The Bloodbath Cure

"Hal, your behavior is childish." said the brash young public relations man to the prosperous middle-aged salesman. "I actually feel I can carry on a deeper conversation with my two-year-old daughter than I can with you." Hal may have felt like lashing out at his young critic, but instead he accepted the slur as if he had merely been done a candid favor. He had to, because both men were taking part in a Sensitivity Training Workshop, one of the fastest-spreading of U.S. management's many devices for putting a keen edge on executives.

For the past nine weeks, Hal and the 15 others in his Sensitivity Training Group have met for one uncomfortable, four-hour session each week at the University of California at Los Angeles. The sessions are deliberately unorganized: the participants sit facing one another in a circle, and nothing is said until the boldest of the group dares to break the silence by introducing himself and perhaps guardedly adding what he hopes to get from the course. Then begin the rambling conversations that wind up with each member of the group dishing out and receiving scathing personal criticism. Inevitably, a few members of U.C.L.A.'s Sensitivity Training Groups walk out in anger, and on occasion women participants break down in tears. But the great majority--like Hal --manfully keep in mind that this is what they paid a $200 tuition fee to hear.

Hopefully, the bloodbath of criticism--which is very much like the "chewing out" sessions of college fraternities and sororities--will send Hal back to his company better able to see himself as others see him, more willing to listen to his subordinates and inspired with a will to correct the faults he has been told he has. Explains one of the directors of the U.C.L.A. sessions: "The trainees become more sensitive, more tolerant. They have learned to ask the question of whether the problem is in me rather than in him." Others call it training in conformity.

Bethel Bath. Sensitivity training was begun on an organized basis more than ten years ago by the National Training Laboratory in Group Development in summer sessions at Bethel, Me. Many of the participants were so emotionally stirred by the first "Bethel Baths" that they came out with an evangelistic glow. But the psychologists were successful enough in preventing Sensitivity Training from becoming a kind of commercial Moral Re-Armament that a dozen colleges now offer sessions under a variety of names such as T-Group Training, Laboratory Training, and Diagnostic Skill Training. Increasingly, too, training-minded corporations such as Western Electric, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and International Business Machines are running their own experimental groups.

Despite such awesome sponsorship, a minority of businessmen still have strong reservations about Sensitivity Training. Although he praises the program in general, Richard Kuck, a personnel executive with Pacific Telephone & Telegraph, warns that "there are people who are powerful administrators who might become too self-critical and tone down the traits that make them good." Robert Service, a top executive with the Los Angeles drug firm of Riker Laboratories Inc., walked out of the U.C.L.A. program after one session, with the complaint that "it dealt purely with emotions and not content . . . It seemed to me, it was group therapy under disguise. You can't have a group of people playing amateur psychoanalysis."

Kick in the Guts. Advocates of Sensitivity Training insist that most participants wind up enthusiastic about the program, contend that the only critics are uncooperative types who so cherish their emotional privacy that they refuse to enter into the spirit of the thing. Somewhere in the middle stands Vice President Robert Mitchell of Mattel, Inc., a fast-growing Los Angeles toy company that encourages its executives to sign on for Sensitivity Training. Arguing that only Sensitivity Training provides "the emotional kick in the guts" necessary to make an executive recognize his personality weaknesses, Mattel says: "I have seen a third of the people we have sent come back with remarkable changes in behavior." But for all his approval, Mitchell concedes that "the people who most need to be made aware of what they are doing to others are the very ones who don't get anything out of the courses."

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