Boeing heard all the warnings but just didn’t listen to its people

livemint.com:

The strange thing about Boeing’s crisis is that so many people saw it coming—and tried to stop it. The planemaker’s safety problems have been obvious since two 737Max jets crashed in late 2018 and early 2019, killing 346 people. Boeing’s engineers were warning managers of potential quality problems as far back as 2001.

But Boeing executives must not have listened and the 737Max crashes apparently weren’t a loud enough wake-up call. So far this year, a panel has blown off a Boeing plane, both the chairman and chief executive officer said they are stepping down, and the company’s share price has tumbled 27%. So why haven’t those occupying the C-Suite heeded the engineers flagging safety issues? Why did they—according to whistleblowers—silence and ignore those employees? These are the most pressing questions for Boeing’s incoming leadership team.

Without clear answers, the new executives will be doomed to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors. Most leaders of manufacturing firms live in fear of being blindsided by a serious safety issue. Perhaps that’s why business schools devote so much time to worrying about how leaders can encourage employees to speak up about problems.

Boeing’s problem is not one of speaking up, though. It’s one of listening up. That puts the onus squarely on senior leaders.

Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School, says hearing employees requires two things. First, interpersonal skills—“listening to learn, asking follow-up questions, walking down the ladder of inference so that ultimately both members of the conversation have learned something." And second, systems that force those conversations to happen on a regular basis. Those systems could take a number of forms, says James