Reluctance to Call High: what’s slavery got to do with it?!
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Aug 31, 2009 @ 01:13 AM
In a recent post, I wrote about why perceived social class may be an element in the fear some inside sales reps have in calling high. One of my blog readers, Richard Fouts, responded with a poignant post on how his own manager at HP once got angry at him for talking to HP founder Dave Packard, and told him he'd fire him if he did it again! What may have been happening here was a pretty good example of poor industrial relations between management and employees, in this case involving three levels: the sales rep, his boss, and the president of the company. By all accounts I've read, Dave Packard was not only approachable, he loved talking to his employees. But there was a communication breakdown along the line, and it came to a head when Richard was called on the carpet for "calling high" within his own company. An educated guess is that Richard's manager considered himself a minion, and tried to inculcate that feeling in his employees. This is middle management failure defined.
Organizational development guru Alexander R. Heron discussed this problem in depth way back in the 20th century, and nailed it so well that he changed the way many large companies treated employees. Although best known for his years as a VP at Crown Zellerbach, he was a well-known author (Sharing Information with Employees, 1944) and speaker who realized that unempowered employees are often inherently unhappy, and tend to create inferior processes and products along the way. Here's his quote from 1953, describing what he views as the genesis of the problem:
"The relationship between employer and employee, if we trace it back far enough, was the relationship between the master and the slave. The master supported the slave; the slave was there for the master. The fact of the matter is that gradually the slave passed out of the picture and employment took his place... There is inherent in the relationship between employers and employees something that must have derived from that tradition of centuries past when the relationship was one of conflict, one of exploitation, one of conquest, one in which the worker was subordinate not only to the will but to the needs of the master. I am sure that those of you who do any psychological or opinion research will find the reflection of that in most employer - employee relationships today."
So how does Heron's view relate to today's' telesales reps that are reticent to call high? It's all psychological, and here, the errant psychology is "I'm not good enough to call high." It's yet another take on the problem of class perception, and it's part of the reason the Framers of our Constitution determined that having a King was not a viable option for our new country. Heron wasn't about smashing the kings of industry, but rather he believed in a "flattened" informational path that would allow for better team communication within a company, no matter how big or small. Sixty some-odd years after he made the statement above, some reps still struggle with the inability to call a "king" on the phone and make something happen.
A little secret: my mom was Alexander Heron's secretary, back in the days where people still called themselves secretaries. She left his employ when she was a few months pregnant with me, and I grew up hearing a lot about him. He and his wife both liked mom, and gave her a nice little silver brush set when I was born and that I still have. Today, I spend a significant amount of time in my telesales training courses discussing how to carry on conversations with executive administrators so that telesales reps get to the executives they need to talk to. I was raised by a good one, so picked up some tips along the way. And it appears that a lot of what her boss believed and taught got passed on to me, too. If you're a sales rep that doesn't call high as often as you'd like, consider what Alexander Heron has to say, and see if it might somehow apply to you. And if you're a telesales manager who has reps that have trouble consistently calling high, consider those unspoken societal "rules" that may be holding your reps back. Consider holding a "lunch & learn" meeting on this topic, and add this concept to your Best Management Playbook.
I'd value your comments on this, too. What do you think of Alexander R. Heron's "slavery" model of business evolution? Does this concept have any value in today's sales world?