Rocking the Boat: How Tempered Radicals Effect Change Without Making Trouble

How to Effect Change

Without Making Trouble

Debra E. Meyerson

Harvard Business Press

Boston, Massachusetts

Copyright 2001, 2008 Debra E. Meyerson

All rights reserved

Text design by Joyce C. Weston

Printed in the United States of America

05 04 03 02 01    5 4 3 2 1

Requests for permission to use or reproduce material from this book should be directed to permissions@hbsp.edu, or mailed to Permissions, Harvard Business School Publishing, 60 Harvard Way, Boston, Massachusetts 02163.

978-1-4221-2138-2 (pbk ISBN)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Meyerson, Debra.

Tempered radicals : how people use difference to inspire change at work / Debra E. Meyerson.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN: 0-87584-905-9 (alk. paper)

1. Organizational change.   2. Corporate culture.   I. Title.

HD58.8 .M493 2001

658.4'06--dc21

2001024505

To the memory of my dedicated and loving father,

Aubrey Jay Meyerson (1931–1995),

who showed me how to take risks

and live life fully.

And to my mother,

Marcia Meyerson,

who throughout my life has

provided the love and safety

to let me do so.

Each time a man stands up for an idea, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or greater intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change.

— Robert Kennedy

Contents

Introduction

Part 1  Tempered Radicals

1  Who Tempered Radicals Are and What They Do

2  Different Ways of Being Different

Part 2  How Tempered Radicals Make a Difference

3  Resisting Quietly and Staying True to One’s Self

4  Turning Personal Threats into Opportunities

5  Broadening the Impact through Negotiation

6  Leveraging Small Wins

7  Organizing Collective Action

Part 3  Challenges for Tempered Radicals

8  Facing the Difficulties (and Conditions that Ease the Difficulties)

9  Tempered Radicals as Everyday Leaders

Appendix A: Research Design and Methods

Appendix B: Sample Interview Protocol

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

About the Author

Introduction

IN ROCKING THE BOAT, we explore two questions: First, how do individuals effect meaningful change from within their organizations? Second, how do organization members express identities and values that are different from the majority culture while fitting into that culture? In both instances, individuals must find ways to balance their desire to speak up, deviate from, or otherwise challenge the status quo against their need to tread cautiously to preserve their credibility within it.

To tackle the first question, I describe a spectrum of change tactics used by men and women in a variety of occupations and positions who hold an array of change agendas—from gender equity and the promotion of diversity to corporate environmentalism, from familyfriendly work practices to fair-trade practices. Because many of the change agents I studied are not high-level leaders and therefore cannot rely on the authority of their positions to effect change, the tactics of influence they exercise tend to be more subtle, incremental, and patient than the levers used by more powerful actors. Accordingly, the change tactics detailed in Rocking the Boat can be applied by anyone who wants to make a difference within his or her workplace.

To speak to the second question, I illustrate the multiplicity of ways people express agendas, identities, and values that are different from and sometimes at odds with those that are dominant in their organizations. Whether their differences from the majority are based on race, gender, sexual orientation, national culture, ethnicity, agendas, or values, the men and women I describe want both to express the parts of themselves that set them apart and to fit into the majority culture.

These two central challenges are inextricably linked. As people act on identities and values that are different from the majority culture, they disrupt and implicitly challenge normal ways of acting and thinking by making visible alternatives. In this way, small acts of self-expression can open the door to new practices and expectations. As one example, which I elaborate on later in the book, a middle manager determined to live up to his personal commitment to share child-care responsibilities scheduled all his meetings to end promptly by 5:30. Although motivated by his personal values, his act deviated from and pushed outward expectations about staying at work late to demonstrate commitment. Because others in the organization noticed and appreciated this small act, it opened the door for coworkers to do the same and planted seeds for additional changes.

New Edition

This book was initially published in 2001 under the title Tempered Radicals.¹ I wrote it for people who walk a fine line between challenging established norms and upholding them: women and men who want to advance social justice or environmental agendas in corporations driven by quarterly profits; ambitious women who refuse to emulate men, yet require access to and credibility in male halls of power; men and women who share parenting responsibilities while they strive to succeed in workplaces that are all-consuming; men and women of color who want to challenge existing terms of inclusion while they strive to be included in predominantly white institutions; educators who bring audacious change agendas to public school systems while they cultivate the trust and cooperation of professionals whose credibility is vested in the maintenance of the traditional system. These individuals want to succeed and fit in and they want to act on agendas, values, and identities that may threaten their path to success. Despite the wide range of agendas, identities, and values that characterize tempered radicals, they have in common the delicate balancing of conformity and deviation, compliance and experimentation, smooth sailing and rocking the boat.

The original edition of Tempered Radicals was shipped to bookstores the week prior to the devastating attacks on September 11, 2001. In the wake of the attacks, the word radical conjured up images of extremism and violence, and modifying radical with tempered was not sufficient to erase these connotations. Since the publication of the original article on tempered radicalism with my colleague Maureen Scully in 1995² and after the release of my book in 2001, I have heard from hundreds of people who recognized themselves in the experiences I described, but who objected to the term radical. I therefore created this new edition and changed the title to appeal to a broader audience who might identify with the everyday experiences and tactics of tempered radicalism. With this republication, I also hope to speak to readers who may not themselves be tempered radicals, but who are interested in unleashing and tapping into the positive changes these individuals bring to their organizations.

The republication also provides the opportunity to revise the introduction to capture advances in my thinking since I wrote the original volume. Since then, I have given dozens of talks to a variety of audiences in the corporate, nonprofit, and public sectors. I have assigned the book and facilitated lively discussions on the topic in classes at Stanford University’s Graduate Schools of Business and Education and have worked with clients ranging from museum professionals to nuclear scientists, women surgeons to health-care administrators, corporate executives to school administrators. With the benefit of these conversations, I reflect on three topics that were either not explored in the original volume or that I realize warrant greater emphasis: (1) The effectiveness of incremental approaches to change, (2) tempered radicals as positive deviants, and (3) the role of leadership in cultivating and amplifying tempered radicalism. It is to these themes I now turn.

The Effectiveness of Incremental Approaches to Change

Do incremental tactics add up to real change? How effective are grassroots efforts compared to top-down or more entrepreneurial approaches to change? No matter what audience I face or what class I teach, I am asked these questions, which reveal a widespread skepticism about the efficacy of this relatively diffuse and slow-moving approach to change I call tempered radicalism. Invariably, executives argue that strategic initiatives driven by senior managers allow change efforts to be more systemic. Idealistic students voice their impatience with the pace of incremental change. Entrepreneurs argue vehemently that it is more expedient to start fresh, building a new organization that reflects one’s values and beliefs, rather than trying to upend the norms and values of established organizations. Others deride incremental efforts from within in favor of change processes waged by external advocacy organizations that can be devoted to the uncompromised pursuit of specific change agendas like environmentalism, social justice, or gender equity; they reason that radical agendas advanced by people within organizations are subject to cooptation pressures that can profoundly alter the content and impact of change efforts and jeopardize the careers of the agents who pursue them.³ And some cynics simply view such efforts from within as fools’ errands.

I understand these questions and the doubts underlying them, but I believe they are misguided. Too often, critics view these contrasting approaches to change as mutually exclusive alternatives—as if change can be waged effectively only through one approach. History would suggest otherwise. Social change occurs through the combination of bold top-down initiatives, entrepreneurial innovations, radical campaigns and movements, and grassroots incremental efforts from within traditional institutions.

In the relatively staid field of education, for example, we see a rise of innovations driven by ambitious entrepreneurs who have little patience with existing educational institutions. Teach for America, the invention of a team of idealistic, impatient, twenty-something entrepreneurs, created a new and prestigious pipeline into the profession of teaching and, importantly, awakened the consciousness of a rising generation of leaders to the inadequacy of U.S. public schools. Heralded regularly as an exemplar of the potency of entrepreneurial approaches, fans of Teach for America applaud the organization for its audacious, take-no-prisoners approach to reinventing the pipeline into teaching and its refusal to conform to the conventions of established processes and institutions. To be sure, these entrepreneurs have no patience for the plodding pace of change within the educational establishment.

One can, however, appreciate the innovations of Teach for America and its entrepreneurial organizational siblings without denying the cumulative impact of the thousands of reformers who work to improve existing educational institutions from within. Dedicated educators, some quite radical in their views, work from within public school districts, schools, universities, and the government to improve or revise programs and policies that prepare teachers to work in today’s struggling schools. Some of these reformers have, over the years, made major strides in their programs’ designs, outreach, and impact. For instance, change agents within the New York City Public Schools have developed a portfolio of successful programs to recruit, prepare, and support school leaders who have the experience and credibility to lead effectively in the most difficult schools in the system. Clearly, they are not as visible as the founders of Teach for America, but their collective impact may be no less impressive.

Similarly, gay advocacy and social movement organizations with radical agendas have managed to change policies and secure legal rights and resources for gay men and women. At the same time, gay employees in traditional organizations have made incremental progress from within through small and large acts of self-expression and advocacy. Openly displaying pictures of their partners on their desks or organizing a coalition of gay employees to secure domestic partner benefits can, over time, change the climate for gay employees. Environmentalists work for advocacy organizations that span the political spectrum in agendas and tactics, and they work within oil and gas companies to advance green policies and procedures from within.⁴ Feminists promote gender equity through the courts and advocacy organizations, and women (and men) managers push out the boundaries of inclusion and work to secure opportunities for women from within traditional institutions.

The choice, then, is not about which approach to change works or works best. Despite different timetables, methods, and even outcomes, each of these approaches to change can contribute to advancing an agenda and, in many instances, reinforce the other. It is crucial not to confuse the pace and visibility of change efforts with their cumulative impact.

Although aspiring change agents tend to focus on questions about the relative efficacy of different tactics, I believe that it may be just as important for them to understand their own temperaments and proclivities for alternative approaches to change. Not everyone is well suited to the pace and risks of entrepreneurship. And certainly not everyone has the patience to persist through quieter incremental efforts from within.

In Leading Social Change, one of my courses at Stanford, patterns invariably arise among the students. The business students tend to be eager to act, want to see demonstrable outcomes, and have little tolerance for the bureaucratic and political constraints that dilute and stall change efforts initiated from within established organizations. They tend to favor entrepreneurial approaches that create alternatives to or threaten existing institutions through competitive pressures. My business school students interested in education tend to be drawn to the promise of charter schools, particularly those that are scaling rapidly, or high-growth entrepreneurial organizations, such as Teach for America, that create alternative pipelines into teaching and educational leadership. The mantra of many of these students who want to make a difference seems to be high growth, high impact.⁵

In contrast, many of my graduate students from the School of Education tend to be more patient in their approach, even as they remain idealistic in their objectives. While they too aspire to effect change, they see existing institutions, such as school districts and universities, as central to the future of the field and therefore as critical agents and targets of change. They more readily see themselves as actors working to advance change from within.

Are the business students and other social entrepreneurs impatient and unrealistic in their call for alternatives and radical change to the status quo? Are education students and the like being complacent in their tolerance for incremental reform?

Do feminist activists undermine progress through radical and relatively threatening tactics? Are feminists who work for change while they succeed in male-dominated corporations selling out and therefore not real feminists? Are radical environmentalists scaring off mainstream allies? Are corporate environmentalists diverting the movement from adequately addressing the climate crisis? I have watched adherents of each approach hurl these and other damning accusations at their counterparts who follow a different course. Such divisiveness between people who pursue similar objectives through different means serves to undermine the overall effort by precluding possible alliances and damaging the credibility of sibling change agents. It is more likely that neither a radical nor an incremental approach alone is sufficient; and usually both are crucial.

Virtually all change processes depend at some level on the patience and persistence of tempered radicals—actors who work behind the scenes, often within established institutions. They become early adopters of entrepreneurial innovations, localized experimenters, and quiet rebels who signal the need to adapt to changing times. Behind the dramatic activities that mark social movements within and outside of organizations, such as the civil rights movement, are the quiet acts of individuals who work patiently and persistently to set the stage for the more visible and seemingly consequential events.

Similarly, the incremental efforts of tempered radicals find credibility, direction, and energy from the bold innovations and demands for change imposed on their organizations by entrepreneurs and radical activists. Thanks to the efforts of activists who establish movement priorities, environmentalists within corporations can mobilize familiar and credible rationale, language, objectives, and means to advance their agendas within their organizations.⁶ Owing to the credibility and impact of Teach for America, reformers within universities may be better poised to drive forward innovations within the system and can tap into a new crop of educators and leaders that Teach for America helped cultivate.

By showcasing the tactics of tempered radicals in this book, I am not suggesting that incremental change from within is the best way to effect change. And I am certainly not implying that grassroots change processes from within organizations should preclude more entrepreneurial, activist, or top-down approaches. But I will attempt to show that these cumulative efforts can matter. While they may be less visible, more diffuse, and less clear in consequence, the actions of those who toil within existing institutions may be no less instrumental in a longterm process of organizational and social transformation.

Tempered Radicals as Positive Deviants

Within the field of management, a growing number of scholars and practitioners are embracing the principles of a new approach to organizational change called positive organizational scholarship (POS).⁷ This movement illuminates further the potential of tempered radicals to make positive contributions in their organizations. With parallel movements in disciplines as diverse as health care, psychology, and international development, POS is the study of that which is positive, flourishing, and life-giving in organizations.⁸ Practitioners within the field of POS seek to identify and amplify positive actions, relationships, thoughts and feelings, while researchers try to understand the conditions that produce these qualities and their organizational implications.⁹

One important strand of POS focuses on understanding and amplifying sources of positive deviance within and among organizations.¹⁰ Positive deviance refers to extraordinary positive outcomes and the means that produce them.¹¹ Unlike most scholarly treatments that view deviance as an individual or social pathology, research on positive deviance illustrates how deviant behaviors or circumstances can lead to positive outcomes in communities and organizations. It is in this sense that POS shines a new light on the adaptive potential of tempered radicals as sources of positive deviance.

In the field of international development, inquiry into positive deviance has been used to identify and build on the hopeful exceptions within a troubled community. Often cited is the example of Jerry Sternin, who, on behalf of Save the Children, an international development organization, identified a handful of thriving families within communities in Vietnam plagued by malnutrition.¹² Sternin inquired into the behavioral and nutrition patterns that accounted for their deviant state and learned that mothers of healthy children were supplementing their children’s rice diets with shrimp and crab that were readily available in the rice fields. After identifying these patterns, Sternin and his colleagues developed a program to train other mothers about the benefits of these foods and how to prepare them. These trainings were meant to spread the learning and benefits from the positive deviance throughout the broader community.

Employees act as positive deviants when they use their differences from the majority or lack of fit within an organization as a springboard for experimentation, constructive rebellion, and learning. Tempered radicals can turn their differences into positive sources of adaptation through a number of different processes illustrated throughout the book. Each of these processes involves recognizing opportunities in everyday situations that may seem uncomfortable, threatening, or otherwise difficult.¹³

Skilled tempered radicals, for example, learn how to turn confrontations that arise from expressed differences into opportunities to shift people’s hearts and minds. Susan, a midlevel human resource executive in a male-dominated workplace, wanted to get to know and support other women who would probably face obstacles similar to the ones she had confronted early in her career. She decided to invite entry-level women managers in her division to a get-acquainted lunch. Soon after returning from the lunch, she was scolded by a male colleague, a rising star in her division, for her rebel-rousing act (the lunch). Susan understood from the tone of her colleague’s accusation that he viewed her lunch as threatening and as a marked departure from the norm of conformity and silence—the unstated expectation that women who wanted to be one of the boys would remain silent about the obstacles they confronted and pretend that gender played no part in their experience. Susan knew that he was partially correct—she was deviating from the script most women followed, and she wanted to do so constructively. After cooling down, she decided to invite her colleague to the next gathering so he could meet the women and learn for himself about some of the challenges they faced and the strategies they discussed for helping one another. After the lunch, Susan’s male colleague became the most outspoken and loyal advocate for women in the organization. Had Susan lashed out when her colleague challenged her deviance, she and the women in the organization never would have gained this influential ally.

Biza, a highly skilled Malaysian engineer, also leveraged his difference into productive learning in the organization. Biza was informed that he was being passed over for promotion because he was quiet and self-effacing, and therefore did not fit the profile of how aspiring managers were supposed to behave. Eventually, he decided to invite his manager into a conversation about cultural assumptions and different beliefs and norms about self-promotion. From this conversation grew an awareness of the implicit bias in the company’s promotion criteria that had led to the loss of many high-potential managers from other cultures to the company’s global competitors.

Kathy Levinson, former president of E*Trade and senior executive at Charles Schwab, and also a lesbian activist, provides another powerful example of positive deviance. Throughout her career, and well before she ascended to positions of formal power, Levinson was a master at turning threatening situations that resulted from her expressed deviance into opportunities for organizational learning and change. After being told that her lesbian partner could not work in the department that she managed under the company’s no-nepotism policy, Levinson initiated a conversation with senior managers in human resources to learn more about how the company defined and treated marital relationships. To apply the no-nepotism policy to her lesbian relationship, the company must view her relationship on par with traditional family relationships. So, if nepotism rules apply to homosexual and lesbian relationships, she reasoned, corporate benefits should be patterned on the same assumption. This logic (along with other challenges in the system) and the conversations that followed led to one of the first corporate domestic benefits programs in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Levinson’s deviance triggered a conflict. Rather than complying with existing rules or stridently protesting against the apparent contradiction, she used the event as an opportunity to open a conversation that ultimately resulted in concrete changes in practice.

Tactics for turning differences and conflicts into opportunities for positive change are discussed at length in chapters 4 and 5. More generally, I provide additional insight throughout the book of how the very behaviors that express tempered radicals’ differences can become occasions for learning, positive adaptation, and change.

POS also provides the central insight that significant social change can occur when organizational or community members identify these local instances of positive deviation and amplify them throughout a system. This bottom-up process is a cornerstone of Appreciative Inquiry (AI)—a powerful POS approach to systemwide change developed by David Cooperrider of Case Western Reserve, which is predicated on identifying and spreading that which is positive or life-giving within a system.¹⁴ With growing evidence of its effectiveness as an organizational development method, AI begins with inquiry into local examples of positive relationships, practices, language, emotions, and modes of thought. With these positive exemplars (often deviant exemplars), people locate concrete ways to build on, emulate, and amplify them.¹⁵

Appreciative Inquiry and other approaches to change within POS demonstrate clearly that an approach to change that originates at the local level needn’t remain local. Small wins needn’t stay small. Microactions that originate as expressions of self can be the basis of altered expectations and norms. Small conversations occasioned by one’s deviance can open the hearts and minds of adversaries and change the behaviors of powerful actors. In short, although the means of tempered radicalism may be incremental and local, its ends can be profound and far-reaching.

The Role of Leadership in Encouraging and Amplifying Local Initiatives

In chapter 8, I summarize the features of organizations that surfaced as most influential to tempered radicals’ willingness to speak up, initiate experiments, and otherwise express their differences. While several organizational conditions mattered in this regard, tempered radicals in my study consistently pointed to the quality of their relationships with immediate supervisors.¹⁶ They explained that this relationship shaped how comfortable they felt, which influenced their willingness to speak up and take risks.

That tempered radicals’ explanations emphasized the importance of their immediate supervisor and work group is consistent with prior research on work teams. Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School has shown that when the psychological safety of a work group is high, members are more likely to engage in behaviors that are interpersonally risky, such as giving candid feedback, asking questions, challenging coworkers’ views, and admitting errors—the very behaviors that lead to learning in groups and organizations.¹⁷ For tempered radicals, a sense of psychological safety appears to dampen the perceived risk of rocking the boat.

This link to prior research on work