The two most important things I can do as a consultant are to listen and to ask questions. As I do in other facets of my life, I try to take a Zen approach to my consulting. What that means is that I acknowledge that the clients with whom I work know their business far better than I ever will and my primary purpose is helping them to surface solutions that they in most cases already know but for a variety of reasons have either not accepted or have buried beneath layers of bureaucracy, political power struggles or corporate noise – the naysayers, and the “it’s always been done this way” mantra that is so pervasive in corporate America today.
Never was this made more apparent than during the conversations that I had this Thanksgiving weekend in the heartland of the automotive crisis with family and friends who have worked for GM directly (some for more than thirty years), third party suppliers and even a local steel mill where the hinges are made for their car and truck doors.
I love going back there because it provides a healthy dose of reality and diversity from the Los Angeles and Manhattan experience that has become my daily life. It’s always eye opening when you speak to intelligent people who live and breathe what I only read about or see through the lens of the national media. Now, I did grow up in a union friendly town, but the Screen Actors Guild, the DGA and the WGA never really seemed like real unions to me, you know the kinds with supposed mafia ties and bent nosed organizers. I mean seriously, my classmate Melissa Gilbert was the president of SAG, and I hardly can see little Laura Ingalls in the same light as Jimmy Hoffa. In truth I actually was a union member myself at one point when I worked at a local grocery store during college. Again, I didn’t have a full appreciation for the impact of that union; all I remember is that they called taxes dues and the triple time I got for working on Christmas and New Years never seemed to offset the regular hits to my meager bi-weekly paycheck.
Ohio in contrast is the real deal. People bleed for the unions out there. These are down to earth, uncomplicated steel workers, auto workers, and food workers. You name it and there’s a union to support it out there. It took me a good many years to shed the stereotyped image that I had been brought up with of these types of union workers – entitled, inflexible, overpaid and lazy.
Given the current financial climate, I couldn’t have picked a better time to be held in the bosom of the UAW. The first thing I noticed was that these members aren’t at all like those stereotypes, they aren’t digging in their heels about what they’re entitled to and they do in fact have a terrific handle on the current realities of the automotive crisis. Two evenings spent with them provided me with more relevant and valuable insight than all of the recent Face the Nation and WSJ reports.
Again as a consultant, our clients want us to bring relevant experience across multiple dimensions and different circumstances facing their industry. The people whom I spoke with this weekend have all of that and more, as these folks have lived lives not exclusively based on the current climate or even the recent past. They saw Chrysler go into and out of bankruptcy and they saw how and why it was successful. They lived through the 1979 union concessions as well as the negotiations and deals with GM management where promises were made but never delivered. Now I’m not naïve enough to think that any of our current auto industry problems are because of a single constituency but I have to tell you that the issues they identified and the solutions they suggested made a whole lot of sense to me and I’ll add that nothing that they talked about included unilateral actions without a shared responsibility by all parties. They really do understand that they are all in this together, management, unions, shareholders, suppliers and car owners. Not once did I ever see them point fingers except to say that none of what they were saying seemed to be heard. This is where a consultant can come in real handy because often an out of town expert with the briefcase is able to communicate the same message in a slightly different way to have it more readily heard and acted upon. That said, what I’m suggesting is that if this group is representative of the quality of GM workers and stakeholders, you already have an army of intelligent and insightful consultants to choose from.
Change is an interesting animal in that most everyone agrees to it in concept, but history, biases, motives and a lack of trust can create incredible resistance to doing anything meaningful to improve performance. Denial and hubris can be incredibly powerful forces and extremely difficult to overcome. Such is the case with GM. Why else would you fly to Congress to ask them for financial support without a plan and on a corporate jet. Who was advising these folks? Having had experience positioning our own firm’s leadership for prior Congressional hearings facing our industry, I can tell you that there is nothing more offensive than the non verbal cues associated with denial and hubris. True change begins with the willingness to have an honest dialogue with those who matter most, your customers and your people. I wonder if GM will ever take this incredibly important step. If they did, I bet that they’d find that their own people have all of the answers they need to address the two paramount objectives for this industry, increasing consumer demand for their cars, and sustainable cost reduction.
As one worker told me so eloquently, “when your own people don’t want to buy your products, you really have a problem”.
