of the International Association of Machinists, the political conservatism of American workers, and the outlook for cooperation between labor and management.

The article details the process of handling shop grievances and managing relations with labor unions in the United States. Employee complaints and the grievance process are viewed as indicators of shop behavior in general and emotional health among workers or with management. Case examples are: The inflated grievance, which focuses on a dispute over a railway service's job rating, becomes an 11 month impasse because the complaint was supposed to be submitted in writing; and The disguised dissatisfaction grievance is the steward's demand at a textile company for higher rates after an alleged work-load increase results from automation. Topics include investigation of "real" and "imaginary" complaints, emotional resistance, and legalistic aspects of the grievance process.

The article discusses the results of a study on business communication, conducted by the American Management Association (AMA) in the U.S. The study found out the need for the management to adopt ideas coming from social science laboratories. It presents an analysis of the cartoon strip on executive communication. It mentions the relevance for employers to have skills at memorandum-writing and effective presentation.

In productivity bargaining, management and labor write an agreement that establishes a set of quid pro quos whereby (a) labor agrees to scrap old work habits for new and more effective ones desired by management, and (b) management returns some of the gains of modernization and increased efficiency to labor in the form of new and better work incentives. This approach, which is better known in Europe than in the United States, goes far beyond the traditional bounds of collective bargaining. The older bargaining process has ordinarily carried a connotation of reluctant compromise between labor's requirements and management's prerogatives. In productivity bargaining, on the other hand, labor and management work together, not only to create the agreement itself, but to create an atmosphere of ongoing cooperation in which the difficult changes called for by the agreement can be carried out. Here the author draws on his extensive experience with productivity bargaining to examine the mechanics of the approach and to argue its merits as a physic for our continuing economic ills. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The following case, while hypothetical, reflects the kinds of real problems faced by the growing number of companies, especially in advanced-technology industries, that have experimented with program management. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the effectiveness of training management to improve their human relations skills. Managers who develop self-awareness and sensitivity to others can often lead their team better by recognizing potential problems and tailoring their business communication to individual employees. The varying factors that affect a person's interpretation of a situation are analyzed, as well as the tendency to pass judgment by many people, which must be avoided if one wishes to become a successful leader.

The article focuses on the management responsibilities of the industrial relations director. The industrial relations executives, who are planners, policy makers, and advisers in their units, need the support of top management because they have little authority over those who actually execute one of their plans. Problems can arise when top management views industrial relations as a job creation strategy and are biased in their appraisals. Industrial relations directors have to prove the value of their work despite the abstract nature of human relations and an absence of tangible measures. Examples of corporate relations include Northwood Corporation and Vedex Company.

The article mentions the problem of employee turnover and human relations training courses in the United States. Some losses in the work force can be explained by the free economy that expands and relocates, young workers who return to school, and married women who resign their jobs due to family responsibilities. The relative cost of labor turnover can be reduced by improved employment and selection procedures, adequate job training and orientation, better wages and working conditions, and the development of human relations training for supervisors. Topics include employee surveys, two improvements that should be made in human-relations training programs, and sociocultural reasons for labor mobility.

The article reports on two series of management conferences which used a case-method approach in their executive training programs. The objectives of Cargill Incorporated and the National Headquarters of the American Red Cross were to improve administrative coordination, communication, and human relations. Groups at the training sessions expressed their opinions and offered ideas based on a casebook of problems. Advice for establishing a program of case discussion includes reasons for selecting an outside conference leader for the first series. Topics are the enthusiasm generated at conferences and experiments at Standard Oil Development Company, the Navy Reserve Officers Training Program, and J.D. Woods and Gordon Ltd.