Teams Blog

I just finished reading a horror story, made all the worse because it is a true story involving failure to protect nuclear weapons secrets, lost management—and indirectly, me.

The story is told in a new book, Implosion at Los Alamos: How Crime, Corruption and Cover-Ups Jeopardize America’s Nuclear Weapons Secrets, by Glenn Walp, Ph.D. Walp’s credentials are impeccable: former head of the Pennsylvania State Police, a master’s in criminal psychology and doctorate in human services, national police awards, and national media appearances. The latter were mostly about one other job he held: Office Leader of the Office of Security Inquiries at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the home of the atomic bomb. Walp did not hold the job long. He did it too well.

The Lab hired him as part of an agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy, which oversees it, to professionalize the Lab’s criminal investigations. Almost immediately upon arriving, he began to uncover massive problems. Walp details how employees’ refusal to follow equipment management procedures left many items missing and untraceable, including computer equipment that might have held nuclear secrets. A mini-Mafia ran free at one facility, buying spy equipment with federal money and protected by a thug who threatened potential whistleblowers with violence. Walp describes rampant abuses of a system that allowed any Lab employee to purchase items at various stores by showing a Lab badge. From another source, I know that one year, more Leatherman tools were bought than there were employees at the Lab. Walp criticizes an internal delivery system that dropped off packages, including high-cost equipment, in open areas without anyone signing for them. He points out numerous lapses regarding both nuclear weapons information and “special nuclear materials,” raising the very real specter of terrorists getting at least enough of the latter to create a “dirty bomb”—a regular bomb that would irradiate people it didn’t kill outright.

The most shocking discovery was that upper managers had known about these problems for years. Furthermore, when Walp tried to do his job, those same managers began interfering with his investigations. When he tried to call in the FBI, he almost immediately received pushback from above. Eventually the chief lawyer at the Lab inserted himself between Walp and the FBI, to the point that Walp warned him of violating “obstruction of justice” laws. Every incident of missing computer memory devices brought the standard Lab refrain that no classified material was compromised, even though there was no way to be sure. The constant message was that Walp’s first loyalty must be to the Lab and the University of California, which had managed the Lab from the start, in 1943. Protecting the UC contract clearly was more important to top managers than protecting U.S. property or nuclear secrets. Walp and others had to resort to DOE’s formal whistleblower process. Despite the extra protections this gave them and outstanding written performance appraisals, Walp and an associate were fired because they “did not fit” with the Lab’s culture. They were quickly escorted off the property by armed guards. The “Mafia” don and his thug had only been placed on administrative leave initially (though they eventually went to prison).

All of this has been corroborated, by DOE and FBI investigators, many journalists, public interest groups, and the U.S. Congress. As a result, two Lab directors in a row and some managers were fired. Walp was rehired as a UC consultant and won a $1 million settlement for his firing, clearly retaliation for his whistleblowing.

I wish I could report things are much better, but they are not. The Lab was forced to team with defense contractor Bechtel and compete for the contract for the first time in 2005. Unbelievably, they won. No surprise, then, that Walp lays out yet more problems and continuing Lab denials through 2009.

One exchange in the book leapt out at me. Walp is talking to his boss. “Glenn, have you ever worked for a corporation before?, Falcon responded. It’s much different working for a corporation than it is for a government or for a governor, continued Falcon. The lab has a certain corporate philosophy and certain corporate rules that the employee must abide by…” Walp himself misses the massive problem with this statement. Los Alamos Lab is not a corporation! It is a federally owned facility managed at the time by a state government entity. This is the most egregious example of management denial I have ever read.

I was relieved the see, however, that Walp did not criticize the Lab’s written procedures for managing equipment (called “personal property”), but the failure to follow them. “Relieved” because, I wrote them.

The lab hired me as a contractor in 1994 to rewrite their equipment management manual. (I had my best-ever boss, Peggy Durbin, who sent me Implosion after I saw it in the world’s funniest business newsletter. She writes it for the bookstore in Los Alamos she co-owns now. You should sign up.) Realizing instantly the manual was an antiquated mess, I started over from scratch. When it became clear the only way to do this quickly was to get four groups of stakeholders working more efficiently, I requested permission to create self-directed work teams (SDWTs). It worked. Within a few months, we had a 350-page draft. In two years, these dedicated people had raised the property management system’s rating by outside auditors from failing to “Outstanding.” Four of the people I served are named, favorably, in Walp’s book.

However, I saw the rampant cultural problems he mentions, especially after I became a manager. My introduction of “management by walking around” was taken by many employees as micro-managing because they weren’t accustomed to any oversight. Most people in our group were treasures, but a significant number would have been fired by private industry years earlier. Upper managers gave little material support to best practices, clearly more interested in smooth sailing. The property SDWTs lost their empowerment. I heard the refrain about protecting the UC contract often. After three years in management I had enough, and I started TeamTrainers.

This post has been painful. I still love the Lab, both for many of the people and for much of the work it does. Walp praises the Lab’s science, which helps prevent the spread of nuclear materials, ensures U.S. weapons still serve as a deterrent, and has led research in a surprising array of topics from computer modeling to alternative energy sources to quantum physics.

I want to call the leaders in the book “blind,” but that would be an insult to blind people. “Lost managers” is a better term. They lost sight of who they really worked for. They lost sight of the real source of damage to the Lab, greater than PR problems. Some of them lost their jobs over it. If you as a manager make any effort to squelch reports of ethical violations, policy violations, and especially legal violations, you may be a lost manager. Let this book help you find your way, lest you destroy what you are trying to protect—even if it’s only your own backside.

Source: Walp, G. (2010) Implosion at Los Alamos: How Crime, Corruption and Cover-Ups Jeopardize America’s Nuclear Weapons Secrets. Justice Publishing, LLC: Gold Canyon, Ariz. (received from Otowi Station Bookstore).

In May of 2000, I received a gift for all the wrong reasons: more than a week off with pay, because a wildfire was threatening to burn down my workplace! I refer to the Cerro Grande Fire that destroyed 400 homes in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and melted a guardrail within sight of American’s only nuclear weapons “pit” facility. At the time I had been working at Los Alamos National Laboratory, home of the atomic bomb, since 1993. Having completed three years as a project leader there, I was frustrated at the limitations of being a manager at a government facility. But I had learned something important about myself. It seemed I was pretty good at creating self-directed work teams, and it was very rewarding to see those teams take off.

One day I was watching TV coverage of the fire. A shot from a news helicopter showed heavy billowing smoke, which opened up briefly to reveal the main administration building. My office was next to that building. I decided it was time to pursue another job. So I spent the rest of my time off writing the business plan for what would become TeamTrainers™ Consulting.

I filed for a business license on June 5, 2000, ten years ago today, in Albuquerque. I chose the date in honor of my father, who would have been 79 that day had he not died when I was 10. The first order of business was finding out the truth about team building. I had taken a couple of seminars, read some books, and done a ropes-course retreat, and was skeptical based on my experiences. As an ex-reporter, I was used to digging for the real story, and had already reviewed something like 600 scientific sources on topics as diverse as romantic attraction, persuasive writing, and corporal punishment of children. For the next six months, I was in the libraries at the University of New Mexico one day a week doing research.

The result was my training manual, The SuddenTeams® Program. Currently it’s over 500 pages (not the book version) and I have nearly that many sources in my bibliography, not counting another 250-300 I reviewed but didn’t use. It covers every aspect of forming and leading a team from after the people have been selected until the team shuts down, including special challenges such as leading virtual teams, getting buy-in from unions, etc.

At this point I made a mistake. I now know the sales cycle for my type of service is 12 to 18 months. At the time, not seeing much sales movement after six months, I panicked and decided I needed a better market. Given its size and high-tech companies,  and my friends there, Seattle seemed the logical choice. You could say I was following the Microsoft model, given that Bill and company started that company in Albuquerque and moved to the Seattle suburb of Redmond.

During my years in Seattle, I freely admit, TeamTrainers ranged from full-time activity to mostly dormant. It’s 10 with an asterisk, as they say about sports records. I am grateful to my ex-wife for pushing me to revive it at one point. I can say I taught at Hewlett-Packard in Silicon Valley, the City of Seattle, and the University of Washington-Bothell, among other places. Another mistake I made was promising clients confidentiality. My argument was that I was giving them a competitive advantage they didn’t want their competitors to know about. But it didn’t add to my sales, and it’s making things a little harder now because I can’t offer many references.

That birthday asterisk also applies to my time here in Raleigh, NC. I grew up here, lived elsewhere 25 years, and came back for family reasons in 2008. I took a year off from TeamTrainers after moving to Raleigh, deciding whether I really wanted to start this business for the third time given that I would mostly be marketing for a while. But the fun I have helping teams is worth the effort.

I have never wavered from the mission I chose from the start: “To improve people’s lives by spreading the benefits of true teaming as widely as possible.” That’s why I keep my hourly rate below the market average, so smaller companies and nonprofits can afford my services. My first gig here was at N.C. State University, and I am especially proud of pro bono work such as trainings for Hospice of Wake County and the N.C. Jaycees. Having seen the life-changing impact of real teamwork on workers and their managers, I wish I could get every team in America to adopt the best practices for teamwork according to science. But until they do, TeamTrainers will have many more birthdays.

“We’re all going to die!”  This was how Ryan Allis, CEO of iContact, started his presentation at a recent Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce event this week. He credited another speaker for the line, but his point was made: keep things in perspective. He shared stories that proved having and staying true to one’s goals and values can contribute to the bottom line. He should know. He set a goal when he was 16 that he would have a $1 million business by the time he was 21. Sadly, he missed the milestone… by 18 days.

Allis said he gave up a $200,000 job right out of high school to go to college. (Granted, it was the University of North Carolina, not that I’m biased.) While there, he and another Tar Heel started what would become iContact. The first year they lost $5,000. In 2008, they made $15 million. Allis described a corporate culture of practical jokes and parties that might have seemed alien to that audience, but sounded normal to someone recently moved from high-tech Seattle. He really caught my ear when he said his company used to have a list of 10 values “that was really sucky and nobody remembered them.”

This reminded me of a study I carry to all of my trainings, “Inspiration and Cynicism in Values Statements.” A survey of executive MBA students found, “On the whole, respondents evaluated the impact of their firms’ value statements on decision-making positively.” Reasons included: “positive outcomes… both inside and outside the company, guidelines provided for decision-making, increased accountability, and clarity of expectations.” But I think it important to note that high-level executives made up half of those respondents. They may indeed use those values, but I am willing to bet most of their employees do not. Allis’ statement surprised me because he had recognized at the top level what you generally only hear from people down the line.

In response, he took his senior leadership team on a retreat and came up with five values that form the acronym WOWME:

1. Wow the Customer.
2. Operate with Urgency.
3. Without Mediocrity.
4. Make a Positive Wake.
5. Engage as an Owner.

From the scientific standpoint, this was not the ideal way to create the list. The study found respondents were most likely to feel value statements had an impact when everyone in the company was involved in creating them, which fits what we know about the psychology behind motivation. There’s no better way to build buy-in than to involve from the start those from whom you want the buy-in. iContact is small enough that this could have been accomplished without a huge investment of time. Allis said they ended up laying off 10% of their employees who could not get on board with the new values as implemented. He probably would have lost far fewer with a bottom-up approach, and most of the turnover would have been voluntary, saving the company heartache and unemployment costs. Plus, each team in the company would have brought out its team values, in alignment with the eventual corporate ones.

That said, everything they have done to implement the values are right on target. I caught him for a quick interview after his talk. Allis said the values are used on performance appraisals and in coaching sessions. The company also has a values recognition program that is very high tech: a poster and stickers. Each time someone exemplifies one of the values, they get a sticker by their name. With a certain number of stickers, they get a gift card. The person with the most stickers at the end of the year gets a prize, Allis explained.

The company lives its values in the more general sense through its “4-1s” program, under which it gives each year:

• monetary donations equivalent to 1% of payroll,
• its product for free to area nonprofits,
• 1% of each employee’s time (2.5 days) for volunteer work, and
• 1% of its equity to The Humanity Campaign.

Given the company’s financial success, it seems to be fulfilling his statement, “The purpose of business is to create value and solve human problems…” Allis is personally proving you can do both with his own extensive volunteer work, including serving as the head of Nourish International, which engages college students to fight poverty.

I can’t resist pointing out, however, that the whole company may not have bought into the values yet. Allis would probably be surprised to learn that five months after WOWME was introduced, his company Web site still lists the old 10-item values list!

Source: Urbany, J. (2005), “Inspiration and Cynicism in Values Statements,” Journal of Business Ethics 62:169.