Dangerous Truths

ou want the truth? I'll tell you what the real problem is. But we need to find a place where it's safe to talk. Hang on, let me close the door. Or maybe I should just call you later, from home."

In many federal offices, speaking the truth about how operations really work is viewed as simply too dangerous to risk. Government employees expect that if they say what's really going on in their agencies, they'll be subject to public humiliation, intimidation, isolation and recriminations on the job. They aren't completely wrong, either. You can have the right to free speech and still be afraid to exercise it. As one senior manager says, with nervous laughter, "You wouldn't dare tell the truth around here." Another is even more blunt: "They may say you have the right to speak your mind, but just do it and you will find yourself in a career death trap."

Many federal employees are angry, frustrated and confused. One senior manager, asked to draw a color-coded graph of his emotional state on an average day, drew a bell curve, the large middle hump thickly colored with solid blazing red indicating frustration running from 7 a.m. to quitting time. Another manager showed a line graph of her typical day-calm green interspersed with wild fluctuations of red spikes. The red? "Oh, those are meetings."

These are not "problem employees." They are some of the government's top performers-people with a burning passion for excellence, who throw their hearts and souls into their jobs. They are beginning to feel powerless-and worse, they are beginning to act that way.

At the heart of this frustration is the conviction that if they were to speak the truth as they see it, their careers would be over. Why? What sort of truths would they tell?

Don't Cover Up

Demanding only positive thoughts and attitudes from employees does not remove the negative. It simply makes the negative invisible and harder to access.

Truth, unpleasant as it might be, is best dealt with openly, honestly and quickly. Ignoring it, dragging it out or pretending it doesn't exist not only does not solve the problem, it spreads it like a virus.

What are the dangerous truths that are sabotaging efforts to improve government operations? Most involve a person or group of people claiming that some other person or group is blocking progress. Middle managers blame top managers, saying they are unwilling to release control of fiefdoms that make them feel important and give them power over others. Top managers, in turn, say middle managers are resistant to change, not very smart or simply lazy.

Employees tend to label any efforts at improvement as the new "flavor of the month" and assume that efforts to improve productivity will simply add more work to people who are already overworked. Meanwhile, they argue, duplicative operations are covered up with labels like "dissimilar redundancies" to keep them from being eliminated.

Managers, employees, legislators and the public-all have their dangerous truths. And all of these groups are both exaggerating the problems and making very good points at the same time. If people aren't given a safe place to express opinions they perceive to be dangerous, those opinions will become self-fulfilling prophecies. But when frustrations are aired in a truly open and honest forum, the cynicism that usually accompanies them is transformed into a heightened sense of shared responsibility.

Airing dangerous truths under an "I'll listen to yours if you listen to mine" arrangement demands that both the speaker and the listener make tough decisions and mutual sacrifices in the name of fundamental change. Denying people a voice, on the other hand, lets them remain victims, powerless to improve their lot-wasting time, energy and money in a senseless tug of war.

So how can leaders of agencies, offices and programs provide a safe place for dangerous truths? It takes more than just putting people together in the same room and letting them vent their feelings.

One facilitator's trick to avoid this situation is to ask people to draw pictures describing how they view their workplaces. This has two key advantages. First, the people who would dominate discussions of such topics if they were held out in the open are submerged in a more democratic process. Second, allowing people to use metaphors in the drawings enables them to express complex perceptions that are lost in linear language.

The pictures and descriptions listed in the left hand column of this page were drawn from recent experiences involving groups of federal executives, managers and employees. They show how providing a forum for all sides to tell the truth, however dangerous, can lead to real changes in the way people perceive their jobs and their agencies.

Annette Simmons of Group Process Consulting in Greensboro, N.C., is author of A Safe Place for Dangerous Truth: Using Dialogue to Overcome Fear and Distrust (AMACOM, 1999). She can be reached at AnnetteGPC@aol.com.