Cold Shower 14: Group Norms vs. Individual Achievement

Cold Shower Group Norms vs. Individual Achievement
Volume I, Article XIV

Dr. Fisher, I must admit to being somewhat confused. All my life the emphasis has been placed on being “No. 1,” and out achieving my peers. The books I’ve read in the past reinforced this mindset, such as Robert Ringer’s “Winning Through Intimidation.” Since then, I’ve been fed nothing but groupthink, teamwork, group goals, and the like, while the people still getting ahead are the hard-charging individuals. They climb over anyone that gets in their way. Tell me, am I missing something? Are my bosses talking out of both sides of their mouths?

My first reaction is to say, “Only in America!” We seem to go from theme to theme, and from extreme to extreme. It is as if everything is a case of “either/or,” when it never is. I am not making small of your dilemma. Eric Hoffer calls it the mania of “true believers,” people who frantically jump on the mania bandwagon with little regard where it is going or why. They just want to belong, to be included, and not to be left behind.

Once I was consultant to a small satellite company of a major corporation. The company was caught up in the hysteria of “total quality management.” The company was a mess. Productivity was down. Markets were disappearing. Plants and equipment were obsolescent. Skill training of personnel was nonexistent. The company thought that winning a prestigious quality award would make everything right. So, 400 workers committed themselves totally to that effort. They won the award. The quality assurance manager received a $10,000 bonus. The other 399 workers were given kudos over the company intercom, and that was it. The operation quickly slid into receivership.

On another occasion, I was given the task of creating a contest to nominate the “best manager” among 14,000 employees in some twenty operations throughout Europe. Anyone could make a nomination, stating how that individual fostered teamwork, created winning morale, and effectively coached and counseled the development of his or her people. Several hundred nominations were received. A committee of workers and managers was created to screen these nominations, and ultimately to select “the workers’ choice of manager of the year.”

To my consternation, once we put forth the consensus nominee for this honor, it was overridden by senior management, which hurriedly placed in nomination an influential country president who was to receive the honor. The irony is that this individual had not even been nominated making a mockery of the contest.

One could be outraged, or wonder why the duplicity. There is little point in either as I have found senior management lacks sophistication in terms of cultural trends or their implications. It does these things because it can, feeling the ends justify the means.

Senior management is a cadre of doers, not students of human nature. With severe limitations in terms of time to make their impact, not unlike professional athletes, senior managers are more inclined to be “numbers” people than transforming agents. They count how many meetings they have attended, not what was accomplished; how many new people hired and trained, not how they have performed; how much and how many of everything with an elastic ruler. As market share dwindles, they have statistics to illustrate why it is not the consequence of their watch; as market share crashes, they have sets of extenuating circumstances causing this “temporary drift in price decline.” Consequently, they get caught up in the twisted metaphor of rhetoric smothering reality. Senior management needs counsel but prefers sybaritic sycophants who generate excuses for their petty strategies.

These spin doctors are so successful in this ploy that regularly a stock can fall from say $70 a share to $20 a share, as in the case of one high tech company over the tenure of one CEO, who is dismissed with $21 million not including pending bonuses and entitlements yet to be figured. It is the only job in America where pay-for-performance has absolutely no relevance.

Esteeming the individual neutralizes the sovereignty of the group. Look to what has happened in professional sport. Numbers have come to dominate. In basketball, the rebounder, the assist maker, the shot blocker, and the defense specialist with high numbers in steals receive top billing where it once was the exclusive domain of the scorer. Professional sports have developed sophisticated performance appraisals that are indisputable as everyone can see the results. The fact that these individual statistics don’t always contribute to group goals, such as winning, is lost in salary arbitration.

Professional sports recognize and accept the individualism of the American psyche, and have found that professional athletes know their worth and negotiate accordingly. Coaching has been reduced to facilitation. It involves little management as professional athletes manage themselves, and when they don’t, they quickly find themselves on the cutting block.

Why have industrial, commercial, educational, religious, and governmental institutions failed to make this connection?

My answer is that athletes recognize their power and know that they control the game, not the coaches, not the owners, and not even the fans. They stir the drink, the drink doesn’t stir them.

Professional workers, that is, knowledge workers, who pride themselves on being so much smarter than professional athletes, have failed to recognize the shift in power to them, or that they now control the work, the work no longer controls them. If they don’t show up, nothing gets done. Nothing!

Despite this, professional workers act as if they don’t have the power, while, paradoxically, management acts as if it is 1945 and it still has it. No one seems to notice as decisions are delayed, opportunities are missed, markets disappear, and power “falls between the chairs.” It isn’t until panic sets in, and crisis management commences that the charade is revealed for what it is – a circus of chaos. Extremes come into play.

Is it individualism or group norms that are the salvation of the organization? The answer is that both must be brought into play, and power be reconciled to the reality of the times, as it has been recognized in professional sport.

We have moved toward group interdependence from individual dependence in every aspect of existence. No single entity is responsible for our safety, security, health or well-being. Society has become a collective conscience of interdependent activity.

In work, this means if there is to be fairness that compensation must reflect contribution as it does in sport. Many athletes make ten times as much as their coaches, and the management above the coaches, whereas CEOs today often makes 300 times the average professional worker’s pay on the line. Something is wrong with this equation.

Professional athletes are in a high-risk business. It now calls for professional workers in-group projects to participate in risk enterprises as well, where their compensation reflects their success or failure, meaning fluctuation in their respective fortunes. Within this context, there is room for individual variation in income as there is in sport, but the group norm still takes precedence in terms of achievement or the lack of same.

As an athlete in a career can play for several teams, the same is most likely to be the case of professional workers in the future. There is no lifetime employment, no guaranteed income, and certainly the biweekly paycheck is soon to be a matter of the past.

Companies in a world economy will have to relocate consistent with this dynamic, perhaps several times and several places around the globe. This is to become a given, as it can no longer be a crutch. CEOs’ compensation will decline, but not until professional workers understand the economic dynamics described here.

By the same token, entitlements will be cut back for all employees. Companies can no longer afford to play the welfare role. Admittedly, they had an ulterior motive for doing so. It was a way to hold on to control through the power of the benefactor. They can no longer afford that role while control as well as power has shifted away from them.

Don’t look for any seismic change in the near future, as average technology workers in Western societies remain suspended in terminal adolescence with a dependency mindset and little knowledge of their nascent control of the agenda. They are in business for themselves, not unlike professional athletes, and can no longer look to others to control their destiny. The die has been caste, and now they are “it.”

Copyright (1996) James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. Cold Shower articles can be obtained by going to www.blogger.com and then www.peripateticphilosopher.blodsport.com.