When there is no paying customer, Yes Men proliferate

In organizations, loyalty to the leader stifles value for the customer.
An analysis of leadership, dissent, Lean and shared responsibility.

A poor colleague, a training consultant, was trying to explain to a group of executives how to navigate workplace safety decision-making to avoid legal complications and prevent accidents.
At one point, the CEO, who was also required to attend the training under the State-Regions agreement, entered the room. After listening distractedly for five minutes, he turned to his front line, turned his back to the trainer, and said, ​​“Let me be clear: I don’t agree with anything this man is saying. ​​” ​​And everyone laughed smugly.

I felt so much solidarity with my colleague that day, as he was publicly undermined by an arrogant man of power!
It was a company that had been privatized for 20 years, but still operated with strong public-sector dynamics (in a non-competitive market), where the only customer was the internal one, because the real customer, the one who pays, had no alternatives.

I have worked for associations, healthcare companies, cooperatives, and organizations that do not produce goods or services in a competitive market but rather serve their members or the public. These are organizations with the ambition to apply lean principles to their processes.
The most challenging part of the job was defining “value” – in the lean sense, “what makes someone smile while paying” – because people eventually realized they weren’t doing it to make the paying customer happy, but to follow internal processes or, worse, to ​​“satisfy the internal customer.”
A socially acceptable way of saying “to make Tom happy,” but more importantly, “to avoid making Dick angry.”

In those organizations, I’ve always found it very difficult to bring about any change. In such contexts, the focus isn’t on valuing the paying customer, but on gaining the right support and the approval of those in charge, regardless of what those who benefit from the services or products—paid for with taxes or membership fees—have to say.
It is in those organizations that I have found a higher incidence of ​​Yes Men (and Yes Women) and lackeys – creatures selected by their environment and who have survived many cycles. They resist leadership changes, thrive in times of uncertainty, and camouflage themselves behind consensus. ​​When a leader has an opinion, they embrace it. ​​When their opinion changes, they change it too. ​​And if the contradiction is too obvious, they simply say, “The context has changed,” thereby avoiding their cognitive dissonance.

As a result, a company’s value is no longer measured by results, ideas, or skills, but rather by loyalty. ​​However, loyalty is not a key to success or innovation for a company facing the current climate of constant change.
Loyalty divides us into factions; loyalty ​​to principles and values, on the other hand, unites us beyond affiliations and endures leadership changes.
In the short term, however, when leaders are vying for power, allegiance can appear – to followers – more beneficial than loyalty, as it offers protection from uncertainty: knowing which side to support is more reassuring than knowing the right course of action.

A key book in my education was Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto: in 2009, the Indian-born American surgeon recounts in this essay the results of a project commissioned by the WHO that involved the study and testing of new health protocols capable of reducing clinical errors – without the help of technology.
Gawande started from a personal point of view: even the best professionals, including himself, in the face of the growing complexity of modern systems, make avoidable mistakes.
His intuition was as simple as it was revolutionary: introduce a shared checklist before each surgery, during which each member of the team —from the chief surgeon to the youngest nurse— had to be able to openly express any risks, doubts, or critical points related to the operation. This brief “round-the-table discussion” broke the implicit hierarchy of the operating room, where often only the surgeon’s voice matters and toward whom there is a certain awe; indeed, anyone who expressed their opinion was appreciated, especially if it differed.
The results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, were impressive: serious complications were reduced by 36% and surgical mortality by nearly 50%.

When you abandon the culture of infallibility and create a safe space for dissent, the quality of the outcome increases.
What saddened Gawande was that this “zero-cost” protocol remained the heritage of a minority of hospitals, but I can imagine how much his work and evidence bothered certain barons!

That round of the table, set up by Gawande, works because it can build a culture that questions the principle of authority, to which we humans are “slightly” sensitive… to put it mildly.
In his famous Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini devotes an entire chapter to the power of authority, showing how deeply rooted in us is the tendency to obey those we perceive as entitled to command.
One of the most emblematic experiments cited in the book was conducted by Charles Hofling in 1966 at 22 US hospitals. In this study, a doctor —an actor — called the nurse on duty ordering a patient to be given an invented drug called “Astroten”, at a dose double the maximum limit indicated on the label. The nurse had never seen or known the doctor, and the procedure explicitly violated hospital protocols. Yet, 21 out of 22 nurses prepared to carry out the order without objection, stopped only at the last moment by the researchers.

Lean and Agile systems were created to defend organizations from this type of degeneration and put the customer, the one who pays, at the center.
In the Lean model, responsibility is first and foremost distributed from the bottom up, and not vice versa: those closest to the problem are allowed to solve it, even if they do not have the highest rank. It is an architecture that discourages deference “to leaders who decide” and rewards critical thinking.
As much as I am not a cultural anthropologist, I believe that the Toyota approach was, at the time, disruptive even in Japan, where manifesting dissent, especially towards the hierarchy, is anything but easy.

In organizations that successfully introduce a culture of continuous improvement, during a meeting, a technician can contradict a manager if the data contradicts him, and he doesn’t lose face: the manager loses face if he ignores the data.

It’s a culture that overturns the very concept of “loyalty”: you’re not loyal to your boss, but to the principle of continuous improvement.

When the worker raises his hand to say that a part is no good, no one reads it as a criticism of the team leader, but it is a warning to prevent a defective product from falling into the hands of a customer, also putting the company’s reputation at risk.
Kaizen, “improvement” in Japanese, is based on the idea that employees are the best resource for identifying problems and making changes.
In this context, the ability of workers to report a problem is not seen as an act of dissent, but as an essential contribution to company growth.

In the Agile world, responsibility is primarily shared, because the team doesn’t work to please a boss (also because a real boss doesn’t have one) but to generate measurable value for the client: in fact, it’s the entire team –not just the leader– who presents their work in front of the client, with burdens and honors.
Customer feedback is constant, and all team members are exposed; dissent before meeting with the customer is seen as a sign of health, not rebellion.

Tacitus, the Roman historian, advocated the necessity of an enlightened prince to avoid the potential civil wars that had arisen during the Republic; yet this principality also needed its opinions to be challenged for the sake of Rome. He could not state this directly and thus conveyed it through his historical analyses at a time when the Senate had lost its power and was merely fawning over the dux.

Tacitus concluded that living under tyrants was a condition to be navigated with prudence, avoiding the two extremes: theatrical opposition and servile flattery. He suggested a third way: ‘the inner freedom of judgment, exercised with restraint and dignity’.

This is perhaps the only possible advice for those working in an organization that rewards faithfulness more than loyalty, and who, at the same time, cannot or do not want to leave for various reasons, or lack the strength to transform the corporate culture by introducing Agile or Lean principles.

To try and change things, there is no use in gossiping against those in power at the coffee machine. One must remain clear-headed, maintain critical thinking, and speak with the calmness of data, demonstrating a genuine interest in the well-being of the company and the customer.
Then, if the manager has no counterevidence yet persists on a path that harms the customer or the company, the individual will have one more reason to decide whether to send out their CV or—and here is where eagles dare! —have the courage to speak with their boss’s boss.