Ghostbusters go mining for facts.

Ghost hunting

Many years ago, I was responsible for an international call center providing customer service in the name of high tech companies. One day, I came into the office a little late and found my general manager standing in the middle of ‘my’ operations floor, addressing ‘my’ people on an urgent matter. Via one of our Board members, he had received a call from a VP Europe of a well-known printer company, one of our clients. Apparently, one of the agents had responded to a customer call from Germany in French, and this call happened to have been from some Board of Directors member’s wife, whose indignancy about such an insult had instigated quite a fuss high up in the hierarchy of our ‘invoice-payers’. It was to be understood that anybody who had so daringly endangered the existence of our contract with this well-respected name would face immediate dismissal. In addition, the manager responsible for the department (me), was ordered to find out who was to blame for this flagrant lack of quality and deliver appropriate punishment.

After I had spent most of the day trying to get the people back to work and put down the excitement, I went about my business, which was not any more the improvement of customer service, but to attend to the pet project of some higher up, which was to save the integrity of the overall customer service of the company. All employees were individually interviewed, and all denied any wrongdoing. Only after some serious pushing with the client did I obtain the exact telephone number that was called, and the time of the call. Without this information I was not going to be able to identify the culprit, and to crucify him/her was the only reasoning that seemed to get through to the source of the upheaval.

When I finally received the telephone number called, it immediately became apparent what had happened: instead of ‘0031’ for The Netherlands, the customer had called ‘0033’ and had ended up with an unsuspecting elderly farmer’s wife in the Elsace who was still perturbed by the earlashing in a foreign language (those kind of emotions do not require any translation) she had received not too long ago. We never received any further complaints from this client, or any excuse about the unwarranted accusations either. The contract was extended, though.

Brutal honesty

At the original moment of writing this blog there was some discontent between 2 departments about the reaching of a communal goal: HeadQuarters had made available a certain tool, and the local office needed to use it. After several months, HeadQuarters found out that the local office had not used the tool as agreed, and the goal would not be reached. The local office explained the tool did not work properly and that they had communicated this umpteen times. Of course, at HeadQuarters nobody was aware of any of the issues. So far, there is ‘damage’, but overseeable.

The next step came when higher management started to get involved: goals were not going to be met, so the issue was escalated up to their level. One of the main challenges here was to avoid ‘shadowfighting’: management one level higher is by definition operating at a higher abstraction level and has less knowledge of the actual facts. Still, it often is their job to discuss what has happened, what went wrong, and therefore how to solve it. For which they rely upon usually one-sided reports by those who actually were involved. As soon as that occurs, there is a danger of ‘pure politics’ starting to guide the process, where the outcome is decided by whoever is the more politically astute at that moment rather than the value of the arguments.

In this case, it was decided that a more fruitful discussion was going to be facilitated by establishing a shared view of the facts. Often, when discussing the facts already different perceptions of those facts become clear, and the whole process of misunderstanding becomes transparent. This was especially true since intercultural differences between Europeans and Asians were part of the equation, and perceptions of reality and emotions are just as much factual as whether the computer screen is blue.

Two representatives, one from HQ and one from the local office, were given the task to create an overview of the facts. The only way to make this process work, was to apply ‘brutal honesty’, which means:

• Both parties need to have been intimately involved in the communication. They need to be able to formulate what they thought at that moment, how they interpreted inputs, and how that made them react. Only then can resultant actions be properly interpreted. This also means that all relevant parties need to be represented, so in case of a tripartite agreement, three representatives should join the process (although a third party greatly increases the complexity.).
• In addition to speaking the same language, parties also need to speak that shared language proficiently enough to be able and deal with emotions and perceptions. Furthermore, a shared high standard of professionalism is required to allow for sufficient progress and quality of work.
• Each party needs to be totally forthcoming with respect to all ‘complaints’ there are about the other party. In that, it is often irrelevant where the complaint comes from or who brought it up, it is a consideration, and it should be examined on its merits.
• All parties involved need to accept intercultural differences and thus that the interpretation of the exact same data by the other may be different from the interpretation by themselves.
• Both sides need to be willing to ‘accept pain’. In such a soul-searching it is virtually impossible to come out unscathed. Every relevant action of particpants will undergo scrutiny and therefore may be open to suggestions for improvements.
• No topic may be out of bounds. No tabu may be accepted.
• Both parties should have the ‘backbone’ to also address the consequences of specific actions of their superiors, without it becoming an easy: “The boss should have taken care of it”.
• They should be left alone to do their work, any interference of superiors/external parties or ‘spinning’ of this process will compromise it.
• The result of their work should be ‘published’ only with mutual consent.

In the above way, a description of the case was established, after which a shared session followed with upper management. Most of the effort here needed to be spent on rectifying the misconceptions that had evolved previously based on lacking information and/or misinterpretations. Many conclusions became self-evident. In the following discussion not everybody agreed on all analyses, but most of the emotions usually associated with ‘escalations’ were surprisingly low and at least this barrier for progress had been removed.

(Originally posted March 29, 2014)

Update June 18, 2015: Below a great blog on how ‘brutal honesty’ can go overboard: problems with brutal honesty