CHAPTER 12
Researcher and Teacher

I believe we are entering a period in which the institutional struggle to survive will usher in the “age of the development of human potential”… and the frontier for the second half of the twentieth century will be creative achievement with the thinking, feeling, acting, and growing of people.¹

ROBERT K. GREENLEAF, C. 1955.

War may be Hell, but the increased knowledge it generates spills out of Hades and into all of peacetime society. World War II saw an explosion of knowledge that went far beyond radar, military tactics, and more efficient ways to blow fragile human flesh into smithereens. While the guns were blazing, men and women had to be recruited, evaluated and trained—quickly and efficiently; they had to be managed, transformed into spies in enemy cultures, killers on the battlefield, and healers in the hospitals; they had to be led. Bob Greenleaf was destined to embrace some of that hard-won wartime knowledge about how to select the right people for available jobs and use it to change the history of personnel assessments in American business.

It all started one morning in October 1943, when the war was in its most furious hours. At an executive staff meeting of the super-secret Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Colonel G. Edward Buxton, who was filling in during the absence of legendary Director William “Wild Bill” Donovan, heard a suggestion from psychologist James A. Hamilton that the OSS should establish a psychological assessment unit modeled after Britain’s War Office Selection Board (WOSB).² Its main purpose would be to weed out those military and civilian recruits who could not stand the stress of working behind enemy lines while they gathered intelligence, sabotaged facilities, organized resistance, and operated in the never-never land of independent action under overall military direction. The assessment unit needed to do more than eliminate people with obvious defects, however. It also had to spot individuals who combined specific skills with the capacity to improvise creative solutions on the spot, unusual people who could work alone or with a team and embrace a commitment to die for each mission if necessary. No existing tests could measure such things, but the need was great. “We simply must have men who can shoulder responsibility and use initiative with common sense,” wrote one field commander. “We have had at least eight men, who for various quirks in their make-up have had to be pulled from the field. One was definitely a psychiatric case.”³ Another wire from the field was more pithy: Send us “a few first-rate men rather than a boatload of mediocrities.”⁴

Buxton and Donovan approved the idea of an assessment unit. Colonel Henson L. Robinson saw to organizational details, while Harvard’s Dr. Harry Murray quickly gathered a group of brilliant and sometimes-quirky scholars, researchers, practitioners, trainers, and intelligence experts at “The Farm,” a country estate forty miles outside Washington in Fairfax, Virginia, which came to be known as “Station S” or “S School.” The core group included such men as Dr. (later First Lieutenant) John W. Gardner, Ph.D. and, eventually, the brilliant social psychologist Kurt Lewin as project consultants. Dr. Murray, who had already made significant contributions to surgery, biochemistry, biology, physiology, and psychology, was a perfect leader for this group. He was described as “a unique combination of thinking machine, dreamer, two-fisted drinker, and scientist whose inner driving force suggests a band of Scotch Presbyterians raising from their knees to do the will of God.”⁵ Their mandate: figure out how to evaluate, select, and prepare civilians and military recruits to be 152 effective spies, saboteurs, organizers, and even killers, not just in Germany and Japan but in Africa, Asia, South America—anywhere their services would be needed.

In December, the unit evaluated its first batch of recruits using organismic—or Gestalt—principles, explained in the book. “Some standard procedures, elementalistic in design, were included in our program,” they wrote in their report, “because the best of these instruments is especially efficient in picking out disqualifying defects of function and so in eliminating men who are definitely inferior. Organismic methods, on the other hand, are to be recommended in addition whenever it is necessary to discriminate unusual talent, to measure ability in the range running from low average to high superior.”⁶ In other words, the unit sought to evaluate the whole person, using what they called “multiform” instruments in order to make “sufficiently reliable predictions” of suitability.⁷ Their arsenal included written tests, interviews, problem-solving challenges, and contrived situations that allowed them to make judgments on capacity for leadership, teamwork, psychological health, and physical endurance. OSS staffers took note of every behavior by recruits: where they sat, what they ate, how they spoke, which bunks they slept in, what they talked about in informal moments, how they responded when challenged by OSS people who masqueraded as lowly staffers at Station S. The psychiatrists even got them drunk to see if they could hold their liquor without letting go of secrets.⁸ Every person was assigned a fitness category after a thorough review of test results and personal impressions by all trainers. By the end of the war, 5,391 recruits had been assessed by the OSS in one-day or three-day periods. Successful recruits were then sent on for further training before being placed in the field.

Validation studies covering the first eight months of 1944 showed an impressive success rate for graduates—including a large number of young women—operating in the European Theater of Operations. “The percentage of unsatisfactory cases was found to be 0 (zero) in four of the six branches, whereas in one of the two remaining branches this figure was 6 percent, and in the other 14 percent.”⁹

In 1946 Bob Greenleaf read an article in Fortune magazine, titled “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” that described the OSS assessment work.¹⁰ The book Assessment of Men, describing the work of the OSS unit, was published in 1948; in May of the following year, an article titled “An Executive 153 Development Program” in Personnel Journal described an assessment program developed by The Mead Corporation that drew heavily on the methodology of the OSS unit.¹¹ But even before those publications, Green-leaf saw the relevance of formal assessment in a business like AT&T, which—like the OSS—also needed to predict the suitability of individuals for employment and promotion. This possibility was recognized by the OSS’s own staff, who wrote in 1948, “It would not take much ingenuity to modify some of the techniques and to invent others of the same type to meet the requirements of other institutions.”¹²

Bob realized the importance of timing, however. He knew that the new AT&T president—a slick, hard-driving, abrasive, but financially savvy man—would likely not approve such an effort, so he put the Fortune article in a file and bided his time.¹³ In the next few years, he dropped hints here and there that the company might look into an assessment program some day but wrote no memos, mounted no visible promotional campaign, and twisted no arms. He was patient, as patient as George Greenleaf had been thirty-five years earlier standing quietly in front of a broken steam engine until he had gathered enough information—and intuition—to do something useful.

In 1951, the time was right. After only a few years in office, AT&T president Leroy Wilson died of leukemia and was replaced by Cleo Craig, one of Bob’s old bosses. Craig was a somewhat introverted intellectual, a diplomat who personally despised company politics, a whiz with numbers, and a leader who was not afraid to give subordinates wide latitude in how they did their jobs. More importantly for Bob’s assessment project, Craig understood the importance of research.¹⁴

Still, Bob began slowly, in a stealth mode. During the next few years, he invited prominent psychologists and researchers to make presentations to key managers and executives so that they could learn what he already knew: although there was plenty of research about the developmental cycles of children, there was almost none about adults. It was as if people quit growing intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually the moment they reached the age of twenty-one. Only recently had psychologists like Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow been focusing on human potential rather than psychopathologies, and no research had yet focused on the capacities and adult development cycles of man-agers.¹⁵ It was probably during this period that Bob had a conversation with Newcomb that revealed his personal strategy on this and so many 154 other efforts. “Over the years I am sure that my father tried many times to pass on to me some of what he had learned,” recalled Newcomb.

It would be several years before a full-blown assessment effort, along the lines of the OSS model, could be mounted. In the meantime, Bob became involved in multiple overlapping projects, each of which moved the giant bureaucracy toward a more precise—and often innovative—process of executive selection and development.

To understand how he arrived at the place where top executives and the Board granted him nearly universal trust in these efforts, one must look at a presentation for which he became famous within AT&T and its hundreds of operating companies. It was called by various names through the years: “What Is A Manager?” “Executive Ability” or, in its printed version, “Management Ability.” Bob gave the talk to managers at all levels within the company. In the Acknowledgment section of a version printed by Pacific Telephone, the original author is listed as anonymous, but the Division Plant Manager goes on to say, “There is no doubt that [the author’s] wisdom and delivery are evident between the lines, giving credit to his effort.”¹⁷ Most people who had been around the company awhile knew the author was Robert Greenleaf, and a drawing of a green leaf on the pamphlet cover was a sure giveaway.

The gist of the talk was a succinct definition of operational (not theoretical) management ability—also called “executive ability” in overheads that survive of his in-person presentations. Here it is: “Management ability is the ability to state a goal and reach it, through the efforts of other people, and satisfy those whose judgment must be respected, under conditions of stress.”¹⁸ Greenleaf 155 expands on each phrase of the definition and then notes that bosses have the problem of deciding who is “developable” as a manager. “Will I bet my chips on this person or will I bet them somewhere else? I haven’t enough chips to bet on everybody. . . but I still have to make this decision.” To give guidance on that decision, Greenleaf outlines further considerations, starting with the “Basic ‘Good’ Man.” (When Greenleaf developed this talk, every manager was a man.) His bullet-point summary gives a fair idea of the content, but it omits the richness of the written explanations— and of Greenleaf’s style of writing, which is far more folksy than in his later essays. It is, in fact, reminiscent of the writings of Norman Vincent Peale, Napoleon Hill, or the best authors of American success literature— conversational, with a liberal sprinkling of apt stories.

Greenleaf covers the basic points one would expect in a short treatise on management abilities: integrity, effective intelligence, enthusiasm, attitude, skills, money sense, time management, and communication. But he also works in “Greenleafian” themes that one would likely not find anywhere else, even in today’s management textbooks. A few examples:

The Management Ability pamphlet was used for years after Bob retired from the company. In 1970, one executive wrote Bob, “I often smile when a young manger says, in commenting on the booklet, ‘These thoughts are really new and great.’ A wish today would be for a sequel, yet I also feel that this need can be served by rereading and striving to do better in carrying out the principles outlined in the original. You did leave many of us a code to live by.”²⁰

The Management Ability talk and publication, plus Bob’s years of research and work in evaluating and developing managers, made him the logical choice to spearhead an innovative program that developed executives through exposure to the humanities—the Bell Humanities Program. It ran full-bore from 1953 to 1958 and continued in shortened forms until 1970.

The AT&T humanities program to develop executives had its roots in the 1920’s, when Chester I. Barnard, whom Greenleaf called “a genius,” was vice president of the Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania and 157 arranged for promising young executives to take courses in the humanities at the University of Pennsylvania.²¹ By 1952, one of those young men, Wilfred Gillen, had risen in the ranks to run the Bell System operating company in Pennsylvania. He persuaded AT&T president Craig to revive the program. Bob Greenleaf was given the assignment of making it work.

The first effort began in the fall of 1953, when twenty middle managers, along with their families, settled in at the University of Pennsylvania for a ten-month course designed by the university, paid for by AT&T, and offered under the umbrella of U. Penn’s Center for Humanistic Studies.²² The curriculum included courses in logic, music, art, American civilization, architecture, and city planning—even a course on Ulysses.²³ By 1960, one hundred thirty-four managers had participated in this program. In 1956, Dartmouth and Williams colleges began shorter, eight-week humanities programs for AT&T executives, and similar programs were developed at Northwestern and Swarthmore. Through 1964, nine hundred forty-three middle managers were exposed to the Bell Humanities Program.²⁴ Every university offering the short courses developed a slightly different curriculum, but most included units on philosophy, American history, law, art, music and literature, economic thought, and social history.

One wonders why a corporation would go to such expense for so few people, with such uncertain results. Greenleaf provided the answer in a historical background to the humanities program. Beginning with the Great Depression and extending through the austerity of World War II, hiring and organizational development was restricted. By the postwar years, top leadership was aging and retiring. The need for well-trained new blood was crucial, because AT&T and its operating units numbered over two hundred-fifty companies.²⁵ Furthermore, the world was different. “Looking back,” said John Markle II, “we see that our predecessors were concerned mainly with production, sales, finance, and technological advancement.”

As Greenleaf discovered, there were precious few ways to fairly determine the long-term impact of such a program, and Mr. Greenleaf was a demon for evaluations. Faculty did their own assessments and Bob sponsored several company efforts along those lines. He never expected immediate business results from the investment. “The only objective for manager education which seemed dependable for the future,” he wrote, “was that of inculcating a research and experimental attitude toward work and a sustaining interest in personal growth.”²⁷ In 1957, he hired Douglas Williams Associates to evaluate that year’s Northwestern University one-semester course, taught to nineteen executives. The report showed that participants “overwhelmingly liked [the experience], considered it worthwhile, and felt it to be of value to self and the Company.” Participants reported more tolerance of other peoples’ views; they were more likely to take more risks, consider complexity, and factor in broader issues when making decisions, and “five of the nineteen explicitly stated that they looked more now into the background of a person to seek a decision’s effect on thought and behavior—the whys. . . Virtually every man left Northwestern with a heightened awareness of and interest in ‘social, political, and economic’ problems and concerns.” Most participants had their awareness heightened so much they were critical of the company’s policies during the then-current recession. The faculty was equally enthusiastic: “They find it a stimulating experience to work with our men, and they believe that it has helped them do a better job with their regular teaching.”²⁸

Even though he gave full credit to each participating university for designing the humanities courses, Bob was deeply involved in discussions with deans and faculty members, helping shape the curriculum, offering contacts for outside speakers—like Peter Drucker—and often serving alongside the speakers as a visiting lecturer. The most impressive teacher he met during this period was Dartmouth’s John Finch, who spent the summer with tough, experienced executives digging into Shakespeare’s history plays. Bob told the story of a “sensational” class he observed with the master teacher. 159

Greenleaf believed in the value of exposure to the humanities. He and Esther had always done it on their own, attending concerts, lectures, and poetry readings from their earliest days together in Greenwich village. In the case of the Bell Humanities Program, he was leery of the way the program was initiated. Douglas Williams was there and later reflected on the humanities effort and another program that was dumped in Bob’s lap at around the same time, an effort to turn installers and repairmen into salespeople who promoted new equipment for residential users.

Bob was also concerned about the way participants for the humanities program were chosen. None of the top people who picked candidates for the program used the same criteria. “Often they would not select a likely candidate because he was too valuable in his current job,” recalled Douglas Williams. “They might pick a person who already had a liberal arts degree because he would be ‘at home’ in this course (just the opposite of what was intended). Or a man would be selected who had performed well in a risky venture, or was perhaps tired from the grind he had been on for a year—as an award to ‘get away from it all.’”³¹

Sure enough, when Frederick R. Kappel replaced President Craig in 1956, it was the beginning of the end for the Bell Humanities Program. In 1958, a high-level committee recommended that support be withdrawn for the programs at Pennsylvania, Swarthmore, Dartmouth, and Williams. They would be partially replaced by a new Management Objectives Program (MOP) with a tighter focus on business issues. The MOP curriculum, started at Dartmouth, was designed by AT&T staff under Greenleaf’s direction, but it still incorporated elements of the humanities. Three courses emerged for the eight-week session: “(1) The Language and Literature of Decision (taught by a professor of English); (2) Analytical Thinking (taught by a professor of philosophy); and (3) Leadership and Goal Setting (taught by a representative of [AT&T—usually Bob Greenleaf.])”³² MOP continued at Dartmouth for ten years.

Simultaneously with all this activity, AT&T ran a four-week course for department heads at Asbury Park, New Jersey, called the Bell System Executive Conference. Begun in 1953, the Executive Conference had three goals: to broaden thinking and outlook, to increase present effectiveness, and to stimulate interest in further self-development.³³ In the course of studying economics, international problems, social developments, and a score of other issues, participants were treated to frequent lectures by some of Bob Greenleaf’s buddies: historians, sociologists, psychologists, ethicists, and theologians among them. 161

The Executive Conferences were not cheap. From November, 1953 through June, 1955 alone, the total cost, including conferees’ salaries, was $1,387,500, and this was just one of several management development programs underway during the same period.³⁴ Outside speakers included Peter Drucker and other management consultants; Edwin Nourse, former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers; professors from MIT and the Harvard School of Business; one or two super salesmen, merchandisers and accountants; and Dr. Edwin Aubrey, Professor of Religious Thought at the University of Pennsylvania.³⁵

In reading through reports of various top executive committee meetings about the direction of executive education and the traditional and non-traditional courses AT&T offered throughout the 1950s, one is struck by the fact that Robert K. Greenleaf is usually listed as the secretary or simply as a representative. He almost never chaired the high-profile committees, even though he would have been the logical choice to head many of them. “As any who have had the assignment can testify, the post of ex officio secretary to such a prestigious group as the committee of Presidents can be a very influential one,” he wrote in the final report on the Bell Humanities Program.³⁶ This was his favorite way of getting things done: staying under the radar, exerting quiet influence, and positioning himself as a listener who could assist in probing, clarifying, and building consensus.

In the midst of his duties for the humanities program, Bob had not forgotten about his dream of a comprehensive assessment project. When he judged that enough support would be in place, he went to President Craig and proposed a small, contained project to assess just one group of beginning managers, all recent college graduates. In order to see how accurate the assessments were, the company would conduct longitudinal studies (that is, research would be repeated at intervals) and track the careers of assessed managers. Craig approved the project.

Bob believed the current methods of assessing and orienting new hires was a mess. Bell Labs, Western Electric manufacturing facilities, Long Lines (which provided long distance service), and the scores of regional Bell companies all used different methods of assessment and orientation, so there really was no consistent method.³⁷ Of particular concern to Bob was the practice of making beginning managers spend their first months— in one company, the first two years—on rotating assignments in 162 every area of the business. The idea behind this was that “experience is the best teacher” and that new employees should get an overall picture before getting on with their individual jobs. Bob thought this was a waste of time and money, but there was no data to support or refute his position, and there was plenty of emotional attachment to the old way just because things had always been done that way. He knew that if he began by suggesting elimination of companies’ long-held programs, his assessment idea would never be approved. Best to sneak up on it.

In 1956, Bob hired his most important ally in the assessment effort: Dr. Douglas W. Bray, a Yale-trained psychologist who had worked with the Aviation Psychology Program in the Army Air Force during the last year-and-a-half of the war and since then had built a distinguished career as a researcher. Like Bob, Douglas Bray had also been impressed by the book Assessment of Men, shared Bob’s concern with actual behavior rather than theories about behavior, and held the belief that the whole person should be evaluated with a battery of tests.³⁸ Bob turned Bray loose to design the first assessment program, hire staff, and conduct follow-up longitudinal studies, while Bob managed ongoing support from the AT&T president and board. Finally, ten years after Bob conceived the idea of a comprehensive assessment effort, the program was underway!

In the summer of 1956, Dr. Bray’s staff administered a week-long battery of assessment procedures to the first group of seventy-four beginning managers from Michigan Bell Telephone. Like the OSS, AT&T’s staff discussed each person individually to make final judgments, considering results from written and oral tests, specialized tasks, personal observations, and interviews. Bray then followed up with his longitudinal Management Progress Studies, a task that eventually took twenty-five years of his remarkably productive career and made him a legend in the field of assessments.³⁹

When Bray’s first annual follow-up report came in, Bob was vindicated. New hires found it devastating to wait for months—or even years— before getting on with their careers. With hard data in hand, he was able to change that ineffective practice in many operating companies. More importantly, he and Douglas Bray had invented the idea of corporate assessment centers. Within two years, other AT&T operating companies were begging for similar programs. Top executives who would never have approved the initiative now bragged about it. In its first four years of operation, the program assessed four hundred twenty-two beginning managers from various AT&T companies. Within a decade, the idea had spread to 163 other corporations, and thousands of assessment centers were operating all over the world. Bob later called his support of assessment work “one of my greatest contributions” to AT&T.⁴⁰

Bray dedicated his book Formative Years in Business to Robert Green-leaf and always had fond memories of his association with the supervisor who supported him as he changed corporate history. “His style was to listen and encourage good ideas rather than discourage bad ones. He was not a rigid, patterned kind of guy but was relaxed and open. Bob never said, ‘Do it my way.’ If you were in the ballpark, he simply encouraged you. I never had a problem with him. He never questioned that what I was doing wasn’t right.”⁴¹

The Management Progress Study ended with the breakup of AT&T in 1984, but it still stands as one of the most impressive research projects in the history of American business. Among its many contributions was its emphasis on the whole person, an exploration of human capacities rather than liabilities, and emerging “life themes” of adults.⁴²

Before he ever heard of the assessment work of the OSS, Bob was well-prepared to understand its significance. Even though he often said, “I am not a scholar,” by the end of the war he had developed into a crackling good researcher, with personal knowledge accumulated from hundreds of studies. Bob knew there was nothing mystical about research. It was simply an organized way to get close to the truth of a matter—not the full truth, because that was seldom possible when it came to personnel issues—but the pieces of truth one could reasonably observe, measure, and manage.

In the course of his travels during the 1930’s, Bob occasionally visited the Western Electric Hawthorne Works, a manufacturing plant in Cicero near Chicago, and heard about some unusual research going on there. The results of the famous “Hawthorne Studies” were destined to transform management and usher in a new era of human relations in business. Bob Greenleaf was in the middle of it all; he knew the key players and used their findings in his ongoing work at the company. The Hawthorne results eventually validated Bob Greenleaf’s personal views about management-worker relations, but the findings gave him more than personal satisfaction. They also offered a proven set of principles about effective listening.

The Hawthorne Studies began in 1924 with a simple experiment based on a reasonable hypothesis: that worker productivity varied 164 according to the level of illumination in the work area. If substantiated, this hypothesis would have validated Frederick Taylor’s Scientific Management idea that managers could twiddle with the external environment and, like automatons, workers would move production up or down in response to changes. It would also have been a boon to General Electric, which sponsored the original study with the hope of selling more light bulbs to manufacturers. But a funny thing happened on the way to tabulating results. Productivity went up every time the light levels went up, went down, or changed in any way. In fact, researchers had to dim illumination to the level of moonlight before it affected output negatively. Other factors must have been affecting worker behavior, but what were they?⁴³

In 1926, Hawthorne executives and outside investigators were joined by Harvard Business School professor Elton Mayo, an Australian with training in psychology, philosophy, and worker relations. In a study of fourteen men in the “bank wiring room,” Mayo’s team discovered that group norms among workers were more important than external variables. Researchers then tested other variables on a group of female workers who assembled electrical relays and discovered that an increased number of five-minute rest periods did help production (“Gee, that’s the berries!” said one worker), but that fatigue and workday length had negligible effects. The researchers’ overall conclusion would shake the corporate world and make Frederick Taylor’s assumptions about worker motivation obsolete. Their report said, “The mental attitude of the operator toward the supervisor and working and home conditions is probably the biggest single factor governing the employee’s efficiency.”⁴⁴ Or, as another contemporary writer put it: “The ability and willingness of the supervisor to listen rather than to shout orders; to know and understand each worker in his group; to be genuinely interested but not domineering; these are some of the aspects of good supervision that turned out to be vastly more important than hours or rest periods or method of payment in improving the mental attitudes of the employees and thereby increasing their productivity as well as their sat-isfaction.”⁴⁵ Participants in the studies felt valued because they had been listened to, and they knew that their opinions mattered. They had more control over their situations and less conflict with management. They developed internal motivations for performance that were more important than external conditions.⁴⁶ 165

The Hawthorne studies caused an earthquake in management circles. Imagine a screen upon which traditional assumptions about workers had been projected since the beginning of the industrial revolution: individual people were expendable and replaceable like gears in a machine; the main role of managers was to crack the whip and keep up quotas; human alienation and loss of community were inevitable at work and, in fact, had nothing to do with one’s work; bosses were there to boss and workers were there to perform or be fired, regardless of the human cost. The Hawthorne studies ripped down that screen of projected assumptions, revealing the soft human flesh and diamond-hard human spirits that it had masked. The “Human Relations School of Management” was born, and its new gospel was supported by solid research which showed that attention to group and individual human factors increased productivity and profits.⁴⁷

Once the Hawthorne team realized the importance of clean communications vertically (up and down the hierarchy) and laterally (between workers), and the power of simply allowing workers to express themselves, they created a position never before seen in an American corporation: the counselor. The counselor was not a therapist, nor was he or she a go-between who solved problems by shuttling messages between workers and supervisors. In fact, counselors had no formal authority at all, for three reasons. First, employees at every level “might not feel free to discuss their problems. . . They would tend to communicate to [the counselor] only those aspects of their situation which would place them in a favorable light… In the second place… vesting authority in the counselor would tend to weaken the supervisor-employee relationship because it would inevitably take from the supervisor some of his responsibilities in dealing with his people.” Finally, the counselor was primarily oriented toward the human problems of the organization and should not usurp the prerogatives of the supervisor, who was responsible for other areas besides human resources.⁴⁸

Counselors acted a lot like Bob Greenleaf when he volunteered to look into some matter for the AT&T president. Their power came from the fact that they had no traditional power, no axe to grind, no overt or covert mission to accomplish beyond improving each person’s experience at work. They also acted like the Quaker Clerks who sought to understand each person’s point of view through listening and restating positions. 166

What did counselors actually do, then? How could any company justify their salaries? Theirs was a specific function of “adequate diagnosis and understanding of the actual human situations—both individual and group—within the factory.”⁴⁹ In other words, counselors found out what was on people’s minds, asked questions, listened deeply, and explored possible courses of action that could be taken by the person being counseled.

As present-day therapists know, a role like that requires good training and clear ground rules, but the Hawthorne people learned that the counseling role need not be restricted to professionals with advanced degrees. Counselors were recruited from men and women who had a sincere interest in people and their problems and were able to make that interest evident. They modeled the kind of behavior they wished others to express toward them. Counselors (also called “interviewers” by the company) guaranteed absolute confidentiality and were taught to assiduously refrain from making any value judgments about what they were told. “The interviewee must feel free to say anything he wishes to the interviewer, and this process is not encouraged if the interviewer registers approval or disapproval.” The counselor “sees to it that his own sentiments are not acted upon by those of the speaker” because “the counselor’s sole object is to lead the employee to a clear understanding of her problem such that she herself comes to realize what action to take and then assumes responsibility for taking it.”⁵⁰

Bob Greenleaf was already aware of the power of listening. He had been teaching some of these same skills and attitudes to managers in Bell System facilities around the country. “True listening builds strength in other people,” he wrote years later in his famous essay.⁵¹ For him, listening was about doing (learning listening skills) and being—bringing one’s full presence to the encounter. Fritz Roethlisberger, one of the primary Hawthorne researchers, held a similar view.

Roethlisberger was the man who inspired Bob in 1939 to design his first formal listening course for AT&T. Through the years, he taught it hundreds of times.

As airy as the Hawthorne counseling program may sound to hard-nosed business people, it was successful for over twenty years. Five employee counselors were on the Hawthorne staff in 1936. The number peaked at fifty-five in 1948 and went back down to eight in 1955. When new management took charge, he program was discontinued.⁵³

Greenleaf had his own insights about the Hawthorne studies, based on his personal experience with key players. Besides Dr. Mayo and his colleagues, Bob credited four Western Electric executives with the passion and vision to pursue the research: works manager Clarence Stoll, his assistant C. L. Rice, Rice’s superintendent David Levinger, and superintendent G. A. Pennock, all “unusual men in the human side of enterprise.” When the last of these four retired, the counseling program began its fatal decline, but Greenleaf believed that it was successful in its heyday because it was congenial to the culture already established by these four remarkable people and that “its justification was philosophical rather than statistical.” In fact, when other manufacturing plants attempted to introduce a counseling program, “it usually was rejected, sooner or later—not because it was either a right or a wrong thing to do, but simply because it was not congenial with the whole culture… Compatibility of method and culture is as important as understanding organic compatibility of human tissue.”⁵⁴

It is an irony of history that, among researchers, the “Hawthorne effect” has come to mean a phenomenon that skews scientific results. If a study shows better employee attitudes or higher productivity after a change, that could simply be because management cared enough to make any change and ask about it, or encouraged different behaviors through the act of observing behaviors. This criticism has substance if behavior 168 changes are not lasting (or supported by the culture), but it is questionable if research is based on the same assumptions that were disproved by the first Hawthorne illumination studies, especially the idea that external changes are more important motivators than personal or group interactions. “We take data from which all human meaning has been deleted,” wrote Elton Mayo colleague F. J. Roethlisberger, “and then are surprised to find that we reach conclusions which have no human significance.”⁵⁵ Rather than learning the big lessons from Hawthorne, too many repeat the original mistakes. “The results were not screwy [in the original Hawthorne studies], but the experimenters were!”⁵⁶

For years, AT&T had invested millions to understand public attitudes toward the phone giant. A statistical research division within the company handled design, methodology, and number crunching. After the war, interest grew concerning the attitudes of AT&T employees, and that research was assigned to Bob Greenleaf in the Personnel Department. In February of 1948, Bob made a speech before school administrators, titled “Human Relations Research in the Bell System,” in which he summarized some of the ongoing work for which he was responsible. (Today those same studies would likely fall under the banner of “human resources.”)

Greenleaf’s humanistic approach to work and his recognition of corporate obligations to stockowners came through in his overview of personnel research. Like Theodore Vail, he believed that nurturing growth in people was the smartest thing a corporation could do for employees and for profit.

Some of the studies on which Greenleaf reported were quite large; others were so informal as to not be considered legitimate research. A cooperative labor-management study interviewed three–hundred fifty management people, the president of AT&T, one–hundred fifty union officers, and one thousand non-management people. Other projects looked at criteria for employment, selection of supervisors, emerging employee attitudes, and the relationship of supervisors to those being supervised.⁵⁸

The latter study, of supervisors and the supervised, was conducted by AT&T district superintendents who were given training in methodology and evaluation. One of Greenleaf’s favorite strategies was to involve company employees who were close to the action, rather than farm the research out to professionals. Ever the realist, he knew that if results were to lead to action, “it usually requires of those who are asked to accept it that they change some well-established personal point of view or habit. Experience indicates that people do not readily change a well-established habit or attitude simply because they know about a better way and concur that it is superior.”⁵⁹ This insight is the reason he wanted to make managers part of the research team. “We believe that the way to accelerate the discovery, acceptance and use of the best human relations principles is to involve as many management people as possible in research, to apply a good learning principle—participation in discovery—as an important means of moving toward the central objective.”⁶⁰ Participation, an approach too often ignored in corporate studies, is validated by Michael Q. Patton, one of the contemporary legends in research evaluation.

Bob liked to assign two-person teams to behavioral research tasks— trusted employees who had some basic knowledge of research but were not too elevated in the hierarchy. “If a study team is well chosen, a curious development takes place. The team attacks the problem with more than twice the determination and zest than either member would have sepa-rately.”⁶² He insisted on sound methodology; after all, Bob had learned from the masters. The team had to agree on the criteria for a study, establish benchmarks for each of the criteria, and develop a study design for getting and analyzing quantitative and qualitative data. Both team members participated in gathering data, largely through interviews, but Green-leaf believed that “the valuable contribution of the team comes out of the ‘huddle’ after the interview. This is where the biases are canceled out and deeper insights and convictions are developed.”⁶³ Team members were forced to agree on the data and what it meant, which required skills of rational analysis, collaboration, and intuition. “Ultimately, [a team member] would acquire a feeling of certainty about [the] assessment. Then [one] could be said to ‘know’,” said Greenleaf.⁶⁴

Bob believed the team approach was good for the company and good for development of participating individuals.

Bob also used research assignments as a way to nurture, mentor, and challenge up-and-coming employees. More than once he put roadblocks in the way of team members, just to see how they responded.

Since moving to New York in 1929, Greenleaf had also learned about the scientific applications of research and development from the people at 171 Bell Laboratories. He jumped at any chance to go visit the facility at 463 West Street in Manhattan and, after 1941, at their modernistic building in Murray Hill, New Jersey. He loved to look at the gadgets and spend time with some of the best scientific minds in the world. Even though he never wrote about those conversations, he would have had the opportunity to speak with people like John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, the team that invented the first transistor in December 1947. Other Bell Labs employees gave the world the first sound motion picture, the first electrically operated digital computer, long-distance television transmission, the fax machine, the laser, cellular telephone technology, communications satellites and, of course, the touch-tone phone.⁶⁶ The people at Bell Labs both plumbed the realities of the physical world, just to understand nature (pure research), and invented new technologies to apply their findings in practical ways (technology).⁶⁷ That mixture was not so different from the methods of the Management Progress Study, which conducted basic research into adult lifecycles and drew conclusions for application of that new knowledge in the corporate structure, and in programs that fostered the growth and applications of individual human skills.

Bob’s favorite room at the Bell Laboratories’ Murray Hill location was the anechoic chamber, an enclosure that was absolutely silent. The avant-garde musician John Cage once sat in a similar chamber. When he emerged, he complained that the room was not totally quiet as advertised; he still heard noises in there. Engineers asked him to describe the sounds and then gave Cage an explanation. “The low sound you heard was blood flowing through your arteries. The high sound was your nervous system in operation.” Bob Greenleaf, the lifelong meditator, the introvert who had to act in public roles every day, reveled in the chamber’s total silence. He would sit on a chair on the suspended wire-mesh floor, surrounded by foam baffles that allowed no audio reflections, and stay until they kicked him out, lost in the richness of the void.⁶⁸