Some Bosses Live in Fool's Paradise: The Mum Effect

As I wrote earlier in the week, my post over at HBR on 12 Things That Good Bosses Believe generated a lot of interest and 75 comments.  I am now going to dig into each of the 12 points in detail over there.  The first one is "I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to work for me.  Or as Julia Kirby retitled it, Some Bosses Live in Fool's Paradise.  I talk about a host of psychological and structural factors that lead to such delusion, including the "Mum Effect"

Bosses are insulated from reality. As Jeff Pfeffer and I reported in Hard Facts, extensive research proves that people routinely "shoot the messenger." Bearers of bad news, even when they aren't responsible for it in any sense, tend to be blamed and to have negative feelings directed toward them. The result is the "Mum Effect": subordinates with good survival instincts soften bad news to make it sound better, or avoid passing it along to their bosses at all. Therefore, in a steep hierarchy it is a happier and happier story that reaches the top ranks. Our most disturbing example came courtesy of physics Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman after his investigation of the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. He said he'd asked a group of engineers to estimate the probability that the shuttle's main engine would fail, and their estimates ranged from 1-in-200 to 1-in-300. But when he asked the head of NASA to make the failure-rate estimate, the answer he got was 1-in-100,000. Feynman pointed to this as an illustration of managerial isolation from reality, a problem he believed to be rampant throughout NASA. 

I should add, however, that not all followers keep bad news away from their bosses to the same degree.  I wonder, what can a boss do to encourage people to deliver bad news?  Yes, not shooting the messenger is a start. But is seems to me that their must be a lot more. 

P.S. Also, I got into argument over at HBR with commentor who took me to task for using the terms superior and subordinate.  He suggested team member because I was emphasizing power differences so much.  My response was that I am not talking about the world as we might like it to be, I am talking about the world as it is, and every organization has a system of rank and hierarchy, and the resulting power differences have hue effects on what people think, feel, and do.  Perhaps I was too tough, or perhaps I am a cynic, but while I do believe that leaders that de-emphasize spower differences are more effective than leaders who emphasize and expand them at every turn, I also believe that power differences are a fact of organizational life, and denying them sets people up for failure.

Comments

[Pat]

1) Start by thanking people who point out when you (the boss) makes a mistake.

2) Next admit that you ( the boss) are human and make mistakes.

3) Lastly, tell people pointing out your mistakes that you are paying them to find solutions - not to tell you what you already know ( that you make mistakes ).

[Wally Bock]

I think this is a fairly straightforward situation. If you kill one messenger, just one, because of the message they bring, other potential messengers will take note. Self-preservation being what it is, future messengers will review the message prior to delivery to make sure all "killer" phrases are left out.

Then, it's like Churchill said of appeasers. They all feed the crocodile, hoping it will eat them last.

[TheLeaderLab]

I agree with Dan. It seems like a lot of this stems from the defensive nature of leaders. I think the competitive nature of moving up in organizations causes a lot of this. Leaders almost have to fight to attain power, as such they're defensive and don't want to lose power. It's be interesting to study the difference in defensiveness and mum effect in hierarchy and non-hierarchy (Gore & Associates) type organizations.

[Daniel Christadoss]

Many years ago I worked on a massive fertilizer project in India. Most of us worked day and night to keep the project to schedule. However in projects of this size there would be inevitable delays, problems and irritants. The weekly progress meetings were held in a conference hall with a huge window facing the project. The meetings were attended by representatives of the owners, construction managers and the contractors. We were delayed in the erection of fertilizer bunkers because the purchasing agent of my company shipped only the bolts and not the nuts to secure the bunkers. The construction manager suggested that we hang the bunker walls on one side to give a completed look from the conference hall. The top boss was told that bunkers were in an advanced stage of completion and almost on schedule. Every one was happy and we had another week to complete.
The project was ultimately completed on time and was one of the more successful projects in that area in the late 70's.
I have seen both sides. Excellent projects killed by bad reporting.
Project disasters because of bosses being completely ignorant of massive problems due to wrong reporting. That is why projects work not because of the boss but because of the team he can pick and motivate.

[Randy Bosch]

Bob, Excellent points! Thank you.
"...not all followers keep bad news away from their bosses to the same degree" infers a broad range of responses to a pandemic. One that is particularly damaging is followers keeping bad news away from their bosses in order to undermine, subvert, destroy them or their goals - even when the goals are superbly good!

[working girl]

I think it largely has to do with the boss themselves and the overall company culture: http://ls-workgirl.blogspot.com/2010/06/watch-eyebrows.html. Of course, some people tend to be more determined to tell the truth as they see it than others, but with an unreceptive corporate climate they tend not to last long.

[Saurabh Gahrotra]

Hi Bob, Loved your post up on HBR and looking forward to reading more on this here.

Dan- I could not agree more with you on this. A supportive and non threatning organizational culture would go a long way in helping an organization get rid of this mum effect and defensiveness. However, every individual is different and the bars of pushing the envelope and encouraging defensiveness may greatly vary. So may be some serious thought needs to go into identifying the correct triggers.

[Dan]

Over the years since co-writing Driving Fear Out of the Workplace (last ed., 1998), I've stayed very interested in what it is that causes the mum effect. Increasingly, I've come back to the notion, started by Chris Argyris, that defensiveness creates a great deal of negative organizational culture. Is there a way for leaders to become less defensive? If so, then we can find out a lot more about the "hidden workplace" of feelings and perceptions that are really out there, and we can begin to ask ourselves essential questions about the personal behaviors that we exhibit, consciously or inadvertently, to keep the mum effect in place. This is, I believe, one of those things where there's a culture in place that we trigger, and the culture in turn causes us keep triggering it. The only way to break out is to really understand how the cultural norms around silence work, know enough about ourselves to interrupt the process, and then, in addition talk about these dynamics openly, inviting awareness and collaboration in creating a different kind of workplace relationship. This is a vulnerable and human process, for sure, one where we stumble, and in the stumbling learn something about culture and, more importantly, something about ourselves.