Do Not Blindly Obey Authority
Dave Smith has been an Industrial Maintenance Electrician since 1975. He has taught maintenance, troubleshooting and safety courses to thousands of electricians in mines, mills, refineries, factories, plants, power stations and offshore platforms throughout North America and the Middle East. Dave is a hands-on guy and teache...
His decision, be the way, directly contravened the beliefs stated on the Mission Statement and Safety Policy documents displayed prominently throughout the plant. What’s even more interesting to me was the lack of reaction on the part of the plant and safety managers. Even though they knew the risks facing their workers, and knew there was a legislated requirement in their province to protect them from these risks—and even knew their own moral and legal responsibilities—they simply accepted the COO’s decision.
Why did the safety and plant managers simply acquiesce?
The answer lies in the work of Stanley Milgram and his research on Obedience to Authority.
Blindly following authority Milgram’s work decisively proves that “normal” people are capable of terrible deeds when “simply following orders” (the now infamous pain inflicting experiments, which you can find on YouTube).
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs—and without any particular hostility—can become agents in a terrible process. Moreover, when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear and they’re asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few have the resources needed to resist authority.
Two summers ago, a certain Canadian oilfield was drenched with rains lasting several days. Large areas of the oilfield were outright impassable, while the others proved treacherous for the tanker trucks transporting oil from the field tanks to the local battery. Some trucks were getting stuck on well sites; others were sliding off rural roads into ditches. The truckers complained to the field foreman, who phoned headquarters and described the situation, suggesting they should shut the field down for the night.
The production manager at HQ, who was eight hours away from the danger, said “keep pumping”, and why wouldn’t he: his salary, bonus and benefits were all derived from production. The field foreman, whose livelihood was dictated by the production manager, shrugged his shoulders and told the truckers, “They say to keep pumping”.
(The field foreman and the truckers—who still refer to this incident—interpreted the order to keep pumping as: “I am willing to risk your life for my bonus”.)
But, as in Milgram’s experiments, everybody obeyed. The night was full of loaded tankers skidding into ditches and the field was alive with rescue vehicles. There were no injuries, thankfully, but the unfortunate side effect of zero injuries was it reinforced the production manager’s conviction that he had made the correct call to keep pumping.
Staying at the top
An insight into the higher echelons of the corporate world is provided in “Staying at the Top: the Life of a CEO”—a profile of Hicks Waldron when he served as CEO and chair of Avon. The company’s major shareholder was an institutional investment company in Boulder, Colo. Waldron received a call from this company at the end of every quarter. They never asked about safety records, nor quality achievements or good deeds. They only demanded: “What is the dividend?”.
Government regulations state that everyone has both the right and responsibility to refuse unsafe work, but few workers are willing to risk the results. In the case of the oilfield, both the field foreman and the truckers were contract workers, so they had no leverage. They all knew that, were they to cross the line today, they would be gone in a month or two.
Astute companies will include in their safety audits a method for identifying managers who overrule safety concerns, and those who address the situations appropriately. Those companies will know whether their workers continue to work due to fear and obedience; in fact, they’ll want to see both workers refusing work and field staff challenging HQ, as this will show the system is working.
Production managers report to senior managers who report to executive officers who, in turn, report to boards that report to shareholders. If you own shares in a company, if you have investments, or if you are concerned about your mutual funds, retirement funds, etc., then you need to recognize that you’re at the highest echelon of either the problem or the solution.
Until next time, be ready, be careful and be safe.
