Often I am asked why we spend so much time on “soft skills” like team building at staff conferences or other large group meetings. The complaint I hear frequently is that we never get to do any “real work” at these events. My response to that is that establishing relationships IS “real work” and that it is some of the hardest and yet most important work that we do. Rather than a polarity where we trade off relationship building with task accomplishment, I becoming more and more convinced that relationship and task form a hierarchy where task is subordinate to relationship – in other words, if you want to successfully accomplish a task, you have to work on the relationship first.
Recently, I read “Young Men and Fire” by Norman Maclean, an account of a tragic forest fire in Montana in 1949. On the afternoon of August 5th of that year, 15 Smokejumpers met with a ground-based fire fighter to bring a 60 acre fire under control in an area known as Mann Gulch. Referring to it as a “10 o’clock” fire, the crew thought they were looking at a routine ground fire that they would have under control by 10 o’clock the next day. However, what appeared to be routine turned out to be anything but. In an instant, the bottom of the gulch was ablaze with what is known as a “blowup” – a sudden and rapid expansion of the fire. Realizing what was about to happen as the fire changed directions and approached the crew, the foreman, Wag Dodge, ordered his men to drop their tools and move away from the fire. Scrambling up a steep hillside, the men ran for their lives. Dodge, realizing that he could not outrun the pursuing blaze, stopped, pulled out a matchbook, and lit the surrounding grass creating an “escape fire” . He then shouted an order to his men to lie down in its hot ashes. None of the men, including Dodge, had ever seen this procedure before. According to Dodge, someone shouted back, “To hell with that, I’m getting out of here!” (p. 99). Dodge lay down in the remains of the escape fire and survived by letting the main fire pass around him. Tragically, none of his crew followed his instructions. Only Robert Sallee and Walter Rumsey managed to escape the fire by crawling through a crevasse in a rock outcropping at the top of a ridge. The rest, 13 in all, either perished instantly in the firestorm or succumbed to their burns by noon on the next day.
Subsequent investigations and studies of the tragedy reveal many points of failure but I think the most poignant finding was that, for the most part, the crew did not have well established relationships with each other. Smokejumpers were by nature independent men – mostly college students and trying to earn some money before returning to school. On a typical fire, they would have a routine job to do and would need little instruction or supervision – “I’ll dig and scratch my fire line free of fuel, you do the same and our lines will link up to form a fire break”. Their role and their sense of self were based on their mental models about where they fit in the overall forest fire fighter hierarchy. In the midst of the blowup, the crew chief ordered the men to drop their tools. Dropping their tools was like dropping their identity. As Maclean says,”when firefighters are told to throw away their tools, they don’t know what they are anymore, not even what gender” (p. 226). In this new and uncertain environment, mental models like hierarchy and roles disappeared. As firefighters, these men were trained to follow orders from superiors without question. Now, in the midst of the conflagration, their identities as firefighters were gone and with them the requirement to follow superiors’ orders. Because the relationship with foreman Dodge was defined by the firefighting task and little else, his potentially life-saving order to lie down in the escape fire area went unheeded. Who was Dodge at this point but someone with a crazy idea? Perhaps if these men had spent some time getting to know each other and building trust prior to being thrown together as a loosely coupled team, the crew would have followed Dodge into the ashes of the escape fire and survived.
Organizational theorist Karl Weick (1993) explored the Mann Gulch disaster in much greater depth. He looked at the notion of “sense making” and what happens when our mental models are no longer valid. He uses the tragedy as a warning for those who think their organizations are stable. The recipe for failure is to “thrust people into unfamiliar roles, leave some key roles unfilled, make the task more ambiguous, discredit the role system, and make all of these changes in a context in which small events can combine into something monstrous” (p. 638). To provide some structure for resilience, Weick suggests that a focus on nonstop communication is crucial. Furthermore, “when meaning becomes problematic and decreases, this is a signal for people to pay more attention to their formal and informal social ties” (p. 646). These relationships help to bring a group back to a common sense of meaning. In other words, when disaster strikes, we must depend on our communications skills and our relationships for survival.
If I assert that relationships are more important than task or at least that tasks should be subordinate to the relationships involved, one counterpoint I hear is that sometimes the task is so urgent there is no time to work on the relationships. To that I suggest that if the task is really that urgent, then as a manager you have to ask yourself what happened to your resources (time, staff, and budget) that created this urgent situation? Did you prepare for the future? Have you invested in the relationships? Margaret Wheatley (2002) states, “It is possible to prepare for the future without knowing what it will be. The primary way to prepare for the unknown is to attend to the quality of our relationships, to how well we know and trust one another” .
With Wheatley’s admonition in mind, I know I will be continue to be focused on ensuring that the processes I am involved with have resources dedicated to building relationships as a fundamental component and not as a “nice-to-have” afterthought. If a few more conversations or discussion circles with flip charts before getting to the “real work” creates anxiety for the action-oriented people I work with, I hope I can beg their patience. When faced with the unknown, be it as dramatic as a fire disaster or as common these days as an organizational restructuring, if we have cared for our relationships, it will have been worth it.
Sources:
Maclean, Norman. (1992). Young men and fire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Weick, Karl. (1993) The collapse of sense-making in organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38(4), 628-652.
Wheatley, Margaret. (2002). When change is out of our control. Retrieved from http://www.margaretwheatley.com/articles/whenchangeisoutofcontrol.html
Learning to Lead 