Cold Shower 25: Servant Leadership -- Putting People First

Cold Shower Servant Leadership – Putting People First
Volume I, Article XXV

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 published 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, I read your book Work Without Managers quite by accident. I was looking for something on management to take me out of the doldrums and came across your book. “Work without managers,” I said, “now that’s something novel.” So many books on management leave people out of the equation, while your book puts them squarely in the frame. I like your definition of the requirements of leadership – the capacity to see and the ability to serve. Wow! In my twenty years with my company I have seen little of this. Soon I will be a casualty of major company downsizing (18,000), while the CEO of my company tells The Wall Street Journal that he feels “no pain” in accepting his $16 million compensation for managing the process. I am angry, bitter, hurt and resentful, but strangely still not cynical. Is there any hope people will one day be put first?

Dr. Fisher replies:

Your maturity under difficult circumstances is remarkable. Hopefully, one day it will also be rewarded. The complex organization is in transition and the working culture lags the reality of the situation. A poison in the system takes time to circulate before it forms an ugly boil on the surface, where it is noticed and is likely to first be denied and then hidden by cosmetics. Ultimately, the boil will have its way and rupture. We are waiting.

Downsizing -- cutting payroll to improve cash flow and appease stockholders – is expedient but only cosmetic surgery. The boil has not been acknowledged and so it will in due course wreak its reward. There is an ugly boil on the complex organization and it extends to all institutions – family, church, school, community, state and society - not just business and industry. Society is not yet ready for enlightened individual workers.

The human dynamic has changed because the worker in the equation has changed. The worker is no longer the submissive, expendable, predictable factor in the equation but the assertive, critical and surprisingly dominant one. The worker is better educated than his management, more in touch with the reality of work, better able to make timely decisions at the level of consequences, and a more competent problem-solver because he has the best information. The hierarchical structure is designed to function for another time with a different set of variables. This is the poison in the system.

This worker is entertained to a confection of bromides in which he is asked to be a “team player” in a pragmatic culture of individualism. This is not consistent with the cultural capital of his heritage, or capitalism. Continuing the sport analogy, capitalism has luxuriated as a team sport with the emphasis on individual performance. As such, it is much closer to baseball than basketball in the sense that individualism is controlled by a manager outside the actual play, whereas in basketball the manager is in the game and hence performance is a function of the chemistry of the team where control exists on the floor. The dichotomy between the two is the reason why management has become schizophrenic.

The comment of your CEO is consistent with the phantom of this elitism, which believes it still calls the shots and is the critical mass necessary for corporate success. He is wrong and a good fifty years behind the curve. He and his cronies have become a vestigial organ. That said, he still gets away with his primal dance because it is easier for workers, even workers made redundant, not to be cynical and to continue to believe in atavistic management and an anachronistic system than it is to do anything about it.

People will be put first when people see themselves as having earned the right to be put first, but not before. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot have unlimited security and enjoy the freedom of contribution. You cannot have a guaranteed paycheck of certain dollars and expect to control what you do. You cannot behave like a spoiled brat and expect to have the gumption to act as a mature adult. You cannot be a whiner and complainer and expect your situation to change without your involvement in the process.

This situation will not change with reengineering or rational ordering of factors. It will only change when the will to change ruptures the ugly boil and starts the natural recovery process to health and beauty. There is little evidence that this is happening and so cosmetics are still in fashion and semantics remain the language of change.

It is as predictable as Newtonian physics that the function of work follows the structure of work, and the structure and function of work combine to establish a culture of work, and the culture of work determines the dominant behavior of work. If these words seem confusing, I apologize. But I still insist that they are elementary.

The individual is the critical mass or he is not; either the organization is built around the synergy of his contributions or it is dedicated to seeing that he behaves and fits. With all the hoopla of the past decades on the management of change, no one has offered the observation that the most successful workers are political and bring about 20 percent of their brains to the attention of work, using the other 80 percent to scheme to their career advantage. Small wonder we have redundancy exercises.

It would be nice if I could reassure you that people will soon be put first. It won’t happen in my lifetime, I’m sure, perhaps not in yours as well because managing change is the wrong focus. Change will come about naturally once workers bring change about in themselves. Order comes from within. To establish order takes more than good intentions, more than a change in attitude. Order requires a radical change in mentality, a structural change in the way the worker’s mind views the world. I don’t see this happening soon.

Copyright (1996) See Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge (1998) at $40, including shipping and handling.