Glasers team up on research and consulting

Susan and Peter Glaser finish each other’s sentences and always like to speak to others together. They model the teamwork that they teach, both in the Lundquist College of Business at the University of Oregon and through Glaser and Associates, their consulting firm. And, they’re excited because they believe that they have accumulated evidence to demonstrate that specific communication interventions can improve life within organizations.

The Glasers have worked with a number of large organizations through their consulting practice, but they’ve had an extensive opportunity to help change the culture of a large educational institution through staff training and development particularly in communication. While a number of organizations claim they foster a "team" culture, say the Glasers, "there’s a gap between managers and leaders who espouse a team culture and those who are actually making it happen." One of the managers in an organization to which they consulted even told the Glasers directly, "I tell my employees, ‘Park your brains at the gate; you’re here to give me a good day’s work.’"

At the educational institution where they collected their data, a manifesto for employee participation had been issued but was considered "a joke" by most who worked there. The Glasers began training employees in groups of 30, and as they went they also developed a group of peer trainers. The peer trainers provided follow-up sessions to insure that the skills being taught were incorporated and used. Training began with senior management to insure that the rest of the organization knew that management was committed to the project. In fact, the Glasers found that managers were more receptive initially to what they were teaching than were the people they supervised.

And what were they teaching? There were three workshops in all. The first focused on communication in conflict and on management of conflict situations. The second focused on group development and teamwork. The third focused on persuasion and influence. Each program drew upon a specific set of learnable skills that the Glasers either created based on research findings or drew upon from others. For example, conflict skills included raising issues, responding to criticism, and perception checking. Their technique focused on moving from observation to practice. The Glasers would often role play a familiar situation in a negative manner. Then they’d analyze with the learners what went wrong with the situation and teach one or more of the skills for handing the problem.

Next, the Glasers would role play the same situation using the skills they had been describing. The learners would then practice the skills in two ways: first, they would write out a situation that had bothered them and indicated how they would handle that situation differently using the skill they were learning; and second they would role-play using the skill with another person while a third person observed and made comments after the role-play was completed.

Evaluations of the program are indicating that employees are using the skills they’ve been taught and are seeing benefit from doing so. In fact, they report that they have taken the skills into their other relationships at home and in the community with good results. While the Glasers stressed that it is important to conduct the follow-up training to insure that the skills are being integrated, employees have reported a noticeable change in the participatory environment since the training was begun.

The Glasers use similar techniques in teaching their management courses at the University of Oregon. In fact, they comment that their courses have become more and more performance-based, as they move toward insuring that students can integrate the theory they are learning into their actual everyday behavior. They find that this approach is a popular one with students, even though the strain of interacting in teams is not always a pleasant experience.

While the Glasers aren’t the only consultants who take their scholarship out into the field, they are insistent proponents of putting organizational communication theory and communication skills into practice. So far, their results have been both rewarding and promising in demonstrating that communication training has a substantial impact on individual and organizational effectiveness.