Best selling authors cite value of Blake and Mouton's work in highlighting the importance of a culture of candor

August 8, 2011

Candor

Transparency: Creating a Culture of Candor (J-B Warren Bennis Series) (Hardcover)
By Warren Bennis, Daniel Goleman, and James O'Toole
2008: Jossey-Bass/A Wiley Imprint

Synopsis

In Transparency, the author powerhouse trio in the field of leadership look at what conspires against "a culture of candor" in organizations to create disastrous results, and suggest ways that leaders can achieve healthy and honest openness. They explore the lightning-rod concept of "transparency" which has fast become the buzzword not only in business and corporate settings but in government and the social sector as well.

Together Bennis, Goleman, and O'Toole explore why the containment of truth is the dearest held value of far too many organizations and suggest practical ways that organizations, their leaders, their members, and their boards can achieve openness. After years of dedicating themselves to research and theory, at first separately, and now jointly, these three leadership giants reveal the multifaceted importance of candor and show what promotes transparency and what hinders it. They describe how leaders often stymie the flow of information and the structural impediments that keep information from getting where it needs to go. This vital resource is written for any organization, business, government, and nonprofit that must achieve a culture of candor, truth, and transparency.

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Blake and Mouton reference:  In his essay "Speaking Truth to Power," (pages 45-91) James O'Toole illustrates how ethical transparency is predicated on the existence of two parties -a candid speaker of facts and a receptive listener- and how both followers and leaders can benefit from the many historical, literary, and philosophical examples of those who dared to speak the truth.

He cites Blake and Mouton in reference to "followers":

"When social psychologists Robert Blake and Jane Mouton examined data from a 1970s NASA study designed to uncover the human factors involved in airline accidents, they discovered that the habitual ways in which pilots interacted with their crews determined whether or not crewmembers would provide essential information to the pilots in the midst of an air crisis. Intact cockpit crews -pilot, co-pilot, navigator- were placed in flight simulators and tested to see how they would respond within the crucial 30 to 45 seconds between the first sign of a potential accident and the fatal moment when it could no longer be averted. The researchers found that the stereotypical take charge flyboy pilots who acted immediately on their gut instincts were far more likely to make the wrong decisions in trying to avoid disaster than were the more open and inclusive pilots who said to their crews, 'We've got a problem. How do you read it?' before they made up their minds on a course of corrective action.

"This finding probably shouldn't come as a surprise. After all, there is the old saw that 'none of us is as smart as all of us,' and at another level the lesson of the study is simple: leaders are far more likely to make mistakes when they act on too little information than when they wait to learn more.

"But Blake and Mouton went deeper in their analysis, demonstrating that the pilots who made the right choices had habitually engaged in open exchanges with their crews, while crewmembers who had worked regularly with the 'decisive' pilots were unwilling to intervene with their take-charge bosses even when they had information that might well have saved the plane. In effect, the latter crewmembers thought to themselves, 'Who am I to challenge his authority?' Blake and Mouton go on to make the obvious analogy: 'Such attitudes create real problems for management, from top to bottom, whether the manager is the captain of a 747 with 400 passengers on board, the manager of a crew of forest fires, the executive in the boardroom, or the supervisor on the shop floor.'"