Cold Shower 7: New Professional Worker & Paradoxical Dilemma

Cold Shower Professional Worker & Paradoxical Dilemma
Vol. I, Art. VII

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 claim the professional worker has the power, but doesn’t know it, or doesn’t want to know it. You make this worker out to be a wimp. So much for generalizations. What do you propose he do to take control? Please, specifics. What would you have me do, a person employed with a good job, earning a respectable income with the prospects of going up the tree of management. Would you have me jeopardize my career, penalize my wife and children for a whim? Would you have me be a martyr?

Dr. Fisher replies:

When we meet the wall of change, and there is no recourse but to continue or to fall into oblivion, desire merges with fear to produce psychobabble. I avoid that inclination, and for it have been called angry, radical, cynical and the historian of despair and chronicler of sorrow; in a word, contentious. Messengers get killed, so they become apologists. I am not an apologist.

Corporate society that Peter Drucker champions is anachronistic. He observed its evolvement, and invented language to justify it. Since WWII, corporate society has been coasting on its petard. Corporate society no longer works because it fails to anticipate and deal meaningfully with chaos, diversity, and the Internet. It fails also to understand that embracing, not opposing contradiction, dissonance, and conflict are the ways to unity and coherence. The product of this embrace is creativity, which is sorely needed albeit missing from corporate society. There is too much pomp and not enough poetry.

Corporate society has further failed to grasp that the world – so far from being a solid matter of fact – is rather a fabric of conventions, which seem often to unsettle its foundation. It insists on rational reductionism and dogmatic rigidity, in “sticking to its guns no matter what,” rather than in disciplined speculation, in being cognitive rather than emotive in its function. It stubbornly insists that it is a predictable machine and not the whimsical human organism that it is. It refuses to admit that its basic operation involve guesswork and inference, that interpretation (of circumstances) is potentially infinite, that meaning is plural, unstable and contextual, that the corporate mind and its operation are mainly fiction, that meaning is a state of mind, not a social practice. In a word ambiguity is the predominant code of corporate behavior.

The productivity per American worker as a function of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was a robust 3.4 percent between 1873 and 1973. The bottom dropped out in 1973 when GDP limped around 2 percent, and has seldom exceeded this. Why?

Economist have a laundry list of reasons, which never factor in the changing of most workers’ collars from blue to white, from well paid factory drones who behave like robots to well paid professionals who behave like spoiled brats. Work has gone from being mainly manual, which could be easily measured, to being mainly mental, which can be easily faked.

Since the traditional indices of performance measurement have proven bogus such as performance appraisal and pay for performance, you would think corporate society might create a climate geared to action, solidarity and the flux of experience. That has not happened. Maturity is missing in the workplace. Most workers, whatever their preparatory education, are either management dependent or counterdependence on the organization for their total well being. Corporate society sponsors the emotional mentality and maturity of obedient 13-year-olds in 20, 30, 40, 50 or 60-year-old bodies, and then wonders why sustained performance is a problem.

The paradoxical dilemma is that the professional has achieved intellectual maturity through the pursuit of academic excellence only to feign emotional immaturity on the job to survive. Those who get ahead are pleasers, don’t rock the boat or make waves, focus on making an impression, and filling the right boxes. They are imitators and competitors, not creative challengers of their own potential. They want to fit, belong, be considered team players, and selfless which puts the emphasis on personality, not performance.

Performance is built on fairness, firmness, consistency and honesty. This is the foundation of trust and spiritual connectedness. Tap the collective spirit and anything is possible. Every organization has the people it needs to be successful. Too often the company resorts to expedient measures, which triggers distrust and produces the six silent killers throwing the organization into further decline. Instead of reassessing this faulty strategy and rallying the troops to be more responsive, the play become reengineering, streamlining, reorganizing, downsizing or redundancy exercises.

What would I have you do? Nothing. Everything. Culture is wrong. Management is dead in the water. Corporate society is perpetuating its own myth. Attachment is driving enterprise, and with it workers into the ground. There is no profit in labeling the heavy in all this as leadership or management or academia, or even personifying the problem as a matter of greed or corruption. Disturbance precipitates action, and alerts survival. Change is a reply to this demand. When you speak of “jeopardizing my career, penalize my wife and children, have me be a martyr,” I know you are not ready. You are buried in comfort and captive to complacency. It is not my role to press you into action. Mine is to plant the seed others are too timid to plant. It is not my concern whether the seed reaches fruition within my lifetime. I am a planter, not a harvester. You have to decide what is more pressing: desire or fear, or getting beyond both.

Copyright (1996) See Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership & Dissonant Workers (2000). Available at $15 (shipping & handling included).