Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

“The Aggressive Willingness to Share”

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Books I know, I know: This is the fifth installment of our study of Sharing Information with Employees, Alexander Heron's 1942 book, the first ever written on employee communication—and we're still not talking about what kind of information Heron expects us to share with them, or by what means. But I think we're going to find those chapters easier to breeze through, and in a few cases I've seen in a sneak peek, laughably antiquated. I promise, get into all of that in the next installment—but only after we learn Heron's concept of "The Aggressive Willingness to Share." —DM

Heron acknowledges that all management teams are willing to share some information, and many are willing to share lots of information. But their motives for doing so, in most cases, are not sufficiently "aggressive" to affect the kind of "understanding" Heron envisions between management and employees. Most employee information-sharing, he says, is based on one of three inferior types of willingness:

1. The "reluctant" willingness, in which the employer shares information with employees because they'll probably find out about it in the papers anyway or hear about it from union organizers. "All things considered," the reluctant executive communicator reasons, "we should offset these possibilities by giving the information ourselves …." This attitude, however sound, is "negative," Heron says. "It is merely seeking the avoidance of certain undesirable possibilities." Set to the goal of achieving understanding between workers and management, the "reluctant" willingness won't cut the mustard.

2. The "paternalistic" willingness. I won't burden you with any more information than I think you need to to do your job. Even proffered by the most benevolent boss, this policy puts the sharer of information in the position of "carefully selecting for his employees the information which he knows they should have and giving them no other." Needless to say, this philosophy doesn't create a full understanding between employees and management either.

3. The "propagandist" willingness to share information. "With no distortion or falsehood in its technique, it relies on selection and interpretation. Those facts which tend to create favorable reactions are selected to be given to the employees. … In the sense in which favorable facts are selected for this propaganda program, it follows that unfavorable facts are suppressed. Because it aims at a specific and desired employee reaction, such a program must be like a government 'information service,' a combination of the functions of publicity and censorship."

If you're like me, you don't disagree that the above willingnesses leave something to be desired, but you're waiting to see what kind of communication attitude Heron expects from organizations who would foster the understanding he's looking for. He calls it "aggressive willingness," and here's how he describes it:

[T]here is an aggressive willingness to share information with employees which has a foundation both deeper and more practical. It reaches deep into the soil of democracy, being rooted in the recognition that John Jones, wage-earning employee, is a sacred human individual. His best achievement as a worker must be voluntary; it must be reached in co-operation with all the other independent personalities grouped into the enterprise of which he is a part. To gain satisfactory performance merely by bribing him with wages and privileges, or by threatening him vaguely with unemployment, is to repudiate the sacredness of his personality. To share with him the knowledge which should enable him to reason his way to willing co-operation is to treat his personality with the respect he deserves.

The aggressive willingness to share information with employees is practical because, honestly and wisely followed through, it will induce a constructive co-operation which cannot be bought or forced.

As far as employee communication goes, that's pretty much the Gettysburg Address, is it not?

And, perhaps like the Gettysburg Address, it's not something all of us really quite believe. I know many, many employee communication practitioners who say they're "passionate" about their work but who do not sincerely believe in the tenets of "aggressive willingness." In fact, I know some to whom these ideas have not ever occurred.

All the time, I hear employee communicators making their best case to management that they might as well tell employees, because employees will find out anyway and "it's better if they hear it from us first."

I know lots of employee communicators who talk a good game but whose real raison d'être in their organizations that they're resident experts on what you can and can't tell employees.

And did you see a few similarities between Heron's "propagandist" willingness and "strategic communicator's" insistence that every word out of the organization's mouth be lashed to a key business goal, targeted at behavior change and measured for ROI?

All people who communicate with employees ought to read Heron's description of "aggressive willingness" and ask:

Is this a creed I will work for? Do I truly believe this, to the extent that I will put forth all the courage, guile, wit and muscle I can muster in order to prove its truth to everyone in my organization?

Ask every day.

Why employee communication is as important to American democracy as public education

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Books Employee communicators who have questioned the importance of their own work or suffered the slings and arrows of others who do—which is to say all of us—should have the following laminated for our cubicle walls.
        These excerpts come from the third chapter of Sharing Information with Employees, the first book ever written on employee communication. Written in answer to author Alexander Heron's plaintive question, "Why not tell them?" these words amount to an employee communication manifesto whose truth I've long understood but never seen put this strongly.
        In the next chapter in our series, we'll get into what good employee communication looks like according to Heron, and I'll take an increasing role in the conversation. But I'd like you to read and react to this section without any more intrusion from me. If we can get agreement on this, we're working from a strong intellectual foundation.
        Heron begins by acknowledging that there are "honest objections to sharing information with employees." The first is that "in spite of the fact that most executives in American enterprises have risen from the ranks, many of them secretly believe that there is a difference between their own mentalities and those of the men today who are in the ranks. They feel vaguely, and sometimes say definitely, that the rank and file cannot understand the information which management can give them."
        Heron, from here on:

This belief can neither be ignored nor denied. It may be sound as to a great portion of the men and women who work for wages. But most of the executives with the superior minds will not argue that things should be so. They will not assert that this general inability to understand is a good foundation for the structure of our democracy or a healthy condition among people who are trying to govern themselves. They will say it is too bad, but it just happens to be true; that we may not like it but cannot alter it; that some people are just born that way. …

Are some people just born without the ability to understand? Some people? All of us were born that way. We were also born without the ability to walk; but we learned by trying. We were born without the ability to talk, or read, or write; but we learned, by trying as we were given the chance. So did the employees who now work for us. Incidentally, they were born without the ability to do the work for which we now hire them; but they learned that as they were given the opportunity. …

… in addition to those who believe it true but regrettable that employees cannot understand such information as we are discussing, there are others who believe it true but not regrettable. They say that some people are just born that way, and they will go on to imply that this is in accordance with some divine plan. It seems to them inevitable that human society be classified and stratified, in the same manner as a hive of bees: If all bees were workers, there would be no organization under qualified leadership. If all were queens, there would be no honey. If all human beings were endowed  by nature with keen, alert, understanding minds, none of us would be satisfied to work for wages or at manual tasks; we would all want to be bosses.

This attitude has a lot of history behind it. It is the idea of both ancient and modern tyrannies under which conquered enemies became the slaves of the conquerors. It is the idea of the medieval aristocracies with their ruling classes ….

Every social order in history which has been built on the foundation of such an idea has collapsed because its foundation refused to remain stable very long. The supposedly predestined working class has successively won the right to bear arms, to own land, and, finally, to rule its nation by votes. We have long since learned that the proper exercise of the right to rule by vote involves abundant opportunity to know the facts and conditions with which the ruling and the votes must deal. The deliberate effort to share business information with the great majority who work for wages corresponds closely to the deliberate plan to make education, basic and continued education, freely available to the people.

… we have all of us, every adult citizen, been jointly and equally entrusted with the government of our nation, state, and city. That government is increasingly engaged in the protection and regulation of the economic interests of all of us. It is inconceivable that the forty millions of us who work for wages can do a good job, or even a safe job, of governing by votes, without knowing more and more about our economic interests.

The American idea has no place for a class predestined to be wage earners incapable of understanding a world beyond the workbench, no place for a class which is denied the opportunity to reason its conclusions on facts which it helps to create, no place for a class which is happier because ignorant of anything beyond the daily task. And those whose sense of superiority leads them to believe in either the necessity or the desirability of such classes are themselves enemies of the American idea or ignorant of its genius.

A painting of a meaningful workplace

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Books In this latest in my series on Sharing Information with Employees, the first book ever written on the
subject of employee communication, we sit back and behold not a fantastical New Economy future of employee engagement, but homely old vision of how business used to feel to employees—and, in the opinion of author Alexander Heron in 1942 and blogger David Murray in 2009, the way they ought to feel again. —DM

In order to create an "image that will remain with us throughout our troubled study of the misunderstanding in industry today," Heron paints a realistic picture of "a time and place in which the realism of the worker's mind was in contact with the realities of industrial enterprise, in which his innocence of abstract economics did not involve a baffled attitude of misunderstanding."

Gather round:

We might find our picture of the old understanding in a wagon shop, a grist mill, a cotton mill, a pottery or cutlery shop. Let us find it in a furniture shop. Perhaps eight men work there. One of them is the boss. He owns the shop, but he works there, visibly. The other seven receive wages. The work done by the boss is not all done with tools; sometimes he uses a pencil. He draws designs, writes occasional letters, puts down figures about wages, costs, and prices.

The other seven know, quite closely, how much money the boss had saved up from his earnings as a journeyman before he started in business for himself; in other words, how much "capital" he had and how long it took him to save it up.

The shop or factory is on the same lot as the house where the boss lives; he owns it. The other seven know how much his taxes are each year. They helped to build the ten-by-thirty addition to the shop last year, and they know how much that cost. They were all in on the discussion before the new lathe was bought, and they remember the price and the freight. They remember how the boss borrowed some of the money from his wife's sister.

They know that the dining room "suit" on which they are working now is for Jane Winton, [who] used to be Jane Carey, the schoolteacher, before she married Bill Winton, the banker. They know it has to be as good as the furniture she saw in Buffalo, and that if it is good Bill's mother is going to give the boss an order for another lot which will keep them all busy through the winter.

They see the finished job emerging under their skilled hands, day by day. They know how difficult it was to get the seasoned walnut, and what it finally cost, what price is to be paid for the finished job, how much the boss will "make" on it, and how much of that will go to pay off the loan from the sister-in-law.

They know that the boss has gradually built a reputation for honest quality and skilled workmanship and that they are part of that reputation. They know why once in a while they have had to wait a little for their wages—when the taxes had to be paid before the money came in for the new counter and fixtures at the drugstore.

Above all, they know the boss. Their attachment to him is basically not sentimental but practical. He is the salesman who gets the orders which bring work to them. He collects the money which pays their wages. He managers to accumulate the working space and the equipment. They are realistic enough to know that they can get their full and fair share of the income of the business. They laugh at anyone who talks of the conflict between labor and capital, between them and the boss.

They know. Because they know, they understand. And in that full and simple understanding they "put themselves" into every job.

Heron does not hope to break down big organizations and return to the idylic picture he paints. But he insists that "the essential elements" of the dynamic "must be restored to American industry if the free-enterprise system, or even the American level of living, is to survive. … True, this group in modern industry will not be the whole establishment. But within every establishment, such a group relationship, multiplied or repeated many times, will be the channel of the needed knowledge, the area of the needed understanding."

Join us next week, as Heron explains why companies don't communicate. He acknowledges, "There are honest objections to sharing information with employees …."