Choice Theory (43 page)

Workers hate this pretense because they are well aware that their managers have no real way to know what they are doing and tend to try to make a few points, bad or even good, that may have nothing to do with the workers’ actual performance. Even if the
managers say something good, the workers know that they could just as well have said something bad; they had no accurate information either way. What the workers do is protect themselves as much as possible, no matter what effect it has on the company. This procedure perpetuates a climate of distrust in the workplace. If a worker believes the review was inaccurate, as many do, he or she and the manager will be separated and never trust each other. Companies lose a lot of money because of this phony procedure that has nothing good going for it. It is one of the few things we routinely do in industry that is completely ineffective.

What is needed instead is for the company to provide a yearly opportunity for each employee to talk to his or her manager about how they both could do something to improve the company. Instead of performance evaluations, these yearly discussions might be called company solving circles, the workplace equivalent of marriage and family solving circles.

In a lead-managed company, the manager would call the employee in and say, “I’d like you to tell me what you think you might do to improve things around here and what you think I might do to help. It’s not important that we come up with anything great, but this is the time for us to level with each other and talk about what you want and how I might help. It’s not the time for each of us to talk about what anyone else is doing, that we can talk about when we get together at our monthly meetings.” Obviously, once this type of meeting became routine, this long-winded preface would be unnecessary.

The following is an imaginary dialogue with the airline desk clerk who wouldn’t say anything about my mileage problem to anyone in the company. This dialogue assumes that the company has been moving in the direction of lead management and that the level of fear in the company is much lower than when I initially talked to this woman. I’ll call the clerk Nancy and the manager, Susan. In a lead-managed company, workers and managers are on a first-name basis.

“Nancy, this is the time for us to get in the circle again. What’s on your mind?”

“I’m taking a chance, when I tell you this, but the way things have been going, I think I can do it.”

“That’s the purpose of what we’ve been trying to do. Get rid of all the fear that was killing things around here. I’d very much like to hear what’s on your mind.”

“OK, Susan, this is it. I want more say about what goes on when a customer makes a complaint or asks for something that’s out of the ordinary. I feel like a fool saying it’s company policy over and over when that’s the last thing customers want to hear. This is a fast-moving business. The plane is leaving in a few minutes, and the customer has a gripe. I know my job. You know I know my job. I’ve been behind that counter for eleven years. I might make little mistakes, I’m not perfect, but right now I think I’m making mistakes all day long because I see dissatisfied customers walking away from the counter. Even if it gets fixed later, that customer is going to remember his dissatisfaction much longer than the once in a while we fix something.”

“Give me an example.”

“OK, it’s that mileage thing. We give out thousand-mile upgrades, and the customer is traveling eleven hundred miles. It takes two upgrades. He has to spend two thousand miles to use eleven hundred. I’d like to tell him, ‘We don’t have hundred-mile refunds, but I can give you back a five-hundred upgrade in change.’ Susan, we still make four hundred on the deal. I’d like to be able to make that decision. I might not make it for everyone, but there are times when I’d like to do it and I can’t, and I feel like a flunky.”

“That’s a few steps above me. I can’t give you that permission.”

“You see, that’s it exactly—you’re in the same boat I’m in. But you could do something. When you get in the circle with John [Susan’s manager], will you tell him what I’m asking? Not just for this but for a lot of things. If you’ll do this much, I’m willing to write out a list and give it to you. But first I want to find out how the land lies. Don’t leave me hanging. Tell me what happened so I know this solving circle is working. And if you don’t tell John who’s making this request, that’s fine with me.”

The higher the request has to go, the more fear there will be in asking for it, but what Nancy is really asking for is some feedback, that something real is happening, that the solving circle is not just some management consultant’s daydream that no one at the top is taking seriously.

Susan said, “I think you’re on to something. But if we give you more power to make decisions, how will we know what you are doing, how far you are going to go?”

“I’ve thought about that. I’ll make up a lavender form so you can see it real easy. Then, whenever I make a decision that I couldn’t make before, I’ll write it down. I’ll do it when I’m not busy or at home. I don’t think it will be very often, but it’s the idea that I can’t, that I’m a little child who has to ask the teacher to go to the bathroom, that’s what I’m talking about. Do you understand? This has been on my mind for five years. It feels good to tell it to you.”

“I’m glad you did. I’ll talk to John.”

“Susan, level with me, I need this job. Do you see what I just said as out of line? Am I now a troublemaker in your book?”

“Nancy, I’m going to give you a letter confirming this conversation, saying you did just what we want employees to do. It’ll be just between you and me. Is that OK?”

“It’s more than OK. I just wonder why you have to keep it between you and me.”

“Nancy, these things take time; it’s the best I can do. When I give you that letter, I have to trust you, too. You see that, don’t you?”

“It’s a tough world, isn’t it? You’d think that all of us would be on the same side, but it isn’t that way, is it? If all we had to worry about is our competitors, we’d have a much easier job, wouldn’t we?”

“Isn’t that the truth?”

I am always amazed at the amount of fear in the world. External control confirms what Pogo said so clearly, “We have met the enemy and they is us!”

A
LL OF US HAVE
experienced kindness and caring from total strangers. Whenever a community is hard hit by a flood, tornado, hurricane, earthquake, or explosion, people from the whole country rally to their support. Even the news of a single person trapped in a cave or on the side of a mountain arouses the concern of people everywhere. When we help strangers, because we know it’s only for a short time, we don’t ask them to do anything but accept our help. The only picture of them in our quality worlds is to help them. Because we have no expectations of strangers, external control is rarely part of any of these helping transactions. But when we are with our wives, husbands, children and parents, students, or employees, expectations are very much a part of all we do, and external control is the way we attempt to do it.

This book focuses on individuals, on learning choice theory, and on getting along much better with each other. It is my hope
that many individuals will make this choice, but they will still encounter many more who don’t, who use external control to deal with them. Although it benefits you to use choice theory even if your spouse, parent, principal, or boss won’t, it would help you a lot more if they did.

In many places in this book I alluded to how much better it would be if we moved as a society from external control to choice theory. I have envisioned the idea of a quality community, an entire community that has made the commitment to change to choice theory—a community in which you wouldn’t have to be concerned that the people you encountered would be trying to make you do what you didn’t want to do and in which the people all around you would think, before they did anything, Will this bring me closer to the others in the community or will it tend to move us further apart? In such a community, when you would use choice theory to deal with others, you could count on others doing the same.

It was this ideal that has encouraged me to try to persuade an entire community to think about learning choice theory. If I could show as well as tell a significant number of people in a community, including some influential ones, that these ideas are valuable and worth learning, the community would not have to spend a great deal of time and money learning how to use it; that part would take care of itself. And once this choice theory community got started, there would be a good chance that word of mouth would keep it going. But how do you show a whole community the value of these ideas and then persuade them to read a book that tells them to consider changing the way they live their personal lives?

I vividly remember how much my dad hated to shovel coal when coal furnaces were all there were. Then, in the fall of 1932, two well-dressed men came to our house three nights in a row and talked to my dad. I listened (he liked me to be with him when he did things) and, although I didn’t understand much of what they were talking about, the men paid me a lot of compliments and I liked their attention.

These men worked for the gas company and were trying to persuade my dad to put a gas-conversion burner into our furnace. The burner would be free; all he would have to do was buy the gas. He agreed, and they installed a thermostat on the wall. The neighbors were very skeptical: “Now they have you; your furnace is wrecked, and you’ll freeze. Besides, even if it works, it’ll cost you an arm and a leg for gas.” But you know the end of the story; my dad was right. No one has ever fought progress and won. If this book is able to persuade you that choice theory is progress, there may be a chance. What I have to do if I want to sell choice theory to a community is to put on my good suit, sit down with the people in the community, and explain the benefits of a quality community based on choice theory. I also have to remember to show how it could help their children; the gas company men didn’t forget about me.

In late winter 1997, I was scheduled to present my quality school ideas to the Corning, New York, school district. I asked if Carleen and I could also give a free presentation the night before to the entire community on applying choice theory to an unhappy marriage. Then I asked my contact person if it would be all right if I went beyond the presentation on marriage and offered the idea of teaching choice theory to the community, especially, if the presentation on marriage went well. We learned that the room would be packed with over six hundred people. I remembered those men from the gas company and didn’t take any chances. I put on my good suit and my best tie.

To begin, I explained the use of choice theory in marriage, citing the fact that a happy, lifelong marriage is an endangered species in our society. But I soon saw that this big crowd wanted more than a lecture, so I decided to demonstrate what I was talking about. I got the superintendent of schools, Vince Coppola, to play an unhappy husband and Carleen to play his angry, disgruntled wife. I played the counselor and demonstrated the structured reality therapy that I use in marital problems. Vince and Carleen gave Academy Award performances; the audience laughed their heads off. I didn’t have to spell out what I meant. I could tell that
in this short demonstration, the audience saw the value of learning choice theory.

While I had their attention, I offered Corning the possibility of pioneering the teaching of this new concept to all the people in the community, who could then use it in many parts of their personal lives. After the talk, I could feel the audience’s interest as they buzzed and hung around. People came up and talked separately both to me and Carleen. I had a word with the chief of police, who recognized that choice theory might help reduce domestic violence, one of the most feared situations his officers have to deal with.

The next day at lunch about thirty community leaders met with Carleen and me to discuss this idea further. They were concerned about committing time and money to something they did not fully understand. After I explained the theory in more detail, they seemed interested but cautious. They said they would get back to me.

I kept thinking about their concerns. I knew these community leaders were also worried about something that they had not brought up—that skeptical neighbors would be only too happy to tell them that they’d made fools of themselves. But here the stakes were much higher than with my dad agreeing to convert to gas. If they agreed to this deal, they might make fools of the neighbors, too. I was asking them to agree to go beyond what my dad had agreed to, to put gas in all their furnaces, not just one.

In an attempt to deal with their concern, I wrote the following letter to Marjorie VanVleet, our contact person, to share with the small informal committee that was formed after our lunch meeting.