Undercover Boss

Undercover Boss is the first in a series of documentaries about CEOs who want to know what their employees really think about them and their company.  In the first segment, a beard and workers’ protective suit allows Stephen Martin, the 43-year-old CEO of the Clugston Group, to live on the front lines for ten days.  It was produced by Channel 4 in the UK, a commercially funded public broadcaster.

I found out about the series through a great article by Stefan Stern in Financial Times.  Mr. Stern describes a key dilemma faced by many chief executives: “Employee attitude surveys, brown bag lunches, focus groups, informal chats: managers try quite hard to find out what their staff are thinking. But the results are mixed at best. What are your staff thinking? Admit it – you don’t really know.” 

You can add town hall meetings where questions are often planted and staging is more reminiscent of a rock-star spectacle than a genuine dialogue.  And let’s not forget emails from the CEO. The readership of those decreases as you move down the organization.  Yes, the rate of opening the email may be 96 percent but that statistic is as meaningless as the number of hits on your website. Remember when MBWA (Management By Walking Around) was all the rage?  Nice, but they often look like a royal family walkabout.  A walkabout also happens to be a purported Australian aboriginal ritual of manhood. You may argue that all of these attempts at a dialogue are better than nothing and I would have agreed with you three years ago.  Today, they remind me more of a definition of insanity – doing the same stuff over and over, expecting different results.

Mr. Martin, the undercover boss, learned a few interesting things. According to Personneltoday.com, “Martin said he was able to get an ‘unfiltered view’ of how his staff saw the company and the issues they were concerned about, identifying real problems with communication and skills.”  And it gets better, or worse, if you’re doing executive communications for Mr. Martin. One of the biggest problems he identified was “his regular e-mail communication and notices to staff about developments within the business were not getting through to many of those working on the construction sites.”

“I thought I was getting my message out there about what we were doing, but it became clear that workers on site were not getting that message because we were not talking to them in a format or language they wanted,” Mr. Martin said.

According to Personneltoday.com, Martin is trying to overcome these problems by setting up teams consisting of labourers, supervisors and managers who meet frequently to discuss developments in the workplace.

The solution, by mixing different layers of organization, is bound to improve the exchange of ideas.  But it’s tough. Mr. Martin and other CEOs are trying to overcome barriers to communications erected by a command-and-control management and communications structure we’ve had for 150 years, originally patterned on the old Prussian army.  The attempt may get rid of some of the filters that exist between each layer, but will not provide that “unfiltered view” acquired by going undercover.  Mr. Martin may also want to consider adding another tool – social media. This would be a more interactive and personal way to communicate with his organization compared to traditional broadcast tools like email.

Channel 4 will broadcast Undercover Boss in two weeks.  CBS is planning to broadcast “the new reality series” later this year.