Cold Shower 18: Would you have a barber perform brain surgery on you?

Cold Shower Would you have a barber perform brain
surgery on you? Vol. I, Article XVIII

This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive for Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past 30 years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. Author of seven books and more than 300 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relation to power – for a changing work force in a changing workplace, he writes about interests of the modern worker. Dr. Fisher started out as a laborer in a chemical plant, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns are designed to provoke discussion.

Question:

Dr. Fisher, you insist change management is a joke, that most interventions only involve cosmetic change, and until very recently I thought you too harsh. I work for a nonprofit educational organization with a religious affiliation. Tension between operations and the board resulted in an intervention conducted by a parent, a brain surgeon, and no real change resulted. Is this a problem only of nonprofits or what? I sense your answer.

Dr. Fisher replies:

The problems of organization are endemic to all, private or public, nonprofit or profit. The complex organization has evolved as an afterthought. Likewise, the discipline of organization-industrial psychology has evolved in answer to problems associated with it.

We have a century long history of stumbling to deal with problems of organization starting with the humanistic movement of the 1930s through the creation of the human resources discipline to the present moment. No one anticipated a work force of such skill, perception, diversity, intelligence and acumen as we enjoy today. Author Eric Hoffer writes, “You can go into skid row and find the people capable of building a city.” Talent is not the problem. The problem is managing, motivating and mobilizing talent to a focused objective. This is where the frustration comes and problems accumulate.

It was a mistake to replace personnel development with human resources management. The words “human resources” are offensive. People are not things to be corralled and managed. People are individuals to be developed and led.

This brings us to the discipline of organization-industrial psychology. The client is the organization through an assessment of individuals, not unlike the client of the clinical psychologist is the individual. Sickness in organization is a function of internal stress and strain within that produces dysfunction and leads to an inability to deal with changing or accelerating external demands.

I would imagine that your brain surgeon developed a questionnaire that was distributed among the staff, along with conducting interviews with key personnel, and from that made an assessment as to what was the cause of tension between operations and the board. And I would further assume that since the brain surgeon has sophisticated skills in his professions that he feels equally qualified to make an accurate assessment of this tension and how to defuse it. This is like trusting a barber to have the skills to perform brain surgery on you; in this case the “you” is the organization.

I was once asked to perform an intervention of the program staff of a $50 million contract for a high tech company making missiles for the Department of Defense. There was extreme tension between the program manager and program staff. I created a systemic questionnaire with internal validity and developed a comparable interviewing process consistent with the questionnaire for the program’s scientists, engineers, support administrators and the program manager. My assessment: The problem was not with the program manager but with the staff. An engineer, representing the staff, came to me and said, “I’ve talked to those participating in this intervention, and to a man they say your assessment contradicts the majority view. How do you explain that?” It was easy. They were all wrong. The program manager was fair, firm, consistent and honest with them, but he remained focused and would not tolerate missed due dates. This was a cost-plus program, meaning personnel were used to dragging their feet and allowing costs to escalate without suffering consequences, “After all, it was a government contract.” Not with this program manager. Once they realized they couldn’t ditch the program manager, they got down to business. Assessment is not a popularity contest.

On another occasion, a city-run community action program had the responsibility of annually distributing $20 million of community funds to the needy. The agency was composed of some forty professionals with solid academic credentials, but wasn’t getting the job done. The director was mainly absent and the operations manager had little power. This came through loud and clear in the intervention with concrete suggestions from the staff how to improve operations. The report submitted put the onus on the director to make these systemic changes in order to leverage staff to do the job, which to a person they were committed to do. The director took umbrage at the report and attempted quite successfully, as it turned out, to attack the credibility of the consultant and the discipline of organization-industrial psychology as well as the veracity of the report. The operations manager, who initiated the intervention, was kicked into field while the director further solidified her relation with the board. It happens.

Consider this. Our culture puts almost a religious onus on organizational leadership to run things. That was true a century ago. Not today. The wisdom of organization is not in the boardroom, not on mahogany row, but in the trenches. The great frustration of people in those trenches is the failure of their voices to be heard. It is also a failure of these trench dwellers to understand the language of management, which is money. The C.E.O. of the private or public firm, for profit or nonprofit organization knows that security rests with romancing the board and dissipating resentment and resistance with cosmetic change and, if necessary, cooking the books. Consultants have learned that it is career limiting to treat the organization as client and not the C.E.O. As a consequence, consultants are often in complicity with management in postponing real change at the expense of everyone and everything. Take comfort in that this too will pass, as survival is still the greatest motivator, for the organization as well as the individual.

Copyright (1996) See Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership & Dissonant Workers (2000), discounted at $15 (S & H included).