If you saw my Executive Communication Report this morning—and if you don’t subscribe to this publication you are crazy, because it is useful and free—you read excerpts of an email to AT&T managers by that company’s Dickens-dubbed CEO John Stankey.
Written in response to results and remarks in a recent employee survey, the Stankey screed was a corporate passive-aggressive version of the famous Glengarry Glen Ross tongue-lashing, to all 140,000 of AT&T leaders and workers. Full of lines like this: “We run a dynamic, customer-facing business, tackling large-scale, challenging initiatives. If the requirements dictated by this dynamic do not align to your personal desires, you have every right to find a career opportunity that is suitable to your aspirations and needs.”
And this: “If a self-directed, virtual, or hybrid work schedule is essential for you to manage your career aspirations and life challenges, you will have a difficult time aligning your priorities with those of the company and the culture we aim to establish.”
And this: “This shift can be characterized as moving away from an orientation on hierarchy and familial cultural norms and towards a more externally focused and competitive market-based culture.”
Pretty much everything but, “Coffee is for closers.”
I don’t work at AT&T. For all I know, it’s peopled with a bunch of whining, entitled mopes who don’t like to work. So I can’t really judge the substance of the Stankey message, or the need for the kind of change it calls for.
But then came this little Stankey slight: “I know change like this is difficult and can be unsettling for some. However, as General Eric Shinseki so eloquently stated, ‘If you dislike change, you’re going to dislike irrelevance even more.'”
That’s the oldest CEO communications canard in the world. I’ve been reading versions of it—”the only constant is change,” “grow or die,” Who Moved My Cheese?—for my whole comms-watching career. In an essay in my book, An Effort to Understand, I wrote what suffices as a retort to the Stankey sentiment, and other CEOs who seem always to think that employees are more cowardly and selfish than they:
At its best, a family or any other social organism is an infinitely complex group contract with a million clauses concerning goodwill and censure, freedom and limits, helpfulness and neediness, love and hostility, indulgence and duty, candor and lies, experimentation and tradition—all delivered by winks and nods, shouts and silences, clothing choices and meal choices, strategies made to look like accidents, and accidents perceived as strategies.
So vast and multi-dimensional are each of these contracts, and so crucial to the functioning of the organism it governs, that anyone who proposes to amend the agreement without appearing to appreciate its sheer magnitude or acknowledging the good faith daily shown by every member of the group in following it—anyone who would try that must be stopped. And questioned and cross-examined. And in lieu of an explanation and a full apology for endangering the group, convicted of breach-of-social contract and punished by immediate removal from any position of power.
It’s not that people don’t like change. It’s that people realize just how truly dangerous change really is, to the fine-tuned functioning of the social organisms that give their lives sustenance, safety and meaning. People demand more than a rational reason to make a change; they demand a leader who they trust to pull off the difficult trick. Because yes: People would rather die slowly together—which, after all, is what we are all doing anyway—than risk blowing catastrophically apart.
So to leaders who wonder why they can’t get people on board for a necessary change: It might not be the change you’re proposing that makes people nervous.
It might be you, who are failing to give them confidence.
From now on we’ll have a name for when leaders fail to inspire their followers to embrace the change they propose, and so accuse them of being afraid of change in general: The Stankey Swindle.
My translation of the memo: “My way or the highway. Tough it out. (Grin.)”
Years ago, three of us at our church who happened to be in professional communications were asked to meet with two of the church elders. We were given a presentation of “the new vision,” which, to make a long story short, was “We want to be like Willow Creek in Chicago.” When they finished the presentation, the three of us looked at one another. Nobody said a word until I couldn’t stand it any more.
“We’re not Willow Creek. We can’t be Willow Creek. But let’s say for the sake argument we thought it might work. What are the elders and pastors — all of them — doing to lead and be the change? What are they doing differently?” The elders looked at one another, and then one of them said, “We haven’t considered that before.”
My response: “If you’re doing what you’ve always done, why should anyone in the congregation change?”
They said they would go back to the Elder Board with that question. We never heard another word about communication or the new vision. If this had been a corporation, our careers would have been over, and the new vision would have been implemented by an outside PR firm.
David, I couldn’t wait to see your perfect response to that AT&T memo. Bravo, my friend.
@Glynn, right on. Perfectly analogous. Business owners are constantly telling employees to “think like an owner.” Ummm, you’re the one trying to sell me something. So how about you think like an employee?
@Jackie, had I known you were waiting, I’d have written it earlier in the morning!
David,
I made the mistake of reading Mr. Stankey’s memo in its entirety. It ends with this clarion call: “Your feedback makes us better, and we have many strong capabilities and attributes to leverage. Our best days are ahead.”
Honestly, who amongst us wouldn’t be thrilled to learn their company will be leveraging its attributes? 70’s-era corporate-speak always makes my heart race! Even better is the promise – vowed by the CEO in writing – that things can only get better. Who needs recruiters when news like that hits the streets?
Great to hear from you, Paul! It’s been a long while … and I might have guessed this red meat was what might draw you out.