Overview

You need leaders, according to Lee Iacocca, to tell people things they don’t want to hear and then get them to do things they don’t want to do. The “right thing” is not always the easy thing. As Rudy Giuliani told us, we had to live in defiance of our fear following the destruction of the World Trade Center by terrorists. The right thing may also involve sacrifice: President Kennedy asked Americans to temporarily give up comfort in order to serve the less fortunate in foreign countries.

This exercise requires participants, working alone, to complete a comparison matrix. It then challenges them to think of a difficult-to-swallow message derived from the matrix and to strategize how that message can be made digestible.

Purpose

To elicit thoughts regarding best ethical practices.

To develop awareness of the gap between the ideal and the real in work-related scenarios.

To outline a message that might close the ethical gap.

Group Size

Any number of participants can engage in this exercise.

Participants first work alone and then make a short presentation to three others.

Room Arrangement

Flexible seating, if possible, so that participants can form small groups after working alone on the first part of the exercise.

Materials

Handout 7.1, “Comparison Matrix”

Procedure

1.Remind the group of management guru Tom Peters’s advice: “If you have gone a whole week without being disobedient, you are not serving yourself or your company well.” Discuss the possible meanings of “disobedient.”

2.Note that one possible meaning is to express dissatisfaction with the organizational status quo, in an effort to promote continuous improvement.

3.Distribute the handout and ask participants to fill it out. (Note: If you spot some people struggling with the best practices for the first column, quietly suggest they work with another person. Avoid possible embarrassment with a comment such as, “That’s the part I had the most trouble with myself. I had to call a colleague for help. Do you mind if I have you and _____ work together on this?”)

4.Once the handout is complete, ask participants, still working alone, to outline a brief “speech” they would make to their manager or other high-level organizational leader to explain the need to remove a specific barrier and would suggest ways the removal could be implemented. The speech should last 5 minutes, at the very most.

5.Next, have participants form groups of four. Each person in the subgroup will deliver his or her speech and will receive feedback from the others in the group.

6.Bring closure to the exercise by asking what it would take for these speeches to actually be delivered.

Variation

This exercise could easily be adapted for:

Presentation programs (for which participants would actually deliver the speech).

Leadership programs (for which participants would develop a proposal and work to have it approved and then implemented).

Communications programs (for which participants would employ specific persuasion tools, such as those described in the Points of Interest).

Discussion

In what ways have you “defied” the status quo in recent months in order to achieve an improved or more ethical state of affairs?

One definition of a “leader” is the person who takes others where they would not have gone without him or her. To what places do people in your organization need to “travel” along the ethical road?

How else could you use a gap analysis to effect improvement in your organization as far as ethical practices as concerned?

Quotation

“All that really matters is devotion to something bigger than ourselves.”

—Teilhard de Chardin

Points of Interest

Keep in mind these D-words as you work to persuade others to adapt your recommendations:

Drama—Heighten the emotional appeal of your presentation by adding a bit of drama to it. The excitement could appear in your voice, in your body language, or in the content of your remarks. A surprising statistic is just one of the ways you could add depth and texture to your message.

Developments—Relating current events (both inside and outside the organization) to the need for the change you are proposing is an effective means of persuasion. You can use the events to validate the likelihood of success of your idea or to suggest a given outcome could be avoided if your plan were implemented.

Deprecation (self only)—At the 2002 Academy Awards presentation, Woody Allen told the audience that he offered the names of 14 other filmmakers who would be even better representatives of New York City than he himself. Then he told them that a caller admitted they had already tried the others and none of them were available. Such humor almost always serves to develop a rapport with an audience. Translated into a business setting, participants might say something like this prior to making their proposal to their manager: “I envy the experience you have in this industry. Even though I’m relatively new, I think I’ve come up with a way we could improve the communication flow in our office.”

HANDOUT 7.1