Peace, William H. (1991). Harvard Business Review.


Soft management does not mean weak management. It means candor, openness, and vulnerability, as well as a willingness to take responsibility for difficult decisions. Such an approach worked well when William H. Peace was faced with having to lay off 15 people at Westinghouse's Synthetic Fuels Division in the early 1980s. Meeting with the people in person, explaining management's reasons for the layoff, and giving employees a chance to object, criticize, and vent their anger eased the emotional blow for those laid off and reassured remaining employees that the division did not face immediate closure. The soft management approach also worked to turn around a hostile labor-management situation at the Westinghouse Steam Turbine Division. The general manager of the division made a series of informational presentations to hostile workers. From those presentations came greater credibility for the general manager and a big improvement in labor-management relations.