How - Dov Seidman [121]
It is Factory Four, though, that most interests us. In Factory Four, everyone takes personal responsibility for maintaining a safe working environment, because they have come to believe that safety is in everyone’s best interests. It is, in a word, valuable. This represents the fourth general type of culture, values-based self-governance. There is a difference between employees who believe in a value and ones who comply with a bunch of rules. The former are governed by should, as in “Keeping people safe is something I value, so everyone should wear a hard hat.” They believe it; they act on their belief, and they self-govern in the name of it; when faced with a choice, the value they hold close guides them surely. The informed acquiescence employees, who are only concerned with rules, live in the world of can. Because the rules live outside of them, they work in a gapped relationship to regulations. Faced with a VIP who does not want to comply (or any situation that does not fit neatly within the rules), they are left to make decisions absent guidance other than enlightened self-interest. If they cannot decide, they call someone else to do so, a manager or boss, and so it goes up the line until someone makes a decision. Into the gap between the individual and the rules falls time, efficiency, and perhaps safety itself.
Informed acquiescence culture, with its hierarchical separation of functions, actually reinforces this gap. One department—say, compliance—might issue proscriptive regulations controlling what you can and can’t say to the marketplace about your products and competition, and another—say, the sales department—might give guidance about what moves the product. In the middle, a salesperson is left to bridge the gap on her own. “I can’t say that,” she might think, “but the notion moves product. Perhaps I can intimate it instead.” When something is expressed as a self-governing value, by contrast, no one tries to split the middle, because there is no middle. The value—in the salesperson’s case, truthfulness—provides a clear should that is unambiguous. And she doesn’t have to say, “I’ll go check with my boss to see what I can say or do.” She can act on her belief, immediately, efficiently, and rapidly. There is no gap, either personally or institution-ally, between the individual and the best behavior (see Figure 10.1).
FIGURE 10.1
Values speak to the higher self. They have the power to inspire and not just motivate. They breed belief. Values-based self-governance, in turn, performs a remarkable double duty: It controls unwanted behavior while simultaneously inspiring higher conduct. In this way, values are actually a more efficient determiner of HOW we do what we do than are rules. When we embrace a value and weld it to our behavior, we believe in what we do. Business defined in values terms is business done for a higher purpose, inspired for the greater good. A person aligned with a company value will be less likely to betray that value, because to do so does not just break a company policy; it betrays the self. At the root of these cultures lies shared values, the HOWS that guide every interaction.
Business has become really good about safety since the early 1990s, in great measure because, perhaps without realizing it, it shifted safety from a set of rules and programs to a part of its core values system, and then found a way to transmit those values throughout the workforce. In other words, it changed safety from a vertical silo of WHAT into a horizontal force of HOW that powered every part of the operation, shifting it from a set of rules to a part of culture. And it succeeded. From 1992 to 2002, U.S. workplace fatalities declined 11 percent, and injuries and illness in private industry declined a remarkable 34 percent, not from more safety cops, but from more safety belief.5
Anarchy and lawlessness, blind obedience, informed acquiescence, and values-based self-governance