Books in Brief & Readers’ Comments
One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, “He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies.” There is creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882), American poet and essayist
The Books
CONFIDENT SELLING (1970). The key to success is bringing out your best which means overcoming your resistance to self-confidence. The resistance disappears when you accept yourself as you are and others as you find them (no longer in print).
WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990). It defines the sickness of organization, “corpocracy,” as the continuing dependence on management failing to recognize the power shift from managers to professional workers.
CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90S & BEYOND (1992). The book deals with the new reality that everyone is in sales. The workplace as a fixed place of employment has disappeared, as has the conventional art of selling or the security of a single job in a career.
THE WORKER, ALONE! (1995). This is a survival manual for never getting fired, not by playing it safe, but by going against the grain of convention and taking charge of your career. Failure is not an option when you take control.
THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996). To have a friend you must be a friend, starting with yourself. This means systematically reprogramming yourself to trust yourself first, last and always before anyone else.
SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998). Times have changed. Corporate restructuring has become the new reality. What is not obvious is the systematic silent destruction of disgruntled employees through passive behaviors until it is too late for damage control.
CORPORATE SIN (2000). The book deals with the failure of leaders to lead and workers to follow, resulting in leaderless leadership and dissonant workers. This is happening when corporate America is under global siege and needs a wake up call.
IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003). This is a novel of Dr. Fisher’s youth written as a memoir. It deals with a community in the middle of America in the middle of the century when the world was at war and he was an eight-year-old boy.
Brief Descriptions of the Books and Readers’ Comments
CONFIDENT SELLING (1970). This was a unique book for its time in that it didn’t look at the prospect that the salesman was calling on so much as it looked at the psyche of the salesman. The book’s premise was that fear of failure or rejection was built-in to the salesman’s approach and doomed him in most cases to failure. Too often he looked at the customer as an adversary and not a partner, as someone to out finesse, not someone with whom to joint problem solve from the same side of the table. The book exploded on the market and went through more than thirty printings and two editions, and was in print for more than twenty years. Although no longer in print, it is available on some remainder lists on the Internet with ideas as fresh as they were more than a generation ago.
ISBN: 0-13-167510-9: available as remainder book by Internet providers in soft and hardbound edition (189 pages, bibliography, index). Otherwise, out-of-print.
WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES (1990). This was a shocking look at American business and why eighty percent of the productive work was being accomplished by less than twenty percent of the workers. It concluded that the organization in most cases still operated in 1945 nostalgia, which was management’s greatest hour as it had a decisive role in the winning of World War Two. But over the last six decades, since that war over, there has been a shift in work from being mainly manual to mainly mental, from dependence on management to call the shots to knowledge workers at the level of consequences making the decisions. Too often, however, position power has remained stubbornly at the controls, reluctant to face the new reality. The book systematically looks at the consequences of this anachronistic behavior, including an examination of all the failed cosmetic attempts to improve the situation without changing anything. Industry Week named it one of the ten best business books of the year, while the Business Book Review Journal named it one of the four major works of the year. It was reviewed extensively including on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”
READERS’ COMMENTS
Dr. Thomas L. Brown, editor, Industry Week: “Work Without Managers is one of the Top 10 Business books of 1991. “Fisher opens by declaring that any large company today is 20 to 30 divisions in search of a corporation, and he has yet hit his stride.”
James R. Wright, columnist, Dallas Morning News: “I find Work Without Managers the most insightful and perceptive examination of the American workplace today.”
Alex Krunic, editor, Business Perspective, Innsbruck, Austria: “Dr. Fisher argues the key to the future is the empowerment of professional workers. The suggestions made here are bound to spark controversy on all levels of organization and therefore should be on the reading list of any interested in understanding the present day American dilemma.”
Business Book Review Journal: “It is our opinion that Fisher has more than accomplished his goal to stimulate discussion and debate, and that Work Without Managers promises to foster a controversy that will be instrumental in affecting a fundamental changing in the American workplace.”
National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered”: Ten years ago, many were calling for a direction in business that called for less management, less managers. In the early 80s, USC professor Warren Bennis said that American businesses were “over-managed and under-led.” And, sure enough, many businesses chopped layer upon layer of managers from the ranks. Now Tom Brown has found a book that argues that, fear not, Work Without Managers can be far from chaos: it might even be better. Work Without Managers is the angriest book I have read about business and management since Dick Cornuelle’s early 80’s book, De-Managing America.
Angry? Le me just read you the first 50 words: “The era of the free lunch has ended. This century, which began with such paternal control and obedience for America, has run amuck. Now, nothing and no one is in control. Take corporate America. Any large company today is 20 to 30 divisions in search of a corporation. The pendulum of centralization-decentralization is more a yo-yo contest with no clear winners, only painfully confused losers. Trauma is written on the face of American enterprise. Meanwhile, this once powerful and energetic nation doesn’t seem to know what is happening.”
Jim Fisher, an ex-blue collar laborer, chemist, scientist, and industrial psychologist, no doubt means every mean word. This is not casual corporate bashing; Work Without Managers is premeditated capital punishment of standard managerial systems that Fisher thinks have outlived their prime, and may not have been useful even then.
You’ll find the book and its author a compelling challenge. This is a roller coaster in print. At its peak, like when he talks about the “Six Silent Organizational Killers,” you’ll find points where you’ll exclaim, “why hasn’t someone said this before?” For example, Fisher argues that people don’t show hustle, don’t do things that need to be done, and have reasons for feeling this way. On the other hand, when he talks about the MBA as “merely a vocational degree,” and lists 16 classics in literature that MBAs probably never studied, but should, some readers will recoil and demand the head of “this scoundrel author.”
Work Without Managers is one of those almost self-published books, which evoke pictures of its author furiously banging away on the keyboard at 3 a.m., hand grasping for more coffee. It is a wide-ranging indictment of the way tradition has taught us to define “management” and has taught us to allow ourselves to “be managed.”
But Fisher’s argument, off-beat as it will seem to most readers, has this to commend it: no one is print today is on “the other soapbox” arguing for keeping things as they are.
Jim Fisher’s style in this book may be a controlled rant, but he seems to be ranting in the right direction.
HOW TO PURCHASE
ISBN: 0-9626498-0-5: Available in softbound edition (350 pages, bibliography, index) from this website at $12.00, plus shipping & handling or from other Internet providers.
CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90S & BEYOND (1992). This book retains the essence of CONFIDENT SELLING while placing the sales person in the center of virtually every occupational endeavor. In the age of electronics, there remains an individual still at the controls. And in a world where your partner and customer may be a continent or more away, awareness of reality has a new meaning. The book is both a blueprint and manual, both a confidence builder and practical guide to confident thinking which is the key to selling with confidence. The book deals with real case histories in the experience of Dr. Fisher from when he was a neophyte salesman to a corporate executive. It also provides a systematic easily understood journey to self-understanding and the power of the open mind. The book was so well thought of that it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for 1992.
READERS’ COMMENTS
Arizona Networking News: “Dr. Fisher feels that the psychology of selling is undergoing a transformation and offers a remarkable guide to better opportunities, a better self-image, and better sales. Not just for sales people, Confident Selling for the 90s & Beyond is a veritable roadmap to ever-increasing success.”
New Awareness Magazine: “While the title of the book refers to selling, the ideas and philosophies can be applied to any and all situations in life. The basic theme of the book is that the relationships in which people are involved, whether they are sales persons or customers, personal relationships or even parent and child will not be the same in the future. Confident Selling for the 90s & Beyond contains a wealth of information, some about the past and present, but much more on the future directions. It could turn out to be as prophetic as John Naisbitt’s Magatrends.”
ISBN: 1-56087-024-9: available in softbound edition (315 pages, bibliography, index) on this website at $10 plus shipping & handling, or from other Internet providers.
THE WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN (1995). This book claims workers have no choice but to go it alone for nothing changes until they do something. Expecting the company to carry them is over; expecting the economy to go smoothly into the future is a thing of the past; and expecting others to have answers for them that fit their needs no longer has any relevance or currency. The game of charades continues, however, where managers still exercise the power they don’t have and workers continue to refuse to assume the power that they do have by rights of their skills and knowledge. Corpocracy remains bent on cosmetic change, which changes nothing and costs those in power less. Workers absorb the costs for this delay. Not until the Worker, Alone realizes it is up to him or her to put the house in order will change occur. Ventilation won’t accomplish it; nor will finger pointing. The worker must get off the dime and grow up and take charge of work, which is another way of taking charge of life. The call is to workers everywhere. They invested heavily in their education only to find disappointing returns on their investment. Angry and confused, they suffer like fatalists through downsizing, redundancy exercises, reengineering, restructuring, conglomerate takeovers, relocation of jobs abroad, and wonder only when the other shoe will fall. Never have workers been more distrustful of the system, failing in this distrust to recognize they are the system. They are the power. They are the company. Nothing happens until they do something. This is crunch time and this little book puts workers on notice that if they don’t manage their lives and careers then nobody will.
Charles D. Hayes, author and philosopher, whose book The Rapture of Maturity: The Worker, Alone is indeed a book alone, in a category by itself. “In it, Fisher calls for an awakening of America’s workforce as fundamentally profound as Emerson’s Self-Reliance essay was to the nineteenth century.”
Jim Komar, The Information Management Professionals: “I came across this book in a peculiar way. A friend gave me a copy written by her dad. I was not looking for another book on the state of business. So many of these have taken what is and tried to make it a bit more palatable for those who seem to blindly comply with what their management currently dictates. Few do what Dr. Fisher suggests, go against the grain. What is the purpose of going against the grain? Perhaps Dr. Fisher captures the essence of the ideas with this: ‘Order is first established inside the individual, once person at a time, before any behavioral change is manifested outside in society-at-large. Change the man from a passive person to an active personality with a social conscience, involved in the management of society, and you change the world.’”
HOW TO PURCHASE
ISBN: 0-9626498-1-3: available in hardbound edition (136 pages, bibliography, index) on this website at $10 plus shipping and handling or from other Internet providers.
THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996). The Taboo deals with the adverse effects of social, cultural, and psychological conditioning, which program people into giving everyone else the benefit of the doubt, but their own selves. Those so inclined worry more about what other people think and feel about them than what they think and feel about themselves. They often display a compulsive need to please others, often at the expense of meeting their own basic needs. Dr. Fisher sees this as leading to an inevitable conclusion: one becomes one’s own worst enemy. The result is self-contempt and depression, as the individual has failed to learn how to be their own best friend. People of such propensity, Dr. Fisher has discovered, live in a virtual prison of mind, captive to someone else’s agenda, and a card-carrying member of a victim mentality. This limits their choices, consumes their energy, clouds their focus, and ultimately commits them to a self-imposed cage that limits their happiness and well being. The Taboo addresses this issue, not in a by-the-numbers-how-to-deal-with-aggression-disappointment-and-pain, but in a no nonsense common sense story telling approach of poignant case studies. These are from the files of Dr. Fisher’s industrial counseling and consulting work. He has dealt with clients who range from CEOs to day laborers, from corporate professionals to independent entrepreneurs. From these intimate observations, he has gleaned insightful strategies for one becoming more self-aware, self-accepting, and self-asserting in the course of their daily life. This is not a how-to book nor a self-help book in the style of the genre, but a take charge book in the style of recognizing one’s situation, accepting it, and taking full responsibility for it. In short, this is a book about making choices and developing one’s own roadmap based on such choices. The benefit is to gain control of one’s life, and in that control to find purposeful satisfaction. Dr. Fisher concludes that it takes courage to embrace The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend, a courage, which he believes everyone possesses, but doesn’t necessarily know. What this book is, he says in the final analysis, might be considered an introduction to a new friend, a friend who walks with you every day, only to be ignored most of the time. Alas, hopefully, no longer!
READERS’ COMMENTS
Eric Michael Rodts, marketing executive, Honeywell, Inc.: “My favorite line of the year comes from the pages of The Taboo. ‘To attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves is to weaken their resolve and diminish them as persons.’ The same holds true of us. Bingo! Amen! Oh yeah!”
James Wright, senior columnist, The Dallas Morning News: “Churchill once had a great line about nothing being as powerful as the simple declarative English sentence. Dr. Fisher is one of the few folks writing in this genre who knows what he meant. The taboo is full of these simple looking, but profound, and from a marketing angle, readable sentences, such as: ‘we are not happy campers. We have lost our moral compass.’”
E. Buddy Davis, Director of Human Resources, Johnny Ruth Clarke Health Centers: “I confess I am a purposeful reader. I have little time to read simply for pleasure. What I look for in a book is guidance through the stormy jungle of everyday life to arrive a better person and effective in my profession. I don’t look so much for solutions as for help in defining my problems. The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend is a bonus. It gave me such help, while it convinced me that I’m a pretty nice guy as well.”
Dr. Billy G. Gunter, Professor of Sociology, University of South Florida: “Fisher bares his soul in this book, and in doing so, exposes mine to me. The message here is not to celebrate self-indulgence, but to provide a strategy for penetrating it in order to arrive at self-acceptance. That compound word is so easy to say, ‘self-acceptance,’ yet so difficult to realize. Be advised, Fisher offers no detours on this important journey.”
Dr. Francis Xavier Pesuth, retired executive: “The flavor of this study is such that the subject matter is retained, after the fact. The coverage shows a great deal of research with a strong but familiar style. Excellent word pictures, but I still don’t know who Howard Stern is!”
HOW TO PURCHASE
ISBN: 0-9626498-2-1: available on this website in cloth edition (460 pages, bibliography, index) at $13 plus shipping and handling, or from other Internet providers.
SIX SILENT KILLERS: MANAGEMENT’S GREATEST CHALLENGE (1998): Everyone admits technology has made drastic changes in our lives and lifestyles. It has also drastically changed the way we do business with each other, which in turn means it has necessitated the change in the structure of organization and the way we work. But here is the problem. We have had major surgery to the organization in the form of downsizing and corporate restructuring, but we have failed to change the workplace culture consistent with these demands. Now most workers are better trained and educated than most of their bosses with specialized skills and knowledge that they, alone, can manage. But for all intent and purpose, the bosses still call the shots, still maintain the charade of performance appraisal, still conduct senseless department meetings, and still hand out assignments as if most workers were manual laborers and it was 1945. The consequence of this is not open rebellion. The consequence of this are six silent killers that are invisible to the eye unless you are looking for them, but are the equivalent of social termites destroying the infrastructure until it is too late for damage control. These killers are six passive behaviors: coming in late and leaving early and doing as little as possible to get by (passive aggression); doing nothing until told and then once completed waiting around for further instruction (passive responsive); always having an excuse why something doesn’t get done (“Not my job!”) or done on time (passive defensive); accepting assignment one never plans on completing, or if completing never on time (approach avoidance), always wanting to have what others have and be what they are instead of being content with what one has and is (obsessive compulsive); and always spreading misinformation or disinformation about the boss, colleagues or the company; withholding information critical to a task, or misusing company property (malicious obedience). In order to improve the situation, senior management was committed but not involve in the corrective process, turning it over to personnel, now called “human resource management.” The results have been devastatingly and critically inept programming workers from management dependence to a counter dependence on the company for their total well being. There is a way out of all this, which Dr. Fisher leads the reader, but not before taking that reader through the no man’s land unconscious incompetence (culture of comfort) through conscious incompetence (culture of complacency) to finally arriving at conscious competence (culture of contribution). Dr. Fisher claims that no matter the educational achievement most workers, because of this programming, display the emotional maturity of an obedient or devious twelve-year-old child suspended in terminal adolescence although possibly in the body of a fifty-year-old. He calls for the culture of contribution and workers with the adult maturity to complain frequently but politely when they encounter duplicity, chicanery, corruption, or malfeasance as well as counter productive behavior.
READERS’ COMMENTS
Billy G. Gunter, Ph.D., associate professor of sociology, University of South Florida: “Fisher gets his ideas and data directly from the workplace. He has worked inside the corporation at all levels from laborer to corporate executive status, and concludes, ‘we don’t know how to manage, motivate, or mobilize the workforce, and as a consequence we spawn six silent killers, which destroy the foundation and infrastructure of the organization from within without anybody noticing.’ In a thoroughly disarming and informative manner, Fisher explains these killers so sensibly that it is like a light bulb going off in your head. You find yourself saying, why didn’t I think of that? “
Anna Flowers, The Journal of Applied Management and Entreprenerism: “For many years, researchers and behavioral scientists have attempted to explain organizations by using psychoanalytical and other psychological school thought structures. James R. Fisher, Jr. follows similar approaches, but for this reviewer, with great insight, philosophical depth, and uncanny predictive truth. This book provides readers with an accurate development of organization USA over the past century, and those crucial factors that must be taken into consideration if organizations are to survive. Fisher’s vibrant explores the dominant cultures in the marketplace, the need for a new set of organization paradigms, incipient catastrophe, the six silent killers, the cultures of comfort, complacency, and contribution.
Dr. Fisher opens his heavily documented and self-experienced work with the dilemma that has spawned the six silent killers, and discusses why this new phenomenon is the latest and greatest challenge to management. He observes “professionals have more the mind of the artist, rather than that of the analyst, the heart of the creator than the discoverer, and more the soul of the rebel than the patriot.”
Six Silent Killers examines those areas that have created what Fisher calls “the new workforce that the post-industrial society has created.” He cites the six silent killers, which have evolved in organizations as a “reaction to the frustration with the growing breach between the role demands of modern workers and the self-demands of those in charge.”
Fisher six silent killers, “the manic monarchs of the merry madhouse,” are passive aggression, passive responsive, passive defensive, malicious obedience, approach avoidance, and obsessive-compulsive behaviors.
His poetic description indicates that these silent killers “eat at the sinews of organizations, and workers who display them have an amazing ability to appear as if performers when clearly they are not. They are caught in the crunch between hypocrisy and hype, turning their frustrations into deceptive devices. They are looking for leadership in a leaderless society. They are looking for direction when nobody admits to being off course. They are looking for real work in the chaos of activities. Wherever they look, they find confusion. Nobody knows who is in control or who has the power. Managers and workers alike, equally frustrated, spread these silent killers. Nobody is in charge. Management plays the role but has little control. Workers are reluctant to step up to the challenge of taking control because they don’t want the responsibility. So control and productive effort slip silently between them, covered by smoke and mirrors of frenzied activity.” (pp. 87, 88).
After a substantive analysis of organizations and managers and worker, which represent the residue of an obsolete culture, Fisher explores the cultures of comfort, complacency, and contribution. He suggests that modern organizations should develop the culture of contribution, which represents “an entirely new landscape for doing business, a new visage and frame of reference. It is the land of growth and contribution.”
This book is written with sincerity and passion, evoking incredible syntactic imagery and stimulating thought. However, it is more an analytical approach in understanding the cause and effect of American Society and its organization than the process of solutions. It is optimistic, perhaps simplistic in the actualization of coping behaviors for survival, but it is very deep in ferreting out those hidden factors (subconscious) that impact behavior without an explanation as to why this kind of behavior occurs.
James R. Fisher, Jr. has succeeded in writing a book, which is a valuable contribution to the fields of psychology, philosophy and business. He provides insight and important issues in contemporary society that allows readers and organizations to understand, prepare for, and survive in the new millennium.
The Wall Street Journal – Across the Board Magazine: One of the hazards of modern life is that its sheer speed forcibly filters out those wonderful moments many previously used to digest a good book. Such reading is in contrast to ingesting an author’s words via the kind of rapid scanning needed just to get through the information flood that engulfs us each day. But it’s not just verbal overflow that has kept thoughtful, even meditative reading to a minimum. Starting somewhere around the days of the One Minute Manager, many authors started reducing the intellectual weight of their books, so as to keep (they hoped) their invitingly simple-to-read books near the top of the pile. Jim Fisher is simply not that kind of author. An industrial psychologist with 40 years of corporate experience, he has written several books; more than likely most managers have read none of them. They are heavyweight reads utilizing a wide range of reference and examples. In sum, you have to work to read them, the payoff being (even if you don’t agree with him!) a full and complete connection with another mind’s thoughts about work, managing, and leading. Why, then, would Fisher’s latest book, Six Silent Killers, merit your attention? Well, this time Fisher seems to have found the magic balance between buoyancy and density. Yes, there are still the voluminous references, and Fisher is not afraid to cite Charles Dickens, Edward de Bono, Deepak Chopra, and Douglas McGregor, all in the same chapter, but he has thrust them into an argument that is simple and well-framed. So, almost 300 pages from the preface, it’s really hard to get lost in this book. Upset, maybe, but never lost . . . In short, trying to keep Fisher’s six silent killers from killing further will be tough work. No wonder he calls Chapter 10, “The Difficult Agenda Ahead, or When the Simple Is Complex.” Still, Fisher refuses to discount his estimate of the overall workplace problem with pat answers designed to sell books. Fisher’s assessment that changing the contemporary workplace will be tough does not, however, lead the book to a cheerless ending. Six Silent Killers ends with a single-point call for change on the part of management. In a brief afterward, Fisher calls for new initiatives to build greater levels of trust in the workplace: “Workers don’t trust management. Management doesn’t trust workers. And neither workers nor managers trust themselves.” His sentiments come at the very end of the book and are explored less than the book’s other topics. One suspects that the author intentionally planned a “sun just coming up over the horizon” wrap. Thus, when he endorses “soft approaches to hard problems” in the very last paragraph, most readers will be saying: “Over? So soon?” Yet, upon reflection, Fisher’s closing words are a capstone to a well-reasoned, well-documented study of how people think about working and managing today. Invest the time, really read the book, and you’ll probably agree that the central reason for an unhappy workplace is some well-defined “killers.” And ever so handily, Fisher will lead you to one more (albeit unstated) conclusion: that there’s a seventh killer somewhere here. It’s a management profession failing to move forward with the times that talks endlessly about “vision” and “empowerment” while refusing to loosen “the command-and-control screws” even one turn. Fisher seems to end his book precipitously, but only the manager who reads it can write the next chapter.
Glenn V. Wilson, restaurateur. In this book Fisher presents models for three phases of cultural development: Culture of Comfort, Culture of Complacency, and Culture of Contribution. Six “productive” organizational activities commonly initiated by senior management are dispelled as “unproductive” to a contributory culture. Fisher goes on to acknowledge that just as termites destroy a home, “social termites” (employees with destructive behaviors) destroy and undermine an organization’s infrastructure. Managing these covert destructive behaviors (Six Silent Killers) are one of management’s greatest challenges. Fisher doesn’t pull any punches in this book, and I like that. His brilliant and succinct writing style makes this book an absolute must for anyone who: a) makes decisions about employees (hiring, firing, performance assessments, etc.); b) can’t put their finger on employee challenges; and c) for those looking to improve productivity and well being in the workplace. As I was reading this book, I realized that three of my six employees in my restaurant business were clearly “social termites.” I was working hard but getting nowhere, spending all my time putting out fires. This book provided me with the insights into employee behaviors, which I was then able to take action on. Sales are up, customers are happy; other workers seem to enjoy their work more, leading to improved productivity. I no longer spend all my time putting out fires. I now spend my time managing a “successful, creative business, and leading the ENTIRE organization, not just an un-chosen few. I wish I had this book 30 years ago, but grateful that I have it now! Thank you James R.
HOW TO PURCHASE
ISBN: 1-57444-152-3: available in hardcover edition (291 pages, illustrations, schematics, bibliography, index), from St. Lucie Press (www.crcpress.com) or other Internet providers. This website price: $40 plus shipping and handling.
CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERS AND DISSONANT WORKERS (2000): Corporate Sin deals with the mortal sin of anachronistic leadership and atavistic followership. Leaders don’t lead. Followers don’t follow. Because they don’t know how in the present work climate. Consequently, it is a standoff with precious time, money, energy, and resources wasted at the expense of productive work. Leaderless leadership seems to be limited by a penchant for critical thinking, which is the prison of what is already known. Followers are frustrated with leadership at a time when leadership is required of them. Given this situation, leadership resorts to emergency measures or panic tactics, and calls them “strategies.” Meanwhile, followers act as if the corporation owes them a living, behaving as if spoiled brats, waiting to be rescued. It is a case of the leadership unable to relinquish the role of surrogate parent to workers as dependent children. Fifty years of this counterdependency is a luxury no organization can any longer afford. Rather then deal with deal with this inclination, leadership instead resorts to precipitous corrections – downsizing, redundancy exercises, mergers, and the like. Dr. Fisher tabs this “schizophrenic management,” as he sees the leadership having lost its moral compass, and therefore its way. Fisher claims this can be traced to its nostalgia for “1945 management,” where workers behaved as obedient children, and no one challenged authority. Not anymore. The book outlines this problem, and offers a blueprint for rectifying the situation. Corporate Sin is admittedly iconoclastic, but at the same time, ameliorative in its assessment and correction. Professionals and senior managers will find it an invaluable resource to getting off the time and on the same page.
READERS’ COMMENTS
Charles D. Hayes, author of Beyond the American Dream: No one is spared in this forthright analysis, neither the self-righteous leaders nor the self-indulgent followers.
It is like a “left cross” to the Psyche. Franz Kafka said that if the book you are reading doesn’t affect you with force as a blow to the side of the head, then reading might be a waste of your time. In that light, reading Corporate Sin, by James R. Fisher, Jr., is an experience similar to receiving steady left jabs, frequent left hooks, and an occasional overhand right that you don’t always see coming and that continues to send shock waves long after it connects. Corporate Sin is a kind of book that will get you out of the middle of the road, and into your own lane. It is a rare find in the management genre, as few in the field write with such passion and honesty. Not many people have the guts to tell the truth as they see it, which is why we’re so startled when someone articulates it. If you are going to read only one book on management this year, make it Corporate Sin.
HOW TO PURCHASE
ISBN: 1-58820-689-0: available: available from this website in softbound edition (228 pages, illustration, schematics, graphs, footnotes) or from other Internet providers. Price from this website: $20 plus shipping and handling.
IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE: MEMOIR OF THE 1940s WRITTEN AS A NOVEL (2003): Imagine coming of age in Clinton, Iowa in the middle of the United States in the middle of the century, and in the middle of this farm belt community of 33,000, snuggled against the muddy Mississippi River during World War II. It is in this working class climate that the author came of age In the Shadow of the Courthouse, while the nation struggled to come of age in the shadow of the atomic bomb. There was no television, mega-sports, big automobiles, or manicured lawns. There was radio, movies, high school sports, the Clinton Industrial Baseball League, where men too young or too old to go to war played for the fun of it. Clintonians had victory gardens, drove old jalopies, took the bus or rode their bicycles to work. It was a time when the four faces of the magnificent Clinton County Courthouse clock chimed on the half hour, and threw a metaphorical shadow over young people’s lives. This made certain they would not be late for meals made from victory garden staples. The courthouse neighborhood had most stay-at-home mothers in two-parent families. Few parents managed to get beyond grammar school, nearly all worked in Clinton factories, or on the railroad. Divorce was as foreign as an ancestral language. It was a time in hot weather that people slept with their families in Riverview Park, left windows open, doors unlocked, bicycles on the side of the house, and if they had automobiles, keys in the car, knowing neither neighbor nor stranger would disturb their possessions. In winter, schools never closed, even when snow banks were four feet high. This is a narrative snapshot with core neighborhood activities of young people against the backdrop of the courthouse, St. Patrick’s School, Riverview Stadium, downtown Clinton and Lyons, Bluff Boulevard, Hoot Owl Hollow, Mount St. Clare College, Mill Creek, Beaver Slough, Joyce Slough, the churches, schools, and hospitals throughout the city, U.S. Army’s Schick General Hospital, which brought the war to this place, tending battlefield casualties, the USO, Chicago & North Western Railway, Clinton Foods, Dupont, and many other industrial work places, which were working hard toward the war effort, as seen through the impressionistic eyes of the author, as a boy from age eight to thirteen. It was also a time when kids created their own play, as parents were too tired or too involved in the struggle to make a living to pay them much mind. Clinton youngsters would never know such Darwinian freedom, or its concomitant brutality again. This is not a history of the times, nor is it a novel in the conventional sense, but rather the recollections of a time, place, and circumstance through the author’s self-confessed imperfect vision. In the Shadow of the Courthouse promises to awaken that sleeping child in the reader of every age.
READERS’ COMMENTS:
Tom Dunmore (Freeport, Illinois): This book is extra special to me since my father, Jack Dunmore, my uncle, Dick Dunmore, and my grandfather, the courthouse groundskeeper, are all part of the story . . . This book will bring back memories to anyone who grew up in a small midwestern city before video games and 100+ channels on TV.
Lynn M. Carr (Houston, Minnesota): While reading this book, I felt nostalgia for a time and place that will never come again. I, too, grew up in Clinton, although it was in the 50’s, but I remember some of the same people. . . When Dr. Fisher mentions that in recent years St. Pat’s was demolished, the school and church he writes about, I remembered when I was there last, at my Bray’s funeral. His coming of age story reminds me so much of Frank McCourt’s books, and no wonder, as they are both of Irish families with hardships, tempers flaring, and the strong love of God and family. . . Clinton has changed, but the warm loving embrace of a community that fought for peace and lovingly raised their children hoping, for a better life for them can be found in the pages of Dr. Fisher’s book. I wish I knew what became of the boys who spent their summers playing in the shadows of the courthouse walls.
Cindy Rockwell (Iowa): This book prompted me to send a note to the author, something I generally avoid doing. Here is that note: I just wanted to drop you a line. The book is quite a joy to read. There are only a few authors that I read on an ongoing basis, it seems so few have the talent to really pull a person into the setting that they are writing about. Stephen King, I believe, is one who can. John Irving, at least in A Pray for Owen Meany is another. And, although the themes of those authors may not be compatible with yours, you certainly have that same ability to really describe without being noticed. I believe that an author who is able to both capture your attention with the tale and then disappear, so that you, the reader, can read unencumbered, has done a wonderful job of telling the tale. That type of author is the one I enjoy the most, and I would like to just say Thank You, it is a great read.
Donald E. Farr (Newhall, California): Having much in common with Dr. James Fisher (both of us practiced industrial psychology and had highly technical and scientific backgrounds, and both graduated from Clinton schools the same year and both enjoyed sports In the Shadow of the Courthouse) makes it understandable that his personal account of people, places, and events would help revive memories of my childhood. On the other hand, I graduated from another Clinton high school (Lyons High, a small school in the north end of town, and had a much different set of friends, hobbies, interests, and events that molded that period of my growth. Our parents were vastly different. What I found in reading this book is a writing technique allowing a remarkable capability through explicit detail, to COMPARE family, friends, and events through recall even though vastly different. I believe that even if you never heard of Clinton, Iowa, this fine book will take you back to YOUR childhood. It will have you remembering where you were and what you were doing during a specific age or year in your own personal life. A most wonderful stimulus and a gift of memories for our children. A great read.
Barbara Hollowell Edgren (Portland, Oregon): Once I started reading this book, I couldn’t put it down. It brought back so many memories and triggered so many more. Some things brought tears to my eyes just thinking of the wonderful and sometimes sad times I remember as a child born in Clinton, Iowa, and never leaving until I went to Iowa State . . . Just reading the names of familiar people and remembering some I haven’t thought about for many years was so exciting to me. Anyone growing up in the Midwest can relate to Jim’s book even if they didn’t grow up in Clinton or know these people personally. There were so many “Clintons” in the Midwest and we all had the same type of childhood – simple, safe, and loving. I have decided to give each of my boys a book for Christmas because this book depicts my life in the 40’s more than anything I could tell them. Thank you Jim Fisher for bringing back some very special memories in my life.
Richard R. Crider (Chula Vista, California): In the Shadow of the Courthouse depicts an era that should be considered historical. The trials and tribulations growing up with little money or influence for most of the children of the time is portrayed in an excellent manner. Credit was bestowed on those who help guide us through those times, such as the Clinton County Sheriff, his Deputies, and many others. It is as honest as one could expect in trying to dredge up times, dates, places, etc. It is one of the finest books I have read in the past 20 years. I am not an avid reader, but this book about Clinton, Iowa, the Mississippi River, and most of all the beloved County Courthouse and Courtyard, where all of us played baseball, football, basketball, ice skated, and in general spent very much of our time in good stead, and as my grandfather stated, under the scrutiny of fine people. It points to Americans of all ages and particularly those struggling through their adolescent years with limited supervision and how they dealt with it. This is such a book, and Dr. Fisher has done a very commendable job of penning this story written as a novel.
Karen Ingram (La Quinta, California): I enjoyed this novel very much and had ordered it from the author prior to its publication. He is writing about his childhood in Clinton, Iowa and I, too, was born and educated there. His characters feel very real, some of them I actually knew, or heard of from older siblings, but they could be people from just about anywhere during the 40’s. As midwesterners, we tend to appreciate the same values and ethics, still respecting the views of others. Each of the characters are “testing the waters” and trying to find their own way. The visualization of his scenes makes it easy to understand the times bringing back a period of history when life seemed simpler, people less rushed, and a dedication to sports and making friends, made life worthwhile. Though the economy was tight and work was scarce, people were creative and Family was very important. I would recommend this book to anyone wishing to examine their childhood with friends, and teachers, or mentors, who played such important roles in shaping their lives. It reads very quickly and is refreshing in light of today’s standards of behavior.
Jo Rogis (Clinton, Iowa): Really enjoyed reading this book, course, being from Clinton and living in Clinton during the “era” that the book was written about, I found it especially interesting. How someone could write his memories from 50+ years ago and be so accurate in “remembering” the good old days of Clinton, Iowa, just amazes me. The author revealed his innermost thoughts as a child, and some of them were very touching. I think it must have been difficult for him to reach back into his past and delve into childhood relationships. Kudos to Dr. Fisher on the publication of his new book. However, Dr. Fisher will always be “Rube” to those who knew him in high school!!
Michael J. Kearney (Los Angeles, California): I was born in Clinton and was a member of St. Patrick’s parish. I know most of the people and places described in the book. Jim’s narrative made it all come alive for me and embraced universal experiences and feelings that should make this book interesting to anyone.
Barry R. Greene (Iowa City, Iowa): I grew up just a little further away from the same Courthouse in Clinton, Iowa as the author. I am a college professor and must admit my bias early in that I think I was able, to some extent at least, to look at the book from the inside out. I knew many of the same people and certainly all of the social, political and religious institutions. This is an excellent book about one of the more interesting times in our history, during and just after World War II. The memories stem from a midwestern river town, but the most compelling narrative for me related to the early priority of life’s choices and circumstances. This is very good reading for anyone with even the slightest interest in history and the joy and anguish of growing up.
Sharon Holt (Longwood, Florida): This book was a nostalgic trip back to my childhood, and consequently back to anyone’s childhood who was raised in a small midwestern town in the 1940’s when the traditional values of family, education, religion, sports, and deep personal friendships were the make-up of common existence. The author has evoked every emotion that is present in the maelstrom of growing up; creating a story that touches one’s sensibilities to the core. This step back into the past weaves a common thread about life during WWII when we all clung together from necessity for emotion and physical survival.
George Jensen (Edmond, Oklahoma): I am about four years younger than the author, but growing up in Clinton I share the same feelings for that time and for Clinton. Growing up as a Lutheran, I did not embrace Catholicism then, but since my grandchildren have grown up as Roman Catholics, I can appreciate what the author is saying. Now living in Oklahoma, I think that anyone growing up in a town of Clinton’s size can find something to relate to. The picture of the courthouse is exactly as I remember it and on a recent visit to Clinton, I verified that everything is so accurate.
Ron McGauvran Clinton, Iowa): When you read In the Shadow of the Courthouse, you will experience Clinton, Iowa and the Midwest in a time far different from Clinton today. For Clintonians, it will remind them of many things long forgotten. For others, it will give them a sense of what it was like growing up when their parents and grandparents were children. For everyone, it will reacquaint them with their youth and how they dealt with growing up, the naiveté and fumbling for an understanding of life. The author literally grew up in the shadow of the Clinton County Courthouse, and attended St. Patrick’s parochial school through the eighth grade. The book focuses on those WWII and postwar years (1942 – 1947) in Clinton as he deals with adolescence, parents, poverty, Catholicism, and friendships. The book promises to stimulate nostalgic recollections and to hold interests from the first to the last scintillating page.
HOW TO PURCHASE
ISBN: 1-4107-1139-0: available in both hard cover and softbound editions (370 pages, map, art work by Carl H. Johnson of Galena, Illinois, poem on the courthouse, and facsimile map). The book may be purchased from this website: $25 plus shipping and handling (hard cover) and $17.50 plus shipping and handling (softbound), or from other Internet providers.
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
The Books
CONFIDENT SELLING (1970). The key to success is bringing out your best which means overcoming your resistance to self-confidence. The resistance disappears when you accept yourself as you are and others as you find them (no longer in print).
WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990). It defines the sickness of organization, “corpocracy,” as the continuing dependence on management failing to recognize the power shift from managers to professional workers.
CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90S & BEYOND (1992). The book deals with the new reality that everyone is in sales. The workplace as a fixed place of employment has disappeared, as has the conventional art of selling or the security of a single job in a career.
THE WORKER, ALONE! (1995). This is a survival manual for never getting fired, not by playing it safe, but by going against the grain of convention and taking charge of your career. Failure is not an option when you take control.
THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996). To have a friend you must be a friend, starting with yourself. This means systematically reprogramming yourself to trust yourself first, last and always before anyone else.
SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998). Times have changed. Corporate restructuring has become the new reality. What is not obvious is the systematic silent destruction of disgruntled employees through passive behaviors until it is too late for damage control.
CORPORATE SIN (2000). The book deals with the failure of leaders to lead and workers to follow, resulting in leaderless leadership and dissonant workers. This is happening when corporate America is under global siege and needs a wake up call.
IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003). This is a novel of Dr. Fisher’s youth written as a memoir. It deals with a community in the middle of America in the middle of the century when the world was at war and he was an eight-year-old boy.
WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990). It defines the sickness of organization, “corpocracy,” as the continuing dependence on management failing to recognize the power shift from managers to professional workers.
CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90S & BEYOND (1992). The book deals with the new reality that everyone is in sales. The workplace as a fixed place of employment has disappeared, as has the conventional art of selling or the security of a single job in a career.
THE WORKER, ALONE! (1995). This is a survival manual for never getting fired, not by playing it safe, but by going against the grain of convention and taking charge of your career. Failure is not an option when you take control.
THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996). To have a friend you must be a friend, starting with yourself. This means systematically reprogramming yourself to trust yourself first, last and always before anyone else.
SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998). Times have changed. Corporate restructuring has become the new reality. What is not obvious is the systematic silent destruction of disgruntled employees through passive behaviors until it is too late for damage control.
CORPORATE SIN (2000). The book deals with the failure of leaders to lead and workers to follow, resulting in leaderless leadership and dissonant workers. This is happening when corporate America is under global siege and needs a wake up call.
IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003). This is a novel of Dr. Fisher’s youth written as a memoir. It deals with a community in the middle of America in the middle of the century when the world was at war and he was an eight-year-old boy.
Thursday, March 10, 2005
Is it Management or is it Leadership?
Preamble:
This was written in 2001, but it would seem as apropos as it was then. It is a condition that a writer/philosopher who sees repeatedly the same things happening as if they were fixed in a time freeze zone. To him, it would appear we learn slowly, and then only when we have no other options. Clearly, we are addicted to "progress" while failing to see that this is because we have a "management" mentality rather than a leadership orientation. We are fond of measuring things rather than qualifying the impact of things on people, and ultimately on the life of this planet. We are quantifiers, left brain thinkers, reducing everything to mathematics or stoichiometric equations. We fail to see the qualitative impact of this fixation until it is too late for damage control.
The irony is that we champion our human consciousness, but choose to ignore the fact that most of us sleepwalk through life, unaware of much outside our habitual routine. We drive ourselves away from reality with noise we call music, with the worship of celebrity as the new religion, and preoccupied with deviant behavior as media entertainment.
It is for this reason that I have paid special attention to the dichotomy between management and leadership. We have lost our moral compass and our way.
Doubtlessly, we have many good managers, but few good leaders. With management, ends justify means. Managers drove the Greeks into Persia, the Romans into nostalgia, the Spaniards into New World exploitation, the Englishmen into colonial hedonism, and now the United States into moral policemen of the world.
The United States Congress attempts to manage the social security crisis rather than lead the nation out of debt. The National Pastime, baseball, is trying to manage the steroid crisis instead of preserving the integrity of the game. The Catholic Church is managing the pedophile abuse crisis of priests instead of establishing a philosophy leading the Church into the twenty-first century. Corporate management is managing the crisis in corporate scandal instead of leading to a restructuring of organization to fit the character of personnel and the times. The government and military attempt to manage the insurgency crisis instead of understanding what creates insurgency and therefore what might neurtralize it.
There isn't a front in our society that hasn't, as my da was fond of putting it, "that doesn't have everything ass backwards." A little article isn't going to change anything, so why write? As the Roman Seneca once said, "My role is to report; your role is to change things."
_________________________________________________________________________________
Is it Management or is it Leadership?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
(Copyright January 2001)
First feed the troops, then the officers. The running of the corporation belongs to the workers. If there is to be a bonus rule, the same rule should apply to the workers and managers alike when it comes to special compensation. Management, believing it holds the ‘Keys to the Kingdom,’ gives itself ‘Nobel Prize-like’ awards, while giving the troops ‘baubles and beads.’ Management, as a word, should be eliminated: inventories can be managed, people led.
Ross H. Perot
Fortune Magazine
February 15, 1988
The dust has settled since Ross Perot published his manifesto on “How I would turn around GM.” Perot got on the General Motors Board of Directors, and was so disruptive, that he was subsequently bought out at great relief to the other board members. Obviously, a provocateur is neither a leader nor a manager, but simply that, a provocateur. Still, what Perot insisted has merit. The problem is that persuasion is an emotional factor and takes time, education, understanding and patience. Good people differ because they look at similar things differently. On the other hand, not such good people will remain insensitive to the facts as long as they can stand the tide. Where Perot is correct is in his insistence that management and leadership are not the same. Therefore, it might be of some use to look at how they differ and why.
Management expects to solve its problems while essentially maintaining the structural integrity of the organization, failing to realize the structure may be the problem. Leadership recognizes the folly of this cosmetic approach seeing the organization in the midst of a revolution. The shift from position power to knowledge power has necessitated the dismantling of the command and control philosophy of organization to a more relevant and realistic relational model.
MANAGER/ LEADER
Cop/ Cheerleader
Referee/ Enthusiast
Devil's Advocate/ Nurturer
Naysayer/ Coach
Pronouncer/ Facilitator
Manipulator/ Enabler
Evaluator/ Counselor
Arranging and Telling/ Mentoring
Management encourages the philosophy of positive thinking and possibility thinking because it sees the worker as a psychological machine, which can be molded and fashioned into an organization man. Leadership understands man is not an object to be force fitted into the role the organization demands of him, but is a complex entity with a myriad of choices. Leadership allows itself to be surprised and benefited by these choices.
Management puts the emphasis on results (success) and therefore unwittingly courts imitation, stagnation, and sterility. Leadership embraces process (where failures do occur) as the price of growth and development. Leadership recognizes that only through risk, pain and, uncertainty, going forth boldly not being afraid to be ludicrous, not being afraid to let the group down is the only formula for real progress.
Management has a mania for control, which finds it inclined to micromanage out of a distrust of those that do. Leadership realizes the only way to truly control is to let go of control. The very process of controlling something breeds a kind of disorder. Looking at people, processes, and problems too closely, becoming too obsessed with control therefore leads to chaos, not order.
Management is a mechanistic art form independent of that which is managed. In that context management functions best in a staid, repetitive environment, where there are routinized, uniform, and conventional practices. Management is inclined to fail when forced to cope with radical change, or where there is an explosive transition to another form. Leadership is a creative art form, which is most dependent on that which is managed. Leadership functions best in a state-of-the-art, frontier technology, and dynamic operation, where chaos, and ambiguity take residence. Leadership must therefore be quite knowledgeable and understanding of the subtle nuances of that which it does.
Tom Peters: "Once you become a manager you give up honest work for the rest of your life."
Management expresses its will and it is manifested, and the organization is diminished. Leadership allows the will of the followers to flourish and the organization is enhanced.
Management is inclined to support the theory of doing everything right the first time regardless of its relative importance. Leadership concentrates on the critical mass of the few right things, which spell the difference between success and failure.
Management, for its insistence on compliance, conformity, politeness, obedience, harmony, and subservience, has unwittingly educated responsibility and accountability out of the workforce, replaced by learned helplessness and nonresponsibility. Leadership gives workers control of what they do, the freedom to do it, and the trust that they will do it well. Through coaching and counseling, leadership encourages workers to take calculated risks and to accept failure as the price of individual initiative. And for this attention, leadership realizes cooperation.
Management functions as a mechanistic design of several discrete parts – research & development, engineering, production, etc. The objectives of these functional groups are often in conflict. The focus and reward system is based on functional group success, not organizational success. Leadership functions as a fluid system of interdependent parts. If any one part is functioning as well as it might, than the organization isn’t. Therefore, the focus and reward system is on success of the system, not on any discrete function.
MANAGEMENT VERSUS LEADERSHIP
FROM/ TOWARD
SELF-CONTROL/ SELF-REALIZATION
DEPENDENCE/ INTERDEPENDENCE
ENDURANCE OF STRESS/ CAPACITY FOR JOY
LIFETIME EMPLOYMENT/ LIFETIME ENJOYMENT
EXISTENCE/ LIVING
MECHANISTIC PROCESSES/ ORGANIC PROCESSES
COMPETITIVE RELATIONS/ COLLABORATIVE RELATIONS
Management is a survival strategy. Survival is predicated on the maintenance of the status quo. This encourages empire building and contributes to forward inertia. Leadership is a developmental strategy. It focuses on continuous improvement and attempts to grow the business by challenging the status quo.
Management is good at managing things, but poor at managing people. Therefore, it fails to deal effectively with people’s natural suspicions and inclination. For people to commit to anything, they must first fight for clarity and understanding before they voluntarily reach agreement. To bypass suspicion and fight is to sue for agreement by bribing (through incentives), intimidating (through fear or non-inclusion), or manipulating people to satisfy the interests of management. These are coercive tactics commonly employed by management. It may realize compliance, but never cooperation. Cooperation is always voluntary. People cooperate when they have a clear understanding that their interests are at heart and being protected. They don’t need to be bribed. They need to know what is expected of them and why, and how they might best realize the objective. Management seeks cooperation but settles for compliance. This is in no small way due to its lack of people skills, and the patience to bring people on board to support the objective. Leadership, on the other hand, knows if the people are not committed to the objective, it cannot lead. It understands the key to cooperation, communication, and collaboration is to perceive and promote the common interests: First perceiving, then exercising the collective will do this.
Management mirrors the age of the machine. Leadership mirrors the age of the system.
Management has difficulty confronting and dealing with change. It has a huge investment in the culture of the status quo. This finds it owning a problem it cannot solve, that is, attempting to manage operations with an authority it no longer has, and a position power, which is now anachronistic. Leadership accepts the reality – the chaos, conflict, ambiguity – and goes with the flow. It creates a climate of contribution in which knowledge power can eventually find its wings to soar. It accepts setbacks, disappointments, surprises, and failures in stride as the price of success. Leadership never owns the problem. It belongs to everyone as the answers reside with those who do. It recognizes the purpose of a system is what it does, not what it says it does, or would like to do. Leadership recognizes it is not the celebrity of a few, but the mindset of the many that makes things happen.
RELATIONAL MODEL OF LEADERSHIP
AUTHORITY THROUGH RELATIONSHIPS
LOYALTY THROUGH RELATIOSHIPS
DISCIPLINE THROUGH RELATIONSHIPS
MOTIVATION THROUGH RELATIONSHIPS
Management is inclined to see things in broad generic terms, and pushes for excellence across the board indiscriminate of what is most important. Leadership is discriminating, that is, it focuses on the chronic few problems. It examines processes to determine the problem’s source, than leverages resources to eradicate it. Leadership knows that the 20 percent critical few problems determine 80 percent of the return on the investment in time, energy, resources, and operations.
Management has the hubris to believe it can manage anything irrespective of its knowledge of that enterprise. Leadership knows it must first be a student of that which it manages, before it can demonstrate the ability to lead. Once it is satisfied it possesses such knowledge, it must know the people. This is because the key to every business is its people, and the knowledge, skill, and experience of those people. Complicating this problem further, the people differ from one industry to another, one discipline to another, one operation to another, and when the operation is in another state or country, one people to another.
Management focuses on the bottom line, which encourages a lot of cheating. Leadership focuses on chronic problems, which represent barriers to the bottom line.
Crisis management persists as standard operating procedure with management because crises are rewarded. The crises management solves are the crises it creates. Crisis management is an embarrassment to leadership and is avoided by developing systems, which acknowledge and deal with previous pitfalls, also known as chronic problems.
Management struggles with crises as an endurance contest, developing a capacity to spawn crises as well as a capacity to dispatch them. Leadership embraces crises as part of the process of growth.
The Most Reverend Thomas MacGraff, S.J., Ph.D., Psychologist:
"It is important to note that information is not operational. Nobody ever did anything because they knew. Think of that. What actually happens is that you take advantage and dump it into human experience, and it comes out felt knowledge. And
felt knowledge is value. And value moves people to do, to
believe, and to be motivated."
The perception, rather justified or not, is that management is committed to the stockholder, the customer, itself, then its workers. This makes for a short-term perspective with warped loyalty to its purposes. An emphasis on now is often at the expense of the future. Leadership is committed to its vision of what can be, and forces act, positively and negatively, on that vision. Leadership is first and foremost of, for, and by the people being led. Its objective is in bringing the future into the present while maintaining healthy contact with the past, with a grudging concern for the present. It takes nothing for granted, and the people being led least of all.
Management promotes internal competition, which leads to functional divisiveness. Leadership promotes cooperation, which leads to consensus building, collaboration and functional interdependence.
We are in a new century, still haunted by the problems encounter in the old. We find the typical organization today in a paradoxical dilemma. It is faced with anachronistic leadership and atavistic followership.
Leaders are looking through the rear view mirror, and wondering why they can’t see ahead. Followers are frustrated with their management, when they are confronted with the demands of leadership roles. This situation is product of the power shift from doing to thinking, from conforming to contributing, from central authority to decision making at the level of consequences. Faced with this dilemma, management often resorts to emergency tactics and calls them strategies. Meanwhile, followers, like spoiled brats, wait to be rescued by their surrogate (management) parents.
The litany of downsizing, redundancy exercises, streamlining, refocusing, reengineering, plant closings, plant relocations, and mergers is nothing less than a confirmation of this, or the personification of schizophrenic management. By that is meant that management is delusional as it attempts to operate from a power base of hierarchical authority, when the pyramid no longer exists. Management, it would seem, has lost its moral compass and cannot find its way.
Reality is subordinated to the expedience of corporate deception. Nothing is as it seems. No one is in control due to management’s unwillingness to face its declining corporate authority.
Sigmund Freud:
"It is only through pain that our level of awareness, our conscious mind increases. Therefore, comfort reduces our awareness, while increasing the power of cognitive dissonance. We see what we want to see, hear what we want to hear, feel what we what to feel, think what we want to thing . . . all to our eventual despair."
Workers have a gigantic problem to overcome in their own right. Over the past century, they have fallen prey to learned helplessness and nonresponsibility, not only in the workplace, but also in the home and school as well. This is due to the removal of consequences of their actions. Much is made of workers alienation and passivity from their employment in mass production and assembly line manufacturing. What is seldom mentioned is their alienation from consequences of their actions. For being punctual, polite, passive, obedient, obsequious, conforming, and reactive, they have been blessed with surreal comfort.
This finds workers today, on the one hand, the most skilled and intellectually sophisticated in history, but on the other, emotionally suspended in terminal adolescence. Management, in the 20th century, created a monster, workers with the emotional maturity of twelve-year-old children, and at a time when mature adult workers are critical to success.
You see when workers take their problems to the streets with placards of complaints before television cameras, rather than using that energy to devise solutions to company problems, then sell management on them as co-partners in their benefits. You see it when workers subscribe to the cult of victim hood, as if they had no power when they, indeed, are the most powerful factor in the workplace. You see it when they sue for higher wages and greater benefits without a thought as to how their performance might justify these demands.
Henry David Thoreau:
"Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only indispensable, but positively hindrances to the elevation of mankind."
The pyramid is shrinking, replaced by horizontal coordination, communication, and cooperation. It is for that reason that the rationale for this transformation is presented here.
________________________
See James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. books and articles as presented on Dr. Fisher's website: www.Theperipateticphilosopher.com
This was written in 2001, but it would seem as apropos as it was then. It is a condition that a writer/philosopher who sees repeatedly the same things happening as if they were fixed in a time freeze zone. To him, it would appear we learn slowly, and then only when we have no other options. Clearly, we are addicted to "progress" while failing to see that this is because we have a "management" mentality rather than a leadership orientation. We are fond of measuring things rather than qualifying the impact of things on people, and ultimately on the life of this planet. We are quantifiers, left brain thinkers, reducing everything to mathematics or stoichiometric equations. We fail to see the qualitative impact of this fixation until it is too late for damage control.
The irony is that we champion our human consciousness, but choose to ignore the fact that most of us sleepwalk through life, unaware of much outside our habitual routine. We drive ourselves away from reality with noise we call music, with the worship of celebrity as the new religion, and preoccupied with deviant behavior as media entertainment.
It is for this reason that I have paid special attention to the dichotomy between management and leadership. We have lost our moral compass and our way.
Doubtlessly, we have many good managers, but few good leaders. With management, ends justify means. Managers drove the Greeks into Persia, the Romans into nostalgia, the Spaniards into New World exploitation, the Englishmen into colonial hedonism, and now the United States into moral policemen of the world.
The United States Congress attempts to manage the social security crisis rather than lead the nation out of debt. The National Pastime, baseball, is trying to manage the steroid crisis instead of preserving the integrity of the game. The Catholic Church is managing the pedophile abuse crisis of priests instead of establishing a philosophy leading the Church into the twenty-first century. Corporate management is managing the crisis in corporate scandal instead of leading to a restructuring of organization to fit the character of personnel and the times. The government and military attempt to manage the insurgency crisis instead of understanding what creates insurgency and therefore what might neurtralize it.
There isn't a front in our society that hasn't, as my da was fond of putting it, "that doesn't have everything ass backwards." A little article isn't going to change anything, so why write? As the Roman Seneca once said, "My role is to report; your role is to change things."
_________________________________________________________________________________
Is it Management or is it Leadership?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
(Copyright January 2001)
First feed the troops, then the officers. The running of the corporation belongs to the workers. If there is to be a bonus rule, the same rule should apply to the workers and managers alike when it comes to special compensation. Management, believing it holds the ‘Keys to the Kingdom,’ gives itself ‘Nobel Prize-like’ awards, while giving the troops ‘baubles and beads.’ Management, as a word, should be eliminated: inventories can be managed, people led.
Ross H. Perot
Fortune Magazine
February 15, 1988
The dust has settled since Ross Perot published his manifesto on “How I would turn around GM.” Perot got on the General Motors Board of Directors, and was so disruptive, that he was subsequently bought out at great relief to the other board members. Obviously, a provocateur is neither a leader nor a manager, but simply that, a provocateur. Still, what Perot insisted has merit. The problem is that persuasion is an emotional factor and takes time, education, understanding and patience. Good people differ because they look at similar things differently. On the other hand, not such good people will remain insensitive to the facts as long as they can stand the tide. Where Perot is correct is in his insistence that management and leadership are not the same. Therefore, it might be of some use to look at how they differ and why.
Management expects to solve its problems while essentially maintaining the structural integrity of the organization, failing to realize the structure may be the problem. Leadership recognizes the folly of this cosmetic approach seeing the organization in the midst of a revolution. The shift from position power to knowledge power has necessitated the dismantling of the command and control philosophy of organization to a more relevant and realistic relational model.
MANAGER/ LEADER
Cop/ Cheerleader
Referee/ Enthusiast
Devil's Advocate/ Nurturer
Naysayer/ Coach
Pronouncer/ Facilitator
Manipulator/ Enabler
Evaluator/ Counselor
Arranging and Telling/ Mentoring
Management encourages the philosophy of positive thinking and possibility thinking because it sees the worker as a psychological machine, which can be molded and fashioned into an organization man. Leadership understands man is not an object to be force fitted into the role the organization demands of him, but is a complex entity with a myriad of choices. Leadership allows itself to be surprised and benefited by these choices.
Management puts the emphasis on results (success) and therefore unwittingly courts imitation, stagnation, and sterility. Leadership embraces process (where failures do occur) as the price of growth and development. Leadership recognizes that only through risk, pain and, uncertainty, going forth boldly not being afraid to be ludicrous, not being afraid to let the group down is the only formula for real progress.
Management has a mania for control, which finds it inclined to micromanage out of a distrust of those that do. Leadership realizes the only way to truly control is to let go of control. The very process of controlling something breeds a kind of disorder. Looking at people, processes, and problems too closely, becoming too obsessed with control therefore leads to chaos, not order.
Management is a mechanistic art form independent of that which is managed. In that context management functions best in a staid, repetitive environment, where there are routinized, uniform, and conventional practices. Management is inclined to fail when forced to cope with radical change, or where there is an explosive transition to another form. Leadership is a creative art form, which is most dependent on that which is managed. Leadership functions best in a state-of-the-art, frontier technology, and dynamic operation, where chaos, and ambiguity take residence. Leadership must therefore be quite knowledgeable and understanding of the subtle nuances of that which it does.
Tom Peters: "Once you become a manager you give up honest work for the rest of your life."
Management expresses its will and it is manifested, and the organization is diminished. Leadership allows the will of the followers to flourish and the organization is enhanced.
Management is inclined to support the theory of doing everything right the first time regardless of its relative importance. Leadership concentrates on the critical mass of the few right things, which spell the difference between success and failure.
Management, for its insistence on compliance, conformity, politeness, obedience, harmony, and subservience, has unwittingly educated responsibility and accountability out of the workforce, replaced by learned helplessness and nonresponsibility. Leadership gives workers control of what they do, the freedom to do it, and the trust that they will do it well. Through coaching and counseling, leadership encourages workers to take calculated risks and to accept failure as the price of individual initiative. And for this attention, leadership realizes cooperation.
Management functions as a mechanistic design of several discrete parts – research & development, engineering, production, etc. The objectives of these functional groups are often in conflict. The focus and reward system is based on functional group success, not organizational success. Leadership functions as a fluid system of interdependent parts. If any one part is functioning as well as it might, than the organization isn’t. Therefore, the focus and reward system is on success of the system, not on any discrete function.
MANAGEMENT VERSUS LEADERSHIP
FROM/ TOWARD
SELF-CONTROL/ SELF-REALIZATION
DEPENDENCE/ INTERDEPENDENCE
ENDURANCE OF STRESS/ CAPACITY FOR JOY
LIFETIME EMPLOYMENT/ LIFETIME ENJOYMENT
EXISTENCE/ LIVING
MECHANISTIC PROCESSES/ ORGANIC PROCESSES
COMPETITIVE RELATIONS/ COLLABORATIVE RELATIONS
Management is a survival strategy. Survival is predicated on the maintenance of the status quo. This encourages empire building and contributes to forward inertia. Leadership is a developmental strategy. It focuses on continuous improvement and attempts to grow the business by challenging the status quo.
Management is good at managing things, but poor at managing people. Therefore, it fails to deal effectively with people’s natural suspicions and inclination. For people to commit to anything, they must first fight for clarity and understanding before they voluntarily reach agreement. To bypass suspicion and fight is to sue for agreement by bribing (through incentives), intimidating (through fear or non-inclusion), or manipulating people to satisfy the interests of management. These are coercive tactics commonly employed by management. It may realize compliance, but never cooperation. Cooperation is always voluntary. People cooperate when they have a clear understanding that their interests are at heart and being protected. They don’t need to be bribed. They need to know what is expected of them and why, and how they might best realize the objective. Management seeks cooperation but settles for compliance. This is in no small way due to its lack of people skills, and the patience to bring people on board to support the objective. Leadership, on the other hand, knows if the people are not committed to the objective, it cannot lead. It understands the key to cooperation, communication, and collaboration is to perceive and promote the common interests: First perceiving, then exercising the collective will do this.
Management mirrors the age of the machine. Leadership mirrors the age of the system.
Management has difficulty confronting and dealing with change. It has a huge investment in the culture of the status quo. This finds it owning a problem it cannot solve, that is, attempting to manage operations with an authority it no longer has, and a position power, which is now anachronistic. Leadership accepts the reality – the chaos, conflict, ambiguity – and goes with the flow. It creates a climate of contribution in which knowledge power can eventually find its wings to soar. It accepts setbacks, disappointments, surprises, and failures in stride as the price of success. Leadership never owns the problem. It belongs to everyone as the answers reside with those who do. It recognizes the purpose of a system is what it does, not what it says it does, or would like to do. Leadership recognizes it is not the celebrity of a few, but the mindset of the many that makes things happen.
RELATIONAL MODEL OF LEADERSHIP
AUTHORITY THROUGH RELATIONSHIPS
LOYALTY THROUGH RELATIOSHIPS
DISCIPLINE THROUGH RELATIONSHIPS
MOTIVATION THROUGH RELATIONSHIPS
Management is inclined to see things in broad generic terms, and pushes for excellence across the board indiscriminate of what is most important. Leadership is discriminating, that is, it focuses on the chronic few problems. It examines processes to determine the problem’s source, than leverages resources to eradicate it. Leadership knows that the 20 percent critical few problems determine 80 percent of the return on the investment in time, energy, resources, and operations.
Management has the hubris to believe it can manage anything irrespective of its knowledge of that enterprise. Leadership knows it must first be a student of that which it manages, before it can demonstrate the ability to lead. Once it is satisfied it possesses such knowledge, it must know the people. This is because the key to every business is its people, and the knowledge, skill, and experience of those people. Complicating this problem further, the people differ from one industry to another, one discipline to another, one operation to another, and when the operation is in another state or country, one people to another.
Management focuses on the bottom line, which encourages a lot of cheating. Leadership focuses on chronic problems, which represent barriers to the bottom line.
Crisis management persists as standard operating procedure with management because crises are rewarded. The crises management solves are the crises it creates. Crisis management is an embarrassment to leadership and is avoided by developing systems, which acknowledge and deal with previous pitfalls, also known as chronic problems.
Management struggles with crises as an endurance contest, developing a capacity to spawn crises as well as a capacity to dispatch them. Leadership embraces crises as part of the process of growth.
The Most Reverend Thomas MacGraff, S.J., Ph.D., Psychologist:
"It is important to note that information is not operational. Nobody ever did anything because they knew. Think of that. What actually happens is that you take advantage and dump it into human experience, and it comes out felt knowledge. And
felt knowledge is value. And value moves people to do, to
believe, and to be motivated."
The perception, rather justified or not, is that management is committed to the stockholder, the customer, itself, then its workers. This makes for a short-term perspective with warped loyalty to its purposes. An emphasis on now is often at the expense of the future. Leadership is committed to its vision of what can be, and forces act, positively and negatively, on that vision. Leadership is first and foremost of, for, and by the people being led. Its objective is in bringing the future into the present while maintaining healthy contact with the past, with a grudging concern for the present. It takes nothing for granted, and the people being led least of all.
Management promotes internal competition, which leads to functional divisiveness. Leadership promotes cooperation, which leads to consensus building, collaboration and functional interdependence.
We are in a new century, still haunted by the problems encounter in the old. We find the typical organization today in a paradoxical dilemma. It is faced with anachronistic leadership and atavistic followership.
Leaders are looking through the rear view mirror, and wondering why they can’t see ahead. Followers are frustrated with their management, when they are confronted with the demands of leadership roles. This situation is product of the power shift from doing to thinking, from conforming to contributing, from central authority to decision making at the level of consequences. Faced with this dilemma, management often resorts to emergency tactics and calls them strategies. Meanwhile, followers, like spoiled brats, wait to be rescued by their surrogate (management) parents.
The litany of downsizing, redundancy exercises, streamlining, refocusing, reengineering, plant closings, plant relocations, and mergers is nothing less than a confirmation of this, or the personification of schizophrenic management. By that is meant that management is delusional as it attempts to operate from a power base of hierarchical authority, when the pyramid no longer exists. Management, it would seem, has lost its moral compass and cannot find its way.
Reality is subordinated to the expedience of corporate deception. Nothing is as it seems. No one is in control due to management’s unwillingness to face its declining corporate authority.
Sigmund Freud:
"It is only through pain that our level of awareness, our conscious mind increases. Therefore, comfort reduces our awareness, while increasing the power of cognitive dissonance. We see what we want to see, hear what we want to hear, feel what we what to feel, think what we want to thing . . . all to our eventual despair."
Workers have a gigantic problem to overcome in their own right. Over the past century, they have fallen prey to learned helplessness and nonresponsibility, not only in the workplace, but also in the home and school as well. This is due to the removal of consequences of their actions. Much is made of workers alienation and passivity from their employment in mass production and assembly line manufacturing. What is seldom mentioned is their alienation from consequences of their actions. For being punctual, polite, passive, obedient, obsequious, conforming, and reactive, they have been blessed with surreal comfort.
This finds workers today, on the one hand, the most skilled and intellectually sophisticated in history, but on the other, emotionally suspended in terminal adolescence. Management, in the 20th century, created a monster, workers with the emotional maturity of twelve-year-old children, and at a time when mature adult workers are critical to success.
You see when workers take their problems to the streets with placards of complaints before television cameras, rather than using that energy to devise solutions to company problems, then sell management on them as co-partners in their benefits. You see it when workers subscribe to the cult of victim hood, as if they had no power when they, indeed, are the most powerful factor in the workplace. You see it when they sue for higher wages and greater benefits without a thought as to how their performance might justify these demands.
Henry David Thoreau:
"Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only indispensable, but positively hindrances to the elevation of mankind."
The pyramid is shrinking, replaced by horizontal coordination, communication, and cooperation. It is for that reason that the rationale for this transformation is presented here.
________________________
See James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. books and articles as presented on Dr. Fisher's website: www.Theperipateticphilosopher.com
Saturday, March 05, 2005
Leadership Manifesto: A Typology of Leaderless Leadership
Leadership Manifesto
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 2002
Part One:
A Typology of Leaderless Leadership
Abstract
This is the first of a four-part series on leadership mainly in outline form. This work makes no attempt to be scientific or definitive in content or context. It is the intuitive reflections of the author’s lifelong involvement in organization at all levels of work and management from laborer to senior manager, from professor to consultant, from domestic to international executive.
The first part is a typology of leaderless leadership, which the author claims exceeds even In Praise of Folly (1511) by Erasmus. Folly’s subject is society and she quickly becomes a many-sided symbol, which stands for all that is natural in man, and for all man’s misdirected efforts to get the wrong things out of life. In that sense this typology has much in common with this early 16th century book.
The second part of the leadership series is to focus on the new leaders and where they are likely to reside, and how today they are being misapplied and misused.
The third part looks at leadership and its relationship to the changing nature of the structure and function of work, and why and how culture resists organizational change even in the face of its increasing peril.
The fourth part presents off-the-wall possible models of leadership that may breakthrough the last vestiges of anachronistic hierarchical structures and atavistic functions as the world of work breaks free of its 2,000-year imprisonment.
* * * * *
“The wise man has his follies no less than the fool;
but herein lies the difference – the follies of the fool
are known to the world, but are hidden from himself;
the follies of the wise man are known to himself, but
hidden from the world.”
Caleb C. Colton (1780 – 1832), English clergyman
Leadership is in a state of retreat bordering on confusion. Not only is leadership out-of-date but out-of-touch with men. For centuries, leadership cues were taken from how the church, military, state, commerce and industry conducted their businesses. All these models are now in jeopardy because they were designed for another time.
Institutions today go from crisis to crisis, scandal to scandal, outrage to outrage. Normalcy is waiting for the other shoe to drop. We have become the United States of Anxiety.
The scandals in the Roman Catholic Church are so pervasive as to no longer shock. Criminal sexual misconduct of priests and bishops has resulted in more than a $billion in payoffs to victims in an attempt to cover-up this shameful behavior. Meanwhile, church coffers are diminishing due to internal pilfering from administrative fraud to embezzlement to misappropriation of funds. Scandal is not, however, limited to the church.
Congressmen, mayors and governors have come in conflict with the law, some of them finding themselves behind bars for malfeasance. By the same token, corporate cooking of company books finds once powerful conglomerates going belly up for creating fictitious bottom lines, while their creative perpetrators are hauled off to jail in Armani suits and handcuffs.
Wordsmiths label these outrages with phrases such as the “arrogance of power,” “greed on steroids,” “corporate mafia,” and “supermarket of crime,” suggesting this is a morality play when it is simply a tragic comedy. It represents a society adrift in a maelstrom without a rudder. All kinds of people are at the helm. We call them “leaders.” But they are leaderless leaders without a rudder. That’s the dilemma of leadership today. Wherever leadership finds itself it expects the rest of us to believe that that is where it intended to go. I find that quite absurd.
People are necessary partners to leadership. They control the rudder. Yet, no fault of their own, most are passive, obedient, obsequious, polite, conforming, dependent and submissive or rudderless as well as clueless. They are of no service to themselves, their leadership, or indeed the organization. Corporate society has conditioned them to behave thusly. This translates behaviorally into learned helplessness and nonresponsibility, the incidental products of leadership gone wrong.
People behave the way they are programmed to behave. The way they are programmed is founded in the leadership culture. Society gets the leadership it deserves. Crisis, scandal and outrage do not occur in a vacuum. They are part of the corporate design, and when the design is wrong, the seven deadly sins work their havoc. There is no profit in finger pointing. No one is innocent. Everyone is guilty. Neither king nor prince, pope nor priest, aristocrat nor workingman escapes the pull of his culture. Greed is the god of our culture and Folly is her leader.
The Holy Father in Central America canonized to sainthood a 17th century Spanish missionary, Brother Pedro, who preached and did good works in Guatemala, and Juan Diego, a native Mexican Indian and the first indigenous American saint. The only problem is that Juan Diego may never have actually lived. There is no proof that he ever existed. To add insult to injury images of Juan Diego more resemble the light skinned conquering Spanish Conquistadors than the dark skinned indigenous people he is meant to celebrate.
Juan Bautista and Jacinto de los Angeles were also beatified during this visit, placing them a step from sainthood. The problem with this beatification is that these two three centuries ago were informers for the Spanish Inquisition. This led to the cruel torture and murder of scores of Indians who risked their lives to worship in the ancient ways of their indigenous culture.
Catholic church membership is fast eroding in Central America. These papal pronouncements are obviously expedient measures to stop this erosion, a common practice of leaderless leadership.
The same type of leadership is on display when an American president bombs a pharmaceutical plant in Africa with the nebulous claim it is producing chemical and biological weapons in the hopes of redirecting media heat from his personal peccadilloes; when congress constructs buildings that are never occupied, or commissions roads to be built with governor support that go nowhere; or when CEOs flee their disintegrating corporations with duffel bags full of tens of millions of dollars while the company stock tanks. In the meantime, employees of such companies find themselves without jobs and with 401(K) accounts reduced to confetti.
Ralph Nader, the scold of corporate America, finds this plunge into amorality beyond cynicism. Why, he asks, didn’t we know sooner about these corporate scoundrels? The same could be asked of the church, state, military, commerce and industry when deeds turn ugly and rise to the surface. Why indeed.
Corporate egos are so insulated from reality with their own conceit that deception can be totally transparent for anyone bothering to look. Of course nobody does proving the executive attitude, “You can’t touch me!” pervasive. Those who knew and could have been whistle blowers extends from the board of directors to corporate insiders to accounting firms to lawyers working for these corporations to credit-rating agencies to corporate director to corporate managers to personnel and department heads to all levels in the system. When filthy lucre flows freely, everyone is blinded by its brilliance.
Change the names of corpocracy to the church and the same whistle blowers might be found in the Roman Curia to the College of Cardinals to the archbishops to the bishops to the parish priests to the laity with knowledge of the same kettle of worms. All hierarchical structured institutions are vulnerable to this malaise, as the same rules apply equally to the president, congress, Supreme Court, governors, and so on down the line to the shock of indifference in communities across the nation. All are engaged in leaderless leadership in one form or another with little apparent interest in wondering why.
Our culture abhors a snitch, stoolie, tattletale, rumormonger, gossipmonger, scandalmonger, nosy parker, big mouth. What’s more, we are mainly a passive people. We don’t “make waves” or “challenge authority.” We react to it. We celebrate our individualism while allowing ourselves to be externally organized rather than self-organized. Our nature is to be compliant rather than cooperative. It is all in the programming. When we think, we are confined to the box, or what we already know, rather than to risk thinking outside it. Consequently, we tend to be clever rather than wise, humble rather than self-confidence, imitators rather than the genuine article. No matter how successful we are someone else is more successful, so we have no peace.
It has been in observing people in organization for nearly four decades that I have come to develop this typology. I’m sure the reader will find him or herself in one or more of these classifications. I do. How could it be otherwise? This is our education.
1. The Manipulator
The manipulator-as-manager believes everyone has his or her price, and that price is as devious as his own. He believes the system is designed for exploitation, and the more able the exploiter the faster his rise to managerial consequence.
Character flaw in this manager comes to the fore when asked his relationship to his people. It is clear that he mistrusts people who have no hidden agenda, naked ambition similar to his own, or in contrast to this appear to be what they seem, straight arrows. Such people he sees as hypocrites – everyone’s bent! -- and driven by weakness.
Whatever his self-indulgence, he expects it to be reflected in his people. If he is a drinker, to name one possible dalliance, he expects his people to have an occasional drink with him after work. A nondrinker is suspect from the start and to be watched. He justifies spending time with his people off duty as a way to get to know them, and to learn what makes them tick. He never admits the need of a social partner to justify his indulgence. Moreover, the manipulator’s penchant is compounded in his people, as he is attracted to those who display similar inclinations.
The weapons of the manipulator are fear and intimidation. During a consulting assignment, I once accompanied a manager to the company gym to play basketball with his people. Another group due to a schedule mix-up occupied the court. This was upsetting to my group who were all psyched up to play basketball.
My host approached the black custodian who had broken the news to the players. In no way dismayed, the manipulator manager cajoled the custodian to demonstrate some flexibility. Then he turned his attention to the manager of the group playing. “Be a sport and play half court. Once we get the rust out of our legs, we can scrimmage your guys in a full court game.”
This manager, clearly intimidated by my host, acceded to his will and the problem was solved. It was accomplished with great facility and no interruption in the harmony of the game. I was impressed. Fifteen minutes later we were playing full court.
A half hour into the scrimmage players of the other team started to leave due to other commitments. This resulted in my group having access to the entire gym until the custodian announced that he was locking up. My host ignored this notice asking me if I wanted to take a shower. Sensing this would get the custodian’s backside up, I said, “No I’m all right,” when in fact I was drenched with sweat and would very much welcome a shower.
Looking toward the custodian, my host said, “You don’t mind if my guys take a shower, do you?”
The black custodian replied, “Yes I do mind. I’m closing up now.”
Undismayed, my host puts his face inches a way from the custodian’s and said with a sly smile, “Who do you work for?” The custodian told him. “You don’t want a letter in your file that you didn’t cooperate with a department head, now do you?” My host wasn’t a department head, far from it, but the custodian didn’t challenge him. We took our showers. He called the custodian’s bluff.
The climate is always ripe for the manipulator where fear is pervasive. The manipulator ultimately becomes manipulated with his own self-deception because he comes to believe he is untouchable. He operates at the expense of people and gets work done “by” them, not with or through them. When his type is dominant in an organization, people bring their bodies to work and leave their minds safely at home.
2. The Frustrated Participant
This manager wants to believe in the system. He sees himself as dedicated, loyal and ambitious, and although frustrated is reluctant to express his complaints. Inconsistency in company policy, flagrant violation of fairness issues, and blatant displays of managerial duplicity, he absorbs without protest feeling it is his role to protect the company’s image.
When he is given the assignment to have company divisions nominate a “manager of the year,” he forms a committee with due diligence to evaluate these contributions to determine the ultimate winner. The consensus candidate is presented to the board, only to have the nominee rejected as “too light weight.” Senior management then hastily nominates its preferred candidate, who was not previously selected in the competition, naming this nominee the new “manager of the year.”
The frustrated manager shares his exasperation and disbelief with this consultant in a flood of words. It is clear that while criticizing such action as being reprehensible he cannot muster the will to be critical of his superiors. It is as if this action had no body.
When I remind him of this, he is suspicious. “Are you a pipeline to senior management?” I assure him that I am not.
“If you want a pipeline to senior management,” I suggest, “ask your senior management to explain its rationale for dumping your nominee.”
The thought of such directness was clearly disheveling. Confrontation never entered the frustrated manager’s mind. “I couldn’t do that. They’d think I wasn’t a team player.”
“So what do you plan to do?”
“What I always do. Suck it up and move forward.”
The frustrated manager would continue to make every effort to anticipate his management’s needs, and to deliver its will whether appropriate or not. If its moral authority was in conflict with his, it was safer to act as an enlisted man in officer country then to challenge that authority.
The frustrated manager represents the good, the bad and the ugly of many organizations. He is able and ready, but somewhat traumatized when made to shelf his ethics for pragmatic considerations. On the one hand he believes in the ethical policies of the company, and on the other considers operating practices, and wonders why they seem so seldom connected. It never occurs to him to take hold at his level. It would not be fair to see the frustrated manager always a corporal for he is often an officer of the company who goes along to get along. Where they are similar is that they both are more rank conscious than task driven, while still wanting to make a meaningful contribution. The frustrated manager defies rational description and is everywhere.
3. The Inside Outsider
The inside-outside manager is a growing presence in organization. Like a boy locked in a candy store, he experiences his most cherished dream of inclusion, but to his chagrin not as a player. Ever the outsider, he is a staff specialist with skills needed but never with line authority.
His skills can be in planning, personnel, organization, research, budget, computer technology, or a host of other specialties, which pale in significance to the power exercised by generalists. He is the equivalent of a civilian among soldiers, and although he may have professional credentials to rank with or exceed the officers, he is never considered one of them.
The inside-outsider manager pays his dues, becomes initiated into the established culture of the elite, but is never identified by it as “one of us.” Much as he might strive to enhance his status his unique skills only exaggerate rather than lessen the difference. Being judged for his specialization, should he show a flare for a generalist’s attributes, this tends only to eclipse rather than enhance his perceived effectiveness, proving he can’t win for losing.
The inside-outsider manager experiences the paradox of being needed but not necessarily wanted, producing a certain amount of internal organizational strain. To the old guard he is a cowboy with little couth and too much hubris. He is however the wave of the future with his numbers growing exponentially.
The inside-outsider manager must come to grips with this reality and accept his inside outsider role as the organization drags its feet to catch up with him. If he can handle this, he will be tolerated and his situation tolerable. If not, he will become a problem, first losing his influence and then his station. No effort on his part will change the way things are, only time will.
4. The Winning Side Saddler
The winning side saddler manager appears with increasing frequency as you move up the organizational chart. He is a pyramid climber with a knack for making his presence felt. A pleaser, anticipator and executer, he dispatches issues before they become problems, endearing him to his bosses. The focus is never on what is needed but what is expected. He is a chameleon with the capacity to change camouflage on a moment’s notice. There is no point in asking him for a coherent point of view because he has never developed one. His nature is that of the hunch player who knows every verse, page and chapter of the “cover your ass” book. A fence rider extraordinary, he tells you what you want and expect to hear. The more uptight and defensive the organization the prominent is his role. A palm tree yielding to the prevailing winds, the winning side saddler manager provides a buffer to the ugly edges of reality. Should a power shift be eminent, the winning side saddler has already saddled the winning horse and is waiting to put his new boss into the stirrups.
Senior management never has a chance. It thinks it judges staff on the basis of qualification and competence, but the winning side saddler knows better. Management settles for comfort level, “am I comfortable with this person?” If comfort is assured, competence and qualification are ordained as givens. This sustains organizational lethargy with senior management’s unconscious design.
To the winning side saddler anything goes that fuels his career. Loyalty is blind. Obedience is an amoral pursuit. Fear is prevalent in his personality if not in his vocabulary. He has an eye for weakness and a gift for exploiting it. His will is to react to the needs of those in charge with the devotion of the sycophant.
The winning side saddler manager is of some value because of his willingness to serve. This is can be an adverse virtue if he withholds vital information because of its negative implications.
It would be folly to discount how important being liked as opposed to being competent has on the organization. CEO Lee Iacocca, after having a record year at Ford Motor Company, was fired by chairman of the board Henry Ford, III. When he asked why, Ford said, “Well, sometimes you just don’t like somebody.”
5. The Nostalgic Elitist
The nostalgic elitist manager is fortunately disappearing. He is a vestige of past restricted glory and an unwilling participant in a more open egalitarian present. He lives in a black and white world of workers and managers, thinkers and doers, the educated and the ignorant, while the world has become predominantly gray. Disturbing to him is that nothing seems as it once was. He takes cynical delight in the vocabulary of “social change,” as he sees it changing nothing, merely manipulating fads and slogans with smoke and mirrors.
Schooled in the belief that abrupt change is infrequent, he is having trouble with this being called one of those exceptional periods. Yet, much as he would prefer it to be otherwise, he cannot ignore that institutions are disintegrating and being resurrected into God knows what.
This non-structured period causes him great pain. His preference is for fixed structures and closed systems. He cannot fathom why his authority is challenged, why the less gifted are to be treated as equals, why his superiority is not self-evident, or whatever this business of a “bill of rights” for workers is all about? He will not accept that the old way is not working any more, choosing instead to see it being abandoned without cause, not out of necessity.
A new mentality is emerging which he cannot comprehend and therefore opposes. He sees a more permissive society with everybody doing their own thing, and he shutters at the decadence, ignoring the fact that creative expression is inversely related to the level of formal control. A more open permissive society spawns creativity, while a more closed and structured one kills it.
The nostalgic elitist manager believes in the idea that there are good and bad attitudes, whereas in reality there are only differing attitudes. This manager holds that there is only one truth, his truth, when each individual experiences a measure of his own truth. You cannot make him see that good people do bad things for good reasons. This defies logic and he is a student of logic.
All this conflicting data irritates the nostalgic elitist manager. He cries for simpler times and more blunt instruments to control behavior. He longs for termination without reason, and the use of stick and carry games to motivate.
He seldom comes to grips with his own weakness, and is often of a sadistic temperament. To him toughness and strength are synonymous. This attitude frustrates subordinates and agonizes superiors, as it underlines his weakness. His prominence is evident the slightest shift in a new direction.
6. The Waiter in the Wings
The waiter in the wings is a pragmatist. He has a healthy appreciation of both his potential and obstacles to success. While others are aggravating about change he is husbanding his resources, planning his tactics and developing his strategy. This separates him from the winning side saddler. He is as strong and resolute as his opposition.
His penchant is to make a periodic assessment of his progress to date versus his long-range objective, assessing this against the progress of his organization. He has no plans to tie his future to a sinking ship, or bide his time with rationalizations. His motivation is kept close to his chest, feeling no need to campaign with bluster.
Operationally, he makes himself indispensable. Yet he confounds subordinates and superiors alike. Success is essentially a game to him. This can be misconstrued as his being cold as well as cool. He cares but doesn’t make an issue of it. Lacking the appearance of emotional baggage, he is often misunderstood and frequently envied.
What confounds his critics is his ability to balance stealth with openness, insouciance with results, choosing never to telegraph his hand. He is waiting to make his move and that is all that matters to him. Both because he doesn’t need and trust one, the waiter in the wings seldom has a confidante, but allows himself to be one.
His MBA patina is obvious as he applies the science of his business school education with the precision of a case study. Yet he gets no rush from being a student as the application of his tools is his only interests.
Balance describes him. He is an excellent writer and effective communicator with a well-developed sense of proportion. In a word he is not easily ruffled. Perspective defines him, which makes him especially engaging as a calming influence in crisis. Inadvertently, this makes him a threat to those who mistrusts his velvet glove approach. He is waiting in the wings and has no doubt that center stage awaits him.
His edge is belief in himself without preamble. He never meets a stranger and is as confident addressing a ghetto audience as a board meeting. As relaxed as he seems, he is actually wound as tight as piano wire. Given this, he can only wait so long before he has to move on, always to a more challenging role.
Long before his present position he was filling all the appropriate boxes in his curriculum vitae to make him a prime candidate much like a first round draft choice in the NFL must spend hard year’s honing his talent for such selection. Organizations recruit him with the same diligence.
In any organization 15 percent of the work force are foot draggers, another 70 percent obsequious followers, and yet another 15 percent hard chargers. The waiter in the wings manager is a hard charger and usually gets little developmental attention, as he will succeed whether the organization does or not. The natural inclination is therefore to spend a disproportionate amount of time with losers and followers, which often results in this superior performer moving on.
7. Happily in Harness
The happily in harness manager accepts his role because he loves what he does. Never wanting to be anything else, he is satisfied. Each promotion is a genuine surprise. By nature, he is appreciative and generous, easy to work with or for, competent without being righteous, confident without being arrogant.
He creates a climate for subordinate growth even if he himself is not inclined to be a good coach or counselor. His most effective teaching method is by example. He is trusted and fair, consistent and honest. He would never think of countermanding an executive order, or bad mouthing a superior. It would never occur to him to do so.
Contentment is a word that describes him. He entered the work force with this attitude and remains true to it as a veteran. He takes pride in his experience and ability to do his job, but uncharacteristically, he registers a surprising tolerance for those less inclined to follow suit. If there is envy or jealousy in him, it fails to show. He celebrates the achievement of others and encourages those more able than him to strive to go beyond his station. He has an equal amount of patience for those who stumble but try as for those who fail to try for fear of stumbling. Although laziness is foreign to his make up, he remains philosophical about lazy people. “This is not their patch. Trust me, when they find it they’ll be a different person.”
The happily in harness manager is the backbone of most successful organizations. His poster board appearance however can be deceiving. He is unlikely to note progressive internal stress and strain building up from dysfunctional practices, or to be inclined to calibrate accelerating external demands on the organization. One thing is certain. A whistle blower he is not.
8. The Quiet Soldier
The quiet soldier manager is not to be confused with the happily in harness. He differs in some striking ways. For example, he is more comfortable in the role of follower rather than leader and identifies with the aspirations and frustrations of his subordinates. He is not necessarily happy. He is just reticent about it. By inclination, he is a doer rather than a thinker, an implementer rather than an innovator. Risk is not in his vocabulary.
The upshot of this is that he is a constant frustration to those in charge. They see him having the talent but not the resolve to do more. Moody and taciturn, he is apt to accept untenable situations rather than to do something about them. “Not my job,” echoes in his silence. Simply put, he is a passive passenger on his own ship with more confidence in someone else doing the navigating.
Hard to believe, he is the manager everyone likes even when he lets his charges down. Is it because he is stoic; has presence; because of his sublime dignity; or is it merely because what you see is what you get? The conundrum is part of his appeal.
Clearly, he needs to be prodded into action. Since he is unlikely to be interested in promotion, the stick and carrot routine doesn’t work. Either he fails to understand his role or chooses to let others worry about it. He needs constant stroking to achieve only adequate performance. Curiously, he is seldom considered incompetent. Perhaps it is because he never makes waves.
In another time the quiet soldier manager was paternalistic management’s perfect son. Today he is the logjam in the soul of the machine always waiting for orders from headquarters. This predilection can derail projects, cause deadlines to be missed, or blow critical networks.
The quiet soldier manager is present on every managerial team as his lack of ego is considered an instinct for teaming. He is the flotsam of yesterday and the jetsam of a new tomorrow and he is present everywhere, a holdover from a system preferring cosmetic to real structural change. And he is unlikely to soon disappear.
9. The Victim
The victim manager has a well-developed martyr complex. Nothing can be taken at face value. He expects to be trusted without being trustworthy, given cherished assignments without being dependable, and taken at his word without being credible. Call it tunnel vision, myopia or hindsight, he has it. He delights in the failures of others, but finds no humor when others delight in his. When others fail, it is because they’re incompetent; when he fails, it’s because others let him down.
He has the mysterious ability to put well-meaning people on the defensive, poisoning their minds with the idea that they don’t like him because of his race, religion, ethnicity, parochialism, socioeconomic status, accent or the neighborhood from which he comes. If that doesn’t work, it is his college or university degree lacks the prestige of certain other institutions. And if that still fails, there are always the staple discriminators: he is too fat, too thin, too short, too tall, too bald, too hairy, too old, too young, too quiet, too loud, too common, too rare, too late.
“Late” has a whole new set of disclaimers for the victim manager. As Marlon Brando says in the film, On the Waterfront (1954), “I could have been a contender,” meaning he could have vied for the World Middleweight Boxing Championship, “if I had had the breaks.” For the victim manager, it is too late (for him) to go back to school, learn new skills, change jobs, change careers, leave the company, start a business, start a family, leave everything and start a new life.
Holding him back is another set of the victim manager’s favorite foibles. He couldn’t do any of these things because he had to take care of his parents, his wife wouldn’t let him, they (company, family, friends, acquaintances, relatives) didn’t approve, he couldn’t find the money, he couldn’t take the stress, and it would interfere with his (bowling, soft ball, club, family, church) obligations.
Mention is never made that he might be afraid of failure, of embarrassing himself, or might not have the stick-to-it-ness necessary to complete the task much less succeed. The victim manager is looking for justification for his unhappiness and he wants it put on everything and everybody, just as long as it doesn’t stick to him. He has never come to terms with the fact that where he is is exactly where he expects to be.
He holds a few other cards meant to put the heat on others, such as he hasn’t been given enough training, coaching, mentoring, or opportunity to prove himself. Yet when he manages, he invariably manages up, fantasizing were he in charge he’d run a tighter running smoother ship.
Asked how he thinks his people see him, he replies, “They like working for me; know where they stand. I treat them the way I’d like to be treated, not the way I’m treated.” Notice an “us” positive always has to be coated with a “them” negative.
Little surprise, when his direct reports are asked what it is like working for him, they echo the same unenthusiastic sentiments he alludes to regarding his bosses. In other words they’re not happy campers either. They see him as a whiner, complainer and often lazy as well. Most of his energy is spent criticizing the system rather than constructing better ways to utilize it. The content of his personality is immersed in “can’t,” not can.
The victim manager has a tendency to form an alliance with the nostalgic elitist manager, complementing the masochist with the sadist. A shroud of gloom surrounds them both and corrupts the air their subordinates breathe. Their most telling power is to turn colleagues such as the quiet soldier and frustrated manager into martyrs working on the victim complex.
The victim manager makes no secret of his discontent. He wears a permanent wounded hound dog expression encased in the armor of passivity. This is so thick that it is impossible to reach him short of termination.
10. The Unbending Idealist
The unbending idealist manager idealizes life and lives in a dream world. He is a product of film and television and prefers to see the world as it should be, not as it is. In contrast to the victim manager he sees himself as a savior of lost causes and even more lost souls, explaining away failures and suspect conduct, failing to place it on the responsible people. Consequences are suspended, forgiven, or ignored. F. S. didn’t mean to steal the laptop. He just forgot to bring it back. G. D. took off early and failed to meet the deadline because her car pool left early. P. M. has a lot on his plate, which caused him to lose it in front of the customer. Such people suck the energy from everything around them while the unbending idealist provides the rationale.
It never occurs to this manager that life is a series of choices. Some people make good ones and others rotten ones. The unbending idealist suffers incurably from the naiveté of the good heart; failing to see this tendency for what it is, compassionate condescension. This manager considers advocates of self-reliance, self-discipline, self-management and survival of the fittest soulless as well as heartless. Failure to put pressure on people to make suitable choices might then find the unbending idealist as headless. Obviously, it is not an either/or proposition, but Folly might insist it being so.
There is a heroic sweep to the role he sees for himself, as if an actor on stage spinning an idyllic part recalled from memory. He equates charisma with competence, and presence with performance. Dress, diction, and the dramatic are tools of his trade for he is the product of a romantic education. Every effort is made to attend the “best” schools and get the most desirable degrees to make his rise to prominence swift and without glitches. Education is not a means, but an end in itself, the ticket to the good life.
Another aspect of this manager is self-consciousness. When he enters a room, he expects heads to turn. When he speaks, he expects necks to crane not to miss a word. He practices in front of a mirror to manage his expressions to best equate them with the intended impact.
Self-image is everything. This proves necessary to create and then live an impossible fiction. With every failure he reinvents himself, never seeming to register the folly of his ways. He is a perfectionist without understanding the blessing of human frailty; that people are flawed but perfectible. He is a dreamer who is looking for fulfillment “out there” when he is tripping over it.
The unbending idealist sees himself different than others with the same training and he is inclined to bridge the difference by waxing sincere. When this fails, he mirrors those bypassing him to increasing power, convinced once he reaches the rarefied air of top management his idealism will finally find a home. What a shock it is to his system when he arrives only to discover the duplicity, chicanery, pettiness, coarseness and trivializing conduct here is not unlike that previously experienced. Small wonder his idealism is in danger of dropping like a stone into cynicism once brutal reality meets unbending idealism.
He now encounters real people where before they were symbols of power. Here he expected camaraderie, not competition, collegial good will, not the maliciousness experienced in his climb. If this reality is not assimilated, a good and possibly great manager could be lost. People are people everywhere, good and bad, ethical and immoral. There are no pristine pockets of them anywhere.
11. The Adventurer
The adventurer manager is different than the unbending idealist manager. The difference is that this manager is totally consumed with the adventure. He has no room for idealism. He is out to push the envelope, which necessitates playing CYA and SYA games. Pushing it where is never clearly defined for the game is the thing.
Experience has taught him that the adventurer best have a “cover your ass” explanation for everything, while the best defense is a “shows your ass” offense to keep troublemakers at bay. When cornered, he comes out swinging with a “red pencil,” a caustic remark, exception to the rule, or an incomprehensible explanation. He can lie with a straight face looking his accuser in the eye, or pass a polygraph test without flinching. His singular sense of adventure has no sense of consequences, as it never occurs to him that he might be caught, humiliated, and terminated.
He is a type “T” personality, a high-risk taker, and thrill seeker, rule breaker with a creative abandon persona. Primarily left-brain oriented, the adventurer manager can easily gravitate to the bizarre. Paranoia, busily fermenting in his brain, provides him with protective sensors, escaping one close call after another. The rush makes him even bolder.
What is confounding is that he is often brilliant and could succeed brilliantly without all the artful dodging. Take one adventurer manager who created a complex matrix of performance indices, which confirmed staggering results. It was so convincing that several chief engineers signed off on it. This led to a huge promotion, only to discover months later that the matrix was entirely bogus. Invariably, the deceiver is caught but often not before he wreaks havoc on the system. The adventurer manager craves attention and feels he has to act precipitously to get it.
Usually, this attitude is not justified as he is often the darling of the organization, the daredevil and nonconformist that is envied for his monstrous accomplishments that often seem to exceed the believable, and for reason – he cuts corners and cheats. Yet he is the glamour boy who seems the perfect manager, a team player who sets the bar higher than anyone else dares. While appearing a solid manager, he is apt to bring shocking embarrassment to the organization because he is never what he seems.
Were his work to be scrutinized instead of his sizzle, his poor management skills would surface because this role is not exciting enough. He has little interest in mundane practices showing a preference for big-ticket items. Constantly challenging himself to be more sensational he cuts corners, fakes results, doctors the books, invents fictitious accomplishments, and worse of all, musters the support of legitimate doers to be tainted with his mythic accomplishments by guile, vanity and flattery.
What may surprise is that the adventurer manager is actually a passive defensive personality. He wants to belong but not to the herd. So he enters the wilderness of despair out of which there is no escape. It is an improbable place that an increasing number of highly talented people are rushing to enter, and we must ask ourselves, why?
12. The Spin Doctor
The spin-doctor manager is the public relations conduit between the community at large and the community within. He is the eyes and ears and voice of authority. His greatest concern is to put a good face on a bad situation requiring him to be a good liar, and herein lays the danger. He has a tendency to reduce everything to public relation speak with cavalier flamboyance, when this is far from the facts of the situation.
He sees his role as the little person on the shoulder of the giant giving directions. This has some merit. The problem is that the spin-doctor manager can come to believe in his own rhetoric, ultimately leading to credibility issues.
Assessing explosive or exploding issues, and putting a positive slant on them, is no small achievement. Wariness is his by word, as unstated implications of a situation can destroy momentum. So, he must be quick to interpret and translate events into believable terms. It is the skill of the illusionist who changes the complexion of the problematic with sleight of hand cunning, giving the chaotic situation an orderly context, a down surge in business an uplifting forecasts, a crisis situation the umbrella of calm.
The danger is to proffer short-term solutions that bypass long-term implications. He is apt to be quick-witted, congenial, decisive, and less a public than a backstage performer. Vital as he is he cannot afford to become manic. As Eric Goffman puts it in Relations in Public (1971),
The manic is someone who does not refrain from intruding where he is not wanted or where he will be accepted but at a loss to what we see as his value and status. He does not contain himself in the spheres and territories allotted to him. He overreaches. He does not keep his place.
Overstepping his role can be a disease most deadly for his every word is trademark to his purpose.
13. The Reluctant Soldier
The reluctant soldier manager is neither fish nor fowl, neither leader nor follower. He is seldom there. He simply is. Everyone knows him. Everyone tolerates him. No one expects anything from him, and therefore nobody does anything about him. He is in the same job and at the same level that he has been for years. He exists. During that time, he has received increased compensation and improved entitlements for doing less and less. He is retired on the job and sees little reason to act otherwise.
The reluctant soldier is the benefactor of a spoils system where favoritism resides. To call him lazy is an oversimplification. A greater stretch would be to see him a “rebel.” He is neither, but a person who has wandered into a job and found a home.
He is often crafty with survival his sharpest tool. This he plays to perfection. Once he was painfully unhappy, but that was so long ago that his memory is inured to it. When first employed, he was considered a “safe hire,” then promoted and forgotten. Statistically, he is a member of the 15 percent “foot draggers,” which plague most organizations.
14. The Unforgivable Prodigal Son
The unforgivable prodigal son manager once stumbled badly. This caused embarrassment to him and the organization. His faux pas was of such magnitude to embarrass the company but not sufficient to warrant dismissal. It would have been better for all concerned that it had been. Once he was punished for this indiscretion with a suspension without pay and his rate frozen for two years, his personnel jacket was expunged of his crime.
Unfortunately, it didn’t end there. The prodigal son manager returned to his job but without forgiving grace. He became a pariah with his guilt whispered behind his back with his every act. There was nothing he could say or do to change the climate. He was stigmatized, and might as well have worn a scarlet letter on his forehead.
New people arrive, and are told to stay clear of the unforgivable prodigal son manager. “He is poison,” they advise without being more specific. He doesn’t make matters any easier for himself jumping the gun telling new people of his crime before they ask.
It matters little that he becomes an efficient manager, the guilty whispers still continue. What behavior could be so reprehensible? In this case, and this is one of a pattern I’ve observed, the prodigal son manager “betrayed” the company and his colleagues. He leaked a story to the media about unsavory company practices. An investigation followed, the company was sanctioned, several customers terminated contracts, and people lost their jobs.
The company was careful not to punish him as a whistle blower, but for breaching company policy, which called for reporting such findings in writing to one’s superior. He didn’t, arguing if he had the company wouldn’t have done anything anyway. So he injudiciously took matters into his own hands. His assessment may have been correct but not right under the circumstances.
Still, if the perception exists that an organization is a closed system, a person is likely to ignore the chain-of-command when exasperation reaches its limits and indeed go over management’s head. This would be tantamount to insubordination, a crime in an uptight operation. Such a culture labels a whistle blower a “snitch” with the unspoken but pervasive word if you want to win promotion and be accepted by your peers, keep your mouth shut! The person fares much better being simply incompetent.
Puritanical justice is actually a double-edged problem. The accused and the accuser are wrapped in the same cloth and painted with the same brush. Trust is destroyed and silence rolls through the organization like thunder. No one is confident to say anything for fear of reprisals. The ultimate loser is the organization. Sincerity is the first casualty. Much talent and energy is wasted in posturing. It is assumed more important to make an impression than a difference, to wax mellow as a personality than to cut to the chase as a performer, more prudent to play it safe than to gamble on venturing outside the box.
As for the unforgivable prodigal son manager, unlike the example above, he is apt to become increasingly irresponsible for what difference does it make? If he is particularly malicious, he is inclined to spread disinformation with a desire for vengeance. He thinks, ‘what have I got to lose, so why not stir things up a bit?’ As his personality becomes increasingly warped, his venom spills out in sarcasm questioning the leadership and its fairness to the troops. Whatever happens, he twists it to reveal an ugly side. Gossip and innuendo are his weapons of mass emotional destruction.
This is precisely what happened to a police captain put on permanent nights for an indiscretion. In this medium sized metropolitan area this meant that he was exposed to all patrol officers as they rotated shifts. In time he riled them up so much the 350 sworn officers went on strike in a state that does not allow public employees to strike. Bedlam followed. Experts of all description were brought in. I was one of them fortuitously stumbling on this cause. Once uncovered, the officers quietly returned to work, embarrassed that somebody they trusted had duped them.
The unforgivable prodigal son manager often shares many of the attributes of the victim manager. What is regrettable is that he is frequently able with passionate drive. This drive has been turned inside out with hate triumphing over love, maliciousness over kindness.
That said, it is dangerous to place him in a position where he could poison the minds and hearts of those reporting to him. The best bet is to isolate him from people until reason wins out. If this seems extreme, this consultant has seen organizations ruined once this Iago is allowed to rant.
15. The Over Achiever
The over achiever manager is inclined to educate himself beyond his intelligence, pushing his ambition to the brink, or beyond his capacity, exposing him to situations past his comprehension. He epitomizes the leaderless leader because action is his call and shooting from the hip is his modus operandi.
He has a surface acumen that is engaging and catches the eye of his superiors. His intensity is contagious. He is likeable and agreeable and seems never to sleep. His attractiveness extends beyond what he does to what he is, a human dynamo. He has lived so long with his limitations, which he hides in a swirl of activity, that they have become assets.
Others assess his performance in his long hours in pursuit of a goal, never pausing to wonder if he might be a more effective reflecting more, and acting less. “Ready, fire, aim” is his inclination. So long is he of this persuasion that he could not fathom it any other way. Nothing is done with ease. This finds him attempting to cover everything rather than focusing on the critical 10 percent causing the problem.
The over achiever manager is not actually an achiever. He is a drone who micromanages to a fault and finds it difficult to delegate. People who accomplish assignments with ease are suspect, as he equates accomplishment with time and intensity. Because of the tornado that he is everyone thinks him competent. They see the whirlwind process and not the marginal product.
He needs help. A career development plan may redirect this tortured manager into a repetitive function he can perform with satisfaction, for example, data collection. Where he has broad discretionary power, such as commanding people, his ineptitude is likely to surface. He is better suited to manage things than people. What is appalling is that working hard is likely to get more attention than working smart. This coats the skids for the over achiever manager.
16. The Messianic Manager
The messianic manager sees himself as a savior. Where he differs with the unbending idealist is that he has a conceptual approach to modify reality. The unbending idealist only has the rationale to explain reality away.
The change masters of the 20th century might never consider themselves sponsors of the messianic manager, but they are. They have worked around the problem of a changing working society with the false assumption that there is a “Holy Grail” core. There isn’t. A brief explanation is warranted.
Douglas McGregor’s (Human Side of Enterprise 1960) “Y” style of manager, Robert Blake and Jane Mouton’s (The Managerial Grid 1964) “team manager,” Carl Rogers’s (On Becoming a Person 1961) “employee center manager,” George C. Homans’s (The Human Group 1950) “informal work behavior,” Chris Argyris’s (Personality and Organization 1957) “humanistic value system,” Frederick Herzberg’s (Work and the Nature of Man 1966) “motivation-hygiene theory,” and Elton Mayo’s (The Human Problem of an Industrial Civilization 1933) “humanistic management,” to name only a few interpreters of leadership and worker motivation, set themselves the noble but impossible task to identify what pushes both leaders and workers off the dime and on the same page, and they have all failed.
With regard to leadership, they have not departed from the 2,000 year-old model of somebody in charge calling the shots and somebody else responding. With regard to motivation, they have assumed motivation can be defined when it is as slippery as an eel in the hand. Put simply, it’s the culture, stupid. The culture dictates behavior, and the culture is driven by the structure and function of work, which is dynamic and ever changing.
Create the culture that supports the interests of the organization and fulfills the needs of the worker and, voila! Leaders and workers get off the dime, move on to the same page and work gets done, the work that moves everyone to where they want to go, not to where they usually end up.
An idealistic concept has driven management in the direction of the messianic manager called “humanism.” Human Resources has been the interpreter of this humanism, selling the leadership on the idea that giving workers everything but the kitchen sink will cause them to applaud their leadership with conscientious, efficient high-level performance. This hasn’t happened. Not only has this failed to materialize into an interdependent leadership-worker partnership in a “culture of contribution,” but it has stumbled instead too frequently into a permissive “culture of complacency,” where nobody is seemingly in charge and workers waffle suspended in terminal adolescence.1 The messianic manager is one of humanism’s most persistent creations.
He is like the missionary that goes into a culture of 4,000 years with the idea he is going to save that culture from itself by changing it into his. Albert Schweitzer (Reverence for Life 1969) comes to mind as a messianic manager, as he brought Western culture to West Africa, setting up a hospital and clinic. Noble undertaking? For me, this is troubling. It has the hubristic feel of Western culture hegemony with “progress society’s most important product” looking down from its mountaintop at this primitive society, and saying, “Don’t worry, we’ll fix you.”
This is characteristic of the messianic manager. He believes he has answers and understands the workings of the minds of those that he plans to save. He has cause and they are his beneficent effect. Schweitzer has admitted in his writings that his motivation was atonement for the excesses of his culture. But in that atonement he assumed the arrogance of saving another culture through the sacrifice and saving of himself. A faulty premise.
It is as if there is a right way and a wrong way of doing everything, and he knows the right way. He takes pride in his humanity, but is it not benign paternalism, and isn’t paternalism what is anachronistic? Moreover, he sees himself as considerate and compassionate, which he tends to be, as long as people respond to his largesse. His group is a family with him as its head. Rather than deal with his people individually, allowing them to assess their individual strengths and weaknesses and to design a system that they can own, they must fit in his. For those who fit, it is like milk and honey; for those who don’t, it is vinegar and acid.
The messianic manager gets rid of the bad apples by converting them into good ones. If this fails to work, bad apples are ignored until they dry up and fade away. Fairness is a weapon and his scepter.
A complex individual, often an able one, he has a passion to contribute but only on his terms. So blinding is this ambition that he will sacrifice people “for their own good,” working them beyond reason as described in Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of the Machine (1981) for a cause bigger than everyone. It is on these grounds that he requires special attention or he may go haywire.
17. The Pained Participant
The pained participant manager could be easily confused with the victim manager and the reluctant soldier manager. He has a separate place in this typology because early in his life, he discovered two things: one that he was able, and two that the world was organized against him. A tragic figure, he is like a Dante who has lost the keys to his own inferno, permanently caged in the pain of self-pity, seeing his situation as unique and his dilemma untenable. He wrestles with his confusion in dialectic all too common, which he will gladly share with you. This dialectic was the same when he was twenty as it is now when he is fifty. Life has been stacked against him because he didn’t have the right parents, the proper educational opportunities, and the breaks that everybody else seems to have. Then too, he is too old now to do anything about it, as he was too young before when he was twenty for the same reason. He is in a cage of his making with an invisible ceiling enclosed in invisible walls.
Somehow he got into management and treats his subordinates as buddies sharing with them his personal woes, which they dutifully listen to at their profit. Life, the system, the company, circumstances have all wronged him, and much as he would like, Kafkaesque, he cannot forgive them for what they do.
Remarkably, the organization is strangely tolerant of the pained participant manager’s obsessive-compulsive inclination. It chooses to ignore his masochism with a blind eye, and always at its peril for he is apt to promote passive behavior among the ranks. This may destroy the organization’s infrastructure as inconspicuously as if social termites invaded its sinews.
No matter how much the organization attempts to mitigate the pained participant manager’s anguish, this only raises the bar of his self-pity. Incredibly, the organization forgives him his transgressions but he never forgives it theirs. His anxieties plague operations. With no cure in sight, the best therapy is to allow this manager to go elsewhere to appease his long suffering soul, but no longer here.
18. The Missionary
The missionary manager, like the messianic manager, has a mission. The difference is that his mission is not that of his own making but that of the organization’s. He has made it his business to spread the gospel according to the corporate fathers to the ignorant. He does this without question or reflection. He is an acolyte and they are his knowing masters. When this mission is consistent with what is needed, everything works smoothly and he is recognized. When the mission is in conflict with what is needed, derailing momentum and causing increasing organizational tension, unlike the victim manager, he takes personal responsibility for this failing like a willing martyr and thus lets his corporate fathers off the hook. He is a believer!
A missionary manager works from the premise that human nature is fundamentally good, that people are therefore basically good but are capable of doing bad things. He sees that goodness drives his masters and this goodness will ultimately triumph. They are the light and the way and beyond the pettiness and greed of common men.
On a personal level, no one is more crushed than him when he discovers his masters have feet of clay, and do bad things such as cook the books, acquire unpaid loans, fail to report income from stock options, and so on. Remarkably, he deals with this by sticking to his principles -- that is, disembodying goodness to the greater cause -- turning a blind eye to whatever does not fit or is not consistent with these principles.
A missionary manager often has a peculiar tick. He can be driven up the wall by swearing, smoking, kidding, wearing facial hair, dressing differently, always having a cup of coffee in hand, keeping office door shut, cracking knuckles, bending company policy, whistling, doodling, disappearing for hours, or any number of other irritating behaviors, but experience little problem with the corporate greed of his masters.
His righteousness may extend to race, religion, ethnicity, politics, or ideas. He has decided what is appropriate to work and what is not. That said, some guys like to talk about sports of a morning to get their blood flowing. If the missionary manager is not into sport, this too may grind against his decorum. Chances are he has a code for everything, adopted from his masters, which has little to do with the job at hand, and much more to do with his comfort level. He is on a mission to help people help themselves to be in sync with corporate policy when they may in fact feel no such need. A holy war may evolve as the missionary manager thinks with his heart and rules with his head.
He is present in every organization with a zeal, which may or may not be appropriate. If the mission is consistent with legitimate concerns, it might best be tested at that manager’s level with his people. Success here will be its own conduit to a larger stage. On the other hand, if the mission is conflicting, it may fuel discontent and disrupt productive work.
This manager is likely to have a strong character but a narrow point of view. The mission is everything. Inconvenience, costs or possible negative impact do not matter. It is what his masters want. He is not interested in obstacles or what can’t be done. He is a man of consequence and puts a tiger in the organization’s tank. Providing that is what is needed, he is someone to reckon with.
19. The Professional
The professional manager is an oxymoron. The professional is seldom a manager albeit carrying the title. This title designation is often used to justify his entry-level pay grade and benefit package. Nor is the manager of professionals necessarily schooled in the discipline of his charges. There exists the belief in management that a professional manager, thanks to Harold Geneen of ITT (Managing 1984), can manage anything whatever the business or discipline, as management is a science. I have seen such arrogance create colossal chaos.
Take the case of the manager who downgraded a systems analyst of a high tech defense contractor because he observed he was “dogging it.”
“The guy doesn’t do a damn thing,” he complained. “Sits there at his desk mumbling all day, tapping his pencil.”
Systems analysts threatened to bolt. They demanded he be restored to full status, and even given a raise. Brouhaha followed, which revealed the offending systems analyst was actually the best problem solver in the group, and revered by his colleagues. The manager didn’t have a clue. How could he? He didn’t know what they were doing. This is not an isolated example.
The professional manager is more often than not educated in a discipline, which has little to do with managing, motivating, and mobilizing a cadre of folks in a given function. Even business school grads are more skilled in managing things than in managing people. In this increasingly technological climate chances are the professional manager picks up what skills he has in leading and developing people on the job in a one-dimensional company management-training program. Moreover, the majority of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies have technical degrees supported by MBAs, which offers little insight into this mood-driven-demanding-self-centered-mercenary system called a person.
Three things are essential to managing people: know them as individuals, treat them as individuals, and develop them as individuals.
Once the professional manager generalizes, he moves into the deep yogurt of no man’s land. To know-treat-develop people as individuals, he must understand their work. In a broader sense, this extends to the business.
Lee Iacocca was a great automobile executive because he knew and loved cars and the people that made them. He had the wisdom not to be pulled into a business he didn’t know. He is the exception.
The professional manager today spends an inordinate amount of time in a factory called a university. He comes out of this institution with a certain slant on how the world works, especially the business world, and feels that he is ordained on that basis to position power, perks and concomitant authority still with a wet nose. No entry-level salary or job for him! He feels he has spent his time in the minor leagues of industry and commerce in academia, and now is entitled. He has this romantic notion of being instantly gratified with affluence, prestige, privilege and trust without the necessity of earning any of it because he has a piece of paper that states he is qualified. Qualified for what?
Actually, for nothing, but that’s not the point. He’s made a six-figure investment in education, has delayed gratification four-to-six-to-eight years, has paid his dues, and now it is time for society to fess up!
Somewhere lost in this scenario is the importance of experience, the benefit of failure in the learning process, and how life and career are a journey, not an end. People fresh out of these academic factories come into the system to demand salaries and benefits that eclipse what people in the system spent ten, twelve or twenty years to accumulate. Small wonder there is dissension.
For many, acquiring professional credentials was a way to avoid struggle. Struggle has gone out of work, pain has taken leave, and the motivation to work has become confused. The professional manager wants a position, not a job; desires authority without concomitant accountability; and expects to be measured in terms of time spent doing rather than results. It is hard to measure work, in any case, when mainly spectator to it, or indeed worth when results are not in the equation.
Of all the monsters we have created the professional manager is the largest. In an age when much work requires basically self-management, when maturity is essential to deal with ever changing and conflicting circumstances, the professional manager epitomizes the spoiled brat generation that feeds on itself and the system. If this seems harsh, consider this when it comes to promotions: having presence is more effective than purpose; making an impression more defining than making a difference; having a winning personality more the focus than performance.
This is how the professional manager has been programmed and this is how he is apt to behave. Campaigning for the next position is a full-time job. There is no point in blaming him. We have programmed this multi-faceted and potentially capable person in learned helplessness and nonresponsibility. Many as I write are marching into middle age suspended in terminal adolescence waiting for their golden parachute.
Summary and Conclusion
My typology is not definitive or all-inclusive. It is not even, dare I admit it, scientific. So, you may discount it entirely, of course, I believe at your peril. What I have seen in nearly four decades of working at all levels of organization, here and abroad, as a working drone, executive, consultant and graduate school educator are all grist for my mill, and I sense within the bounds of many of your own experiences.
You may take issue with many of my ideal type descriptions, but my bet is that you have had more than a passing acquaintance with most of them.
Our institutions are failing across the globe, and such failures are always human if also circumstantial. The fact that scandals and failures grow grosser is evidence only that we have a problem. Nothing else. It is not a morality issue. It is a contextual problem. Obviously, people are failing and this is the reason for the typology.
A typology has the ability to describe perhaps better than any other way the humanness of this failure. If you see more failure than successful ideal types here, it is because I have encountered more.
I must confess that I have struggled for clarity in seven books and scores of articles to describe these crumbling walls within workplaces without defining an architectural scheme to eradicate the problem. I am confident that more gifted carpenters of the mind will put their craft to work on such a new design. I don’t apologize for this deficiency, but simply state it, as I cannot divine what will replace CEOs or presidents or pontiffs, but believe they will be modified if not committed to history in due course. Why? Because leaders of extant institutions no longer know how to lead and have never learned how to follow. Their eyes are guided by history, not vision, by what they know, not what they can find out, by what has worked before, not what is failing now, by a sense of power, not a sense of people.
Circumstances, mainly brought on by the technological explosion, are forcing a reevaluation of “leadership.” I suggested more than a decade ago that work could be conducted much better without managers (Work Without Managers 1990); that performance appraisal was a sham, a costly time consuming ritual without substantive results, and that the total quality movement was an expediency driven by a crisis management. Time has not changed my mind.
Little real change is realized when you superimpose a methodology, exquisite as it may be, on a faulty foundation. The Malcolm Baldridge Award for Quality, for example, does not change institutional behavior any more than quality control circles have changed individual motivation. The fat still comes back in both cases.
Leadership discussions assume everyone is talking about the same thing. I don’t think they are. Leadership is often personified in a charismatic leader (President Kennedy), a central figure (Pope John Paul II), or a person that sits at the top of the organization (CEO). It can be called “service leadership” or “competent leadership,” or whatever but leadership invariably is reduced to an individual at the helm. I find this too narrow a perspective. For one, I don’t think charisma is relevant, if it ever was. Nor do I think leadership is personified in a central figure. I believe leadership is far more universal, pervasive, organic and encompassing. Put another way, everyone is a leader or no one is!
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Dr. Fisher’s books and ideas are on other places on the Internet, including his website: www.peripateticphilosopher.com
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 2002
Part One:
A Typology of Leaderless Leadership
Abstract
This is the first of a four-part series on leadership mainly in outline form. This work makes no attempt to be scientific or definitive in content or context. It is the intuitive reflections of the author’s lifelong involvement in organization at all levels of work and management from laborer to senior manager, from professor to consultant, from domestic to international executive.
The first part is a typology of leaderless leadership, which the author claims exceeds even In Praise of Folly (1511) by Erasmus. Folly’s subject is society and she quickly becomes a many-sided symbol, which stands for all that is natural in man, and for all man’s misdirected efforts to get the wrong things out of life. In that sense this typology has much in common with this early 16th century book.
The second part of the leadership series is to focus on the new leaders and where they are likely to reside, and how today they are being misapplied and misused.
The third part looks at leadership and its relationship to the changing nature of the structure and function of work, and why and how culture resists organizational change even in the face of its increasing peril.
The fourth part presents off-the-wall possible models of leadership that may breakthrough the last vestiges of anachronistic hierarchical structures and atavistic functions as the world of work breaks free of its 2,000-year imprisonment.
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“The wise man has his follies no less than the fool;
but herein lies the difference – the follies of the fool
are known to the world, but are hidden from himself;
the follies of the wise man are known to himself, but
hidden from the world.”
Caleb C. Colton (1780 – 1832), English clergyman
Leadership is in a state of retreat bordering on confusion. Not only is leadership out-of-date but out-of-touch with men. For centuries, leadership cues were taken from how the church, military, state, commerce and industry conducted their businesses. All these models are now in jeopardy because they were designed for another time.
Institutions today go from crisis to crisis, scandal to scandal, outrage to outrage. Normalcy is waiting for the other shoe to drop. We have become the United States of Anxiety.
The scandals in the Roman Catholic Church are so pervasive as to no longer shock. Criminal sexual misconduct of priests and bishops has resulted in more than a $billion in payoffs to victims in an attempt to cover-up this shameful behavior. Meanwhile, church coffers are diminishing due to internal pilfering from administrative fraud to embezzlement to misappropriation of funds. Scandal is not, however, limited to the church.
Congressmen, mayors and governors have come in conflict with the law, some of them finding themselves behind bars for malfeasance. By the same token, corporate cooking of company books finds once powerful conglomerates going belly up for creating fictitious bottom lines, while their creative perpetrators are hauled off to jail in Armani suits and handcuffs.
Wordsmiths label these outrages with phrases such as the “arrogance of power,” “greed on steroids,” “corporate mafia,” and “supermarket of crime,” suggesting this is a morality play when it is simply a tragic comedy. It represents a society adrift in a maelstrom without a rudder. All kinds of people are at the helm. We call them “leaders.” But they are leaderless leaders without a rudder. That’s the dilemma of leadership today. Wherever leadership finds itself it expects the rest of us to believe that that is where it intended to go. I find that quite absurd.
People are necessary partners to leadership. They control the rudder. Yet, no fault of their own, most are passive, obedient, obsequious, polite, conforming, dependent and submissive or rudderless as well as clueless. They are of no service to themselves, their leadership, or indeed the organization. Corporate society has conditioned them to behave thusly. This translates behaviorally into learned helplessness and nonresponsibility, the incidental products of leadership gone wrong.
People behave the way they are programmed to behave. The way they are programmed is founded in the leadership culture. Society gets the leadership it deserves. Crisis, scandal and outrage do not occur in a vacuum. They are part of the corporate design, and when the design is wrong, the seven deadly sins work their havoc. There is no profit in finger pointing. No one is innocent. Everyone is guilty. Neither king nor prince, pope nor priest, aristocrat nor workingman escapes the pull of his culture. Greed is the god of our culture and Folly is her leader.
The Holy Father in Central America canonized to sainthood a 17th century Spanish missionary, Brother Pedro, who preached and did good works in Guatemala, and Juan Diego, a native Mexican Indian and the first indigenous American saint. The only problem is that Juan Diego may never have actually lived. There is no proof that he ever existed. To add insult to injury images of Juan Diego more resemble the light skinned conquering Spanish Conquistadors than the dark skinned indigenous people he is meant to celebrate.
Juan Bautista and Jacinto de los Angeles were also beatified during this visit, placing them a step from sainthood. The problem with this beatification is that these two three centuries ago were informers for the Spanish Inquisition. This led to the cruel torture and murder of scores of Indians who risked their lives to worship in the ancient ways of their indigenous culture.
Catholic church membership is fast eroding in Central America. These papal pronouncements are obviously expedient measures to stop this erosion, a common practice of leaderless leadership.
The same type of leadership is on display when an American president bombs a pharmaceutical plant in Africa with the nebulous claim it is producing chemical and biological weapons in the hopes of redirecting media heat from his personal peccadilloes; when congress constructs buildings that are never occupied, or commissions roads to be built with governor support that go nowhere; or when CEOs flee their disintegrating corporations with duffel bags full of tens of millions of dollars while the company stock tanks. In the meantime, employees of such companies find themselves without jobs and with 401(K) accounts reduced to confetti.
Ralph Nader, the scold of corporate America, finds this plunge into amorality beyond cynicism. Why, he asks, didn’t we know sooner about these corporate scoundrels? The same could be asked of the church, state, military, commerce and industry when deeds turn ugly and rise to the surface. Why indeed.
Corporate egos are so insulated from reality with their own conceit that deception can be totally transparent for anyone bothering to look. Of course nobody does proving the executive attitude, “You can’t touch me!” pervasive. Those who knew and could have been whistle blowers extends from the board of directors to corporate insiders to accounting firms to lawyers working for these corporations to credit-rating agencies to corporate director to corporate managers to personnel and department heads to all levels in the system. When filthy lucre flows freely, everyone is blinded by its brilliance.
Change the names of corpocracy to the church and the same whistle blowers might be found in the Roman Curia to the College of Cardinals to the archbishops to the bishops to the parish priests to the laity with knowledge of the same kettle of worms. All hierarchical structured institutions are vulnerable to this malaise, as the same rules apply equally to the president, congress, Supreme Court, governors, and so on down the line to the shock of indifference in communities across the nation. All are engaged in leaderless leadership in one form or another with little apparent interest in wondering why.
Our culture abhors a snitch, stoolie, tattletale, rumormonger, gossipmonger, scandalmonger, nosy parker, big mouth. What’s more, we are mainly a passive people. We don’t “make waves” or “challenge authority.” We react to it. We celebrate our individualism while allowing ourselves to be externally organized rather than self-organized. Our nature is to be compliant rather than cooperative. It is all in the programming. When we think, we are confined to the box, or what we already know, rather than to risk thinking outside it. Consequently, we tend to be clever rather than wise, humble rather than self-confidence, imitators rather than the genuine article. No matter how successful we are someone else is more successful, so we have no peace.
It has been in observing people in organization for nearly four decades that I have come to develop this typology. I’m sure the reader will find him or herself in one or more of these classifications. I do. How could it be otherwise? This is our education.
1. The Manipulator
The manipulator-as-manager believes everyone has his or her price, and that price is as devious as his own. He believes the system is designed for exploitation, and the more able the exploiter the faster his rise to managerial consequence.
Character flaw in this manager comes to the fore when asked his relationship to his people. It is clear that he mistrusts people who have no hidden agenda, naked ambition similar to his own, or in contrast to this appear to be what they seem, straight arrows. Such people he sees as hypocrites – everyone’s bent! -- and driven by weakness.
Whatever his self-indulgence, he expects it to be reflected in his people. If he is a drinker, to name one possible dalliance, he expects his people to have an occasional drink with him after work. A nondrinker is suspect from the start and to be watched. He justifies spending time with his people off duty as a way to get to know them, and to learn what makes them tick. He never admits the need of a social partner to justify his indulgence. Moreover, the manipulator’s penchant is compounded in his people, as he is attracted to those who display similar inclinations.
The weapons of the manipulator are fear and intimidation. During a consulting assignment, I once accompanied a manager to the company gym to play basketball with his people. Another group due to a schedule mix-up occupied the court. This was upsetting to my group who were all psyched up to play basketball.
My host approached the black custodian who had broken the news to the players. In no way dismayed, the manipulator manager cajoled the custodian to demonstrate some flexibility. Then he turned his attention to the manager of the group playing. “Be a sport and play half court. Once we get the rust out of our legs, we can scrimmage your guys in a full court game.”
This manager, clearly intimidated by my host, acceded to his will and the problem was solved. It was accomplished with great facility and no interruption in the harmony of the game. I was impressed. Fifteen minutes later we were playing full court.
A half hour into the scrimmage players of the other team started to leave due to other commitments. This resulted in my group having access to the entire gym until the custodian announced that he was locking up. My host ignored this notice asking me if I wanted to take a shower. Sensing this would get the custodian’s backside up, I said, “No I’m all right,” when in fact I was drenched with sweat and would very much welcome a shower.
Looking toward the custodian, my host said, “You don’t mind if my guys take a shower, do you?”
The black custodian replied, “Yes I do mind. I’m closing up now.”
Undismayed, my host puts his face inches a way from the custodian’s and said with a sly smile, “Who do you work for?” The custodian told him. “You don’t want a letter in your file that you didn’t cooperate with a department head, now do you?” My host wasn’t a department head, far from it, but the custodian didn’t challenge him. We took our showers. He called the custodian’s bluff.
The climate is always ripe for the manipulator where fear is pervasive. The manipulator ultimately becomes manipulated with his own self-deception because he comes to believe he is untouchable. He operates at the expense of people and gets work done “by” them, not with or through them. When his type is dominant in an organization, people bring their bodies to work and leave their minds safely at home.
2. The Frustrated Participant
This manager wants to believe in the system. He sees himself as dedicated, loyal and ambitious, and although frustrated is reluctant to express his complaints. Inconsistency in company policy, flagrant violation of fairness issues, and blatant displays of managerial duplicity, he absorbs without protest feeling it is his role to protect the company’s image.
When he is given the assignment to have company divisions nominate a “manager of the year,” he forms a committee with due diligence to evaluate these contributions to determine the ultimate winner. The consensus candidate is presented to the board, only to have the nominee rejected as “too light weight.” Senior management then hastily nominates its preferred candidate, who was not previously selected in the competition, naming this nominee the new “manager of the year.”
The frustrated manager shares his exasperation and disbelief with this consultant in a flood of words. It is clear that while criticizing such action as being reprehensible he cannot muster the will to be critical of his superiors. It is as if this action had no body.
When I remind him of this, he is suspicious. “Are you a pipeline to senior management?” I assure him that I am not.
“If you want a pipeline to senior management,” I suggest, “ask your senior management to explain its rationale for dumping your nominee.”
The thought of such directness was clearly disheveling. Confrontation never entered the frustrated manager’s mind. “I couldn’t do that. They’d think I wasn’t a team player.”
“So what do you plan to do?”
“What I always do. Suck it up and move forward.”
The frustrated manager would continue to make every effort to anticipate his management’s needs, and to deliver its will whether appropriate or not. If its moral authority was in conflict with his, it was safer to act as an enlisted man in officer country then to challenge that authority.
The frustrated manager represents the good, the bad and the ugly of many organizations. He is able and ready, but somewhat traumatized when made to shelf his ethics for pragmatic considerations. On the one hand he believes in the ethical policies of the company, and on the other considers operating practices, and wonders why they seem so seldom connected. It never occurs to him to take hold at his level. It would not be fair to see the frustrated manager always a corporal for he is often an officer of the company who goes along to get along. Where they are similar is that they both are more rank conscious than task driven, while still wanting to make a meaningful contribution. The frustrated manager defies rational description and is everywhere.
3. The Inside Outsider
The inside-outside manager is a growing presence in organization. Like a boy locked in a candy store, he experiences his most cherished dream of inclusion, but to his chagrin not as a player. Ever the outsider, he is a staff specialist with skills needed but never with line authority.
His skills can be in planning, personnel, organization, research, budget, computer technology, or a host of other specialties, which pale in significance to the power exercised by generalists. He is the equivalent of a civilian among soldiers, and although he may have professional credentials to rank with or exceed the officers, he is never considered one of them.
The inside-outsider manager pays his dues, becomes initiated into the established culture of the elite, but is never identified by it as “one of us.” Much as he might strive to enhance his status his unique skills only exaggerate rather than lessen the difference. Being judged for his specialization, should he show a flare for a generalist’s attributes, this tends only to eclipse rather than enhance his perceived effectiveness, proving he can’t win for losing.
The inside-outsider manager experiences the paradox of being needed but not necessarily wanted, producing a certain amount of internal organizational strain. To the old guard he is a cowboy with little couth and too much hubris. He is however the wave of the future with his numbers growing exponentially.
The inside-outsider manager must come to grips with this reality and accept his inside outsider role as the organization drags its feet to catch up with him. If he can handle this, he will be tolerated and his situation tolerable. If not, he will become a problem, first losing his influence and then his station. No effort on his part will change the way things are, only time will.
4. The Winning Side Saddler
The winning side saddler manager appears with increasing frequency as you move up the organizational chart. He is a pyramid climber with a knack for making his presence felt. A pleaser, anticipator and executer, he dispatches issues before they become problems, endearing him to his bosses. The focus is never on what is needed but what is expected. He is a chameleon with the capacity to change camouflage on a moment’s notice. There is no point in asking him for a coherent point of view because he has never developed one. His nature is that of the hunch player who knows every verse, page and chapter of the “cover your ass” book. A fence rider extraordinary, he tells you what you want and expect to hear. The more uptight and defensive the organization the prominent is his role. A palm tree yielding to the prevailing winds, the winning side saddler manager provides a buffer to the ugly edges of reality. Should a power shift be eminent, the winning side saddler has already saddled the winning horse and is waiting to put his new boss into the stirrups.
Senior management never has a chance. It thinks it judges staff on the basis of qualification and competence, but the winning side saddler knows better. Management settles for comfort level, “am I comfortable with this person?” If comfort is assured, competence and qualification are ordained as givens. This sustains organizational lethargy with senior management’s unconscious design.
To the winning side saddler anything goes that fuels his career. Loyalty is blind. Obedience is an amoral pursuit. Fear is prevalent in his personality if not in his vocabulary. He has an eye for weakness and a gift for exploiting it. His will is to react to the needs of those in charge with the devotion of the sycophant.
The winning side saddler manager is of some value because of his willingness to serve. This is can be an adverse virtue if he withholds vital information because of its negative implications.
It would be folly to discount how important being liked as opposed to being competent has on the organization. CEO Lee Iacocca, after having a record year at Ford Motor Company, was fired by chairman of the board Henry Ford, III. When he asked why, Ford said, “Well, sometimes you just don’t like somebody.”
5. The Nostalgic Elitist
The nostalgic elitist manager is fortunately disappearing. He is a vestige of past restricted glory and an unwilling participant in a more open egalitarian present. He lives in a black and white world of workers and managers, thinkers and doers, the educated and the ignorant, while the world has become predominantly gray. Disturbing to him is that nothing seems as it once was. He takes cynical delight in the vocabulary of “social change,” as he sees it changing nothing, merely manipulating fads and slogans with smoke and mirrors.
Schooled in the belief that abrupt change is infrequent, he is having trouble with this being called one of those exceptional periods. Yet, much as he would prefer it to be otherwise, he cannot ignore that institutions are disintegrating and being resurrected into God knows what.
This non-structured period causes him great pain. His preference is for fixed structures and closed systems. He cannot fathom why his authority is challenged, why the less gifted are to be treated as equals, why his superiority is not self-evident, or whatever this business of a “bill of rights” for workers is all about? He will not accept that the old way is not working any more, choosing instead to see it being abandoned without cause, not out of necessity.
A new mentality is emerging which he cannot comprehend and therefore opposes. He sees a more permissive society with everybody doing their own thing, and he shutters at the decadence, ignoring the fact that creative expression is inversely related to the level of formal control. A more open permissive society spawns creativity, while a more closed and structured one kills it.
The nostalgic elitist manager believes in the idea that there are good and bad attitudes, whereas in reality there are only differing attitudes. This manager holds that there is only one truth, his truth, when each individual experiences a measure of his own truth. You cannot make him see that good people do bad things for good reasons. This defies logic and he is a student of logic.
All this conflicting data irritates the nostalgic elitist manager. He cries for simpler times and more blunt instruments to control behavior. He longs for termination without reason, and the use of stick and carry games to motivate.
He seldom comes to grips with his own weakness, and is often of a sadistic temperament. To him toughness and strength are synonymous. This attitude frustrates subordinates and agonizes superiors, as it underlines his weakness. His prominence is evident the slightest shift in a new direction.
6. The Waiter in the Wings
The waiter in the wings is a pragmatist. He has a healthy appreciation of both his potential and obstacles to success. While others are aggravating about change he is husbanding his resources, planning his tactics and developing his strategy. This separates him from the winning side saddler. He is as strong and resolute as his opposition.
His penchant is to make a periodic assessment of his progress to date versus his long-range objective, assessing this against the progress of his organization. He has no plans to tie his future to a sinking ship, or bide his time with rationalizations. His motivation is kept close to his chest, feeling no need to campaign with bluster.
Operationally, he makes himself indispensable. Yet he confounds subordinates and superiors alike. Success is essentially a game to him. This can be misconstrued as his being cold as well as cool. He cares but doesn’t make an issue of it. Lacking the appearance of emotional baggage, he is often misunderstood and frequently envied.
What confounds his critics is his ability to balance stealth with openness, insouciance with results, choosing never to telegraph his hand. He is waiting to make his move and that is all that matters to him. Both because he doesn’t need and trust one, the waiter in the wings seldom has a confidante, but allows himself to be one.
His MBA patina is obvious as he applies the science of his business school education with the precision of a case study. Yet he gets no rush from being a student as the application of his tools is his only interests.
Balance describes him. He is an excellent writer and effective communicator with a well-developed sense of proportion. In a word he is not easily ruffled. Perspective defines him, which makes him especially engaging as a calming influence in crisis. Inadvertently, this makes him a threat to those who mistrusts his velvet glove approach. He is waiting in the wings and has no doubt that center stage awaits him.
His edge is belief in himself without preamble. He never meets a stranger and is as confident addressing a ghetto audience as a board meeting. As relaxed as he seems, he is actually wound as tight as piano wire. Given this, he can only wait so long before he has to move on, always to a more challenging role.
Long before his present position he was filling all the appropriate boxes in his curriculum vitae to make him a prime candidate much like a first round draft choice in the NFL must spend hard year’s honing his talent for such selection. Organizations recruit him with the same diligence.
In any organization 15 percent of the work force are foot draggers, another 70 percent obsequious followers, and yet another 15 percent hard chargers. The waiter in the wings manager is a hard charger and usually gets little developmental attention, as he will succeed whether the organization does or not. The natural inclination is therefore to spend a disproportionate amount of time with losers and followers, which often results in this superior performer moving on.
7. Happily in Harness
The happily in harness manager accepts his role because he loves what he does. Never wanting to be anything else, he is satisfied. Each promotion is a genuine surprise. By nature, he is appreciative and generous, easy to work with or for, competent without being righteous, confident without being arrogant.
He creates a climate for subordinate growth even if he himself is not inclined to be a good coach or counselor. His most effective teaching method is by example. He is trusted and fair, consistent and honest. He would never think of countermanding an executive order, or bad mouthing a superior. It would never occur to him to do so.
Contentment is a word that describes him. He entered the work force with this attitude and remains true to it as a veteran. He takes pride in his experience and ability to do his job, but uncharacteristically, he registers a surprising tolerance for those less inclined to follow suit. If there is envy or jealousy in him, it fails to show. He celebrates the achievement of others and encourages those more able than him to strive to go beyond his station. He has an equal amount of patience for those who stumble but try as for those who fail to try for fear of stumbling. Although laziness is foreign to his make up, he remains philosophical about lazy people. “This is not their patch. Trust me, when they find it they’ll be a different person.”
The happily in harness manager is the backbone of most successful organizations. His poster board appearance however can be deceiving. He is unlikely to note progressive internal stress and strain building up from dysfunctional practices, or to be inclined to calibrate accelerating external demands on the organization. One thing is certain. A whistle blower he is not.
8. The Quiet Soldier
The quiet soldier manager is not to be confused with the happily in harness. He differs in some striking ways. For example, he is more comfortable in the role of follower rather than leader and identifies with the aspirations and frustrations of his subordinates. He is not necessarily happy. He is just reticent about it. By inclination, he is a doer rather than a thinker, an implementer rather than an innovator. Risk is not in his vocabulary.
The upshot of this is that he is a constant frustration to those in charge. They see him having the talent but not the resolve to do more. Moody and taciturn, he is apt to accept untenable situations rather than to do something about them. “Not my job,” echoes in his silence. Simply put, he is a passive passenger on his own ship with more confidence in someone else doing the navigating.
Hard to believe, he is the manager everyone likes even when he lets his charges down. Is it because he is stoic; has presence; because of his sublime dignity; or is it merely because what you see is what you get? The conundrum is part of his appeal.
Clearly, he needs to be prodded into action. Since he is unlikely to be interested in promotion, the stick and carrot routine doesn’t work. Either he fails to understand his role or chooses to let others worry about it. He needs constant stroking to achieve only adequate performance. Curiously, he is seldom considered incompetent. Perhaps it is because he never makes waves.
In another time the quiet soldier manager was paternalistic management’s perfect son. Today he is the logjam in the soul of the machine always waiting for orders from headquarters. This predilection can derail projects, cause deadlines to be missed, or blow critical networks.
The quiet soldier manager is present on every managerial team as his lack of ego is considered an instinct for teaming. He is the flotsam of yesterday and the jetsam of a new tomorrow and he is present everywhere, a holdover from a system preferring cosmetic to real structural change. And he is unlikely to soon disappear.
9. The Victim
The victim manager has a well-developed martyr complex. Nothing can be taken at face value. He expects to be trusted without being trustworthy, given cherished assignments without being dependable, and taken at his word without being credible. Call it tunnel vision, myopia or hindsight, he has it. He delights in the failures of others, but finds no humor when others delight in his. When others fail, it is because they’re incompetent; when he fails, it’s because others let him down.
He has the mysterious ability to put well-meaning people on the defensive, poisoning their minds with the idea that they don’t like him because of his race, religion, ethnicity, parochialism, socioeconomic status, accent or the neighborhood from which he comes. If that doesn’t work, it is his college or university degree lacks the prestige of certain other institutions. And if that still fails, there are always the staple discriminators: he is too fat, too thin, too short, too tall, too bald, too hairy, too old, too young, too quiet, too loud, too common, too rare, too late.
“Late” has a whole new set of disclaimers for the victim manager. As Marlon Brando says in the film, On the Waterfront (1954), “I could have been a contender,” meaning he could have vied for the World Middleweight Boxing Championship, “if I had had the breaks.” For the victim manager, it is too late (for him) to go back to school, learn new skills, change jobs, change careers, leave the company, start a business, start a family, leave everything and start a new life.
Holding him back is another set of the victim manager’s favorite foibles. He couldn’t do any of these things because he had to take care of his parents, his wife wouldn’t let him, they (company, family, friends, acquaintances, relatives) didn’t approve, he couldn’t find the money, he couldn’t take the stress, and it would interfere with his (bowling, soft ball, club, family, church) obligations.
Mention is never made that he might be afraid of failure, of embarrassing himself, or might not have the stick-to-it-ness necessary to complete the task much less succeed. The victim manager is looking for justification for his unhappiness and he wants it put on everything and everybody, just as long as it doesn’t stick to him. He has never come to terms with the fact that where he is is exactly where he expects to be.
He holds a few other cards meant to put the heat on others, such as he hasn’t been given enough training, coaching, mentoring, or opportunity to prove himself. Yet when he manages, he invariably manages up, fantasizing were he in charge he’d run a tighter running smoother ship.
Asked how he thinks his people see him, he replies, “They like working for me; know where they stand. I treat them the way I’d like to be treated, not the way I’m treated.” Notice an “us” positive always has to be coated with a “them” negative.
Little surprise, when his direct reports are asked what it is like working for him, they echo the same unenthusiastic sentiments he alludes to regarding his bosses. In other words they’re not happy campers either. They see him as a whiner, complainer and often lazy as well. Most of his energy is spent criticizing the system rather than constructing better ways to utilize it. The content of his personality is immersed in “can’t,” not can.
The victim manager has a tendency to form an alliance with the nostalgic elitist manager, complementing the masochist with the sadist. A shroud of gloom surrounds them both and corrupts the air their subordinates breathe. Their most telling power is to turn colleagues such as the quiet soldier and frustrated manager into martyrs working on the victim complex.
The victim manager makes no secret of his discontent. He wears a permanent wounded hound dog expression encased in the armor of passivity. This is so thick that it is impossible to reach him short of termination.
10. The Unbending Idealist
The unbending idealist manager idealizes life and lives in a dream world. He is a product of film and television and prefers to see the world as it should be, not as it is. In contrast to the victim manager he sees himself as a savior of lost causes and even more lost souls, explaining away failures and suspect conduct, failing to place it on the responsible people. Consequences are suspended, forgiven, or ignored. F. S. didn’t mean to steal the laptop. He just forgot to bring it back. G. D. took off early and failed to meet the deadline because her car pool left early. P. M. has a lot on his plate, which caused him to lose it in front of the customer. Such people suck the energy from everything around them while the unbending idealist provides the rationale.
It never occurs to this manager that life is a series of choices. Some people make good ones and others rotten ones. The unbending idealist suffers incurably from the naiveté of the good heart; failing to see this tendency for what it is, compassionate condescension. This manager considers advocates of self-reliance, self-discipline, self-management and survival of the fittest soulless as well as heartless. Failure to put pressure on people to make suitable choices might then find the unbending idealist as headless. Obviously, it is not an either/or proposition, but Folly might insist it being so.
There is a heroic sweep to the role he sees for himself, as if an actor on stage spinning an idyllic part recalled from memory. He equates charisma with competence, and presence with performance. Dress, diction, and the dramatic are tools of his trade for he is the product of a romantic education. Every effort is made to attend the “best” schools and get the most desirable degrees to make his rise to prominence swift and without glitches. Education is not a means, but an end in itself, the ticket to the good life.
Another aspect of this manager is self-consciousness. When he enters a room, he expects heads to turn. When he speaks, he expects necks to crane not to miss a word. He practices in front of a mirror to manage his expressions to best equate them with the intended impact.
Self-image is everything. This proves necessary to create and then live an impossible fiction. With every failure he reinvents himself, never seeming to register the folly of his ways. He is a perfectionist without understanding the blessing of human frailty; that people are flawed but perfectible. He is a dreamer who is looking for fulfillment “out there” when he is tripping over it.
The unbending idealist sees himself different than others with the same training and he is inclined to bridge the difference by waxing sincere. When this fails, he mirrors those bypassing him to increasing power, convinced once he reaches the rarefied air of top management his idealism will finally find a home. What a shock it is to his system when he arrives only to discover the duplicity, chicanery, pettiness, coarseness and trivializing conduct here is not unlike that previously experienced. Small wonder his idealism is in danger of dropping like a stone into cynicism once brutal reality meets unbending idealism.
He now encounters real people where before they were symbols of power. Here he expected camaraderie, not competition, collegial good will, not the maliciousness experienced in his climb. If this reality is not assimilated, a good and possibly great manager could be lost. People are people everywhere, good and bad, ethical and immoral. There are no pristine pockets of them anywhere.
11. The Adventurer
The adventurer manager is different than the unbending idealist manager. The difference is that this manager is totally consumed with the adventure. He has no room for idealism. He is out to push the envelope, which necessitates playing CYA and SYA games. Pushing it where is never clearly defined for the game is the thing.
Experience has taught him that the adventurer best have a “cover your ass” explanation for everything, while the best defense is a “shows your ass” offense to keep troublemakers at bay. When cornered, he comes out swinging with a “red pencil,” a caustic remark, exception to the rule, or an incomprehensible explanation. He can lie with a straight face looking his accuser in the eye, or pass a polygraph test without flinching. His singular sense of adventure has no sense of consequences, as it never occurs to him that he might be caught, humiliated, and terminated.
He is a type “T” personality, a high-risk taker, and thrill seeker, rule breaker with a creative abandon persona. Primarily left-brain oriented, the adventurer manager can easily gravitate to the bizarre. Paranoia, busily fermenting in his brain, provides him with protective sensors, escaping one close call after another. The rush makes him even bolder.
What is confounding is that he is often brilliant and could succeed brilliantly without all the artful dodging. Take one adventurer manager who created a complex matrix of performance indices, which confirmed staggering results. It was so convincing that several chief engineers signed off on it. This led to a huge promotion, only to discover months later that the matrix was entirely bogus. Invariably, the deceiver is caught but often not before he wreaks havoc on the system. The adventurer manager craves attention and feels he has to act precipitously to get it.
Usually, this attitude is not justified as he is often the darling of the organization, the daredevil and nonconformist that is envied for his monstrous accomplishments that often seem to exceed the believable, and for reason – he cuts corners and cheats. Yet he is the glamour boy who seems the perfect manager, a team player who sets the bar higher than anyone else dares. While appearing a solid manager, he is apt to bring shocking embarrassment to the organization because he is never what he seems.
Were his work to be scrutinized instead of his sizzle, his poor management skills would surface because this role is not exciting enough. He has little interest in mundane practices showing a preference for big-ticket items. Constantly challenging himself to be more sensational he cuts corners, fakes results, doctors the books, invents fictitious accomplishments, and worse of all, musters the support of legitimate doers to be tainted with his mythic accomplishments by guile, vanity and flattery.
What may surprise is that the adventurer manager is actually a passive defensive personality. He wants to belong but not to the herd. So he enters the wilderness of despair out of which there is no escape. It is an improbable place that an increasing number of highly talented people are rushing to enter, and we must ask ourselves, why?
12. The Spin Doctor
The spin-doctor manager is the public relations conduit between the community at large and the community within. He is the eyes and ears and voice of authority. His greatest concern is to put a good face on a bad situation requiring him to be a good liar, and herein lays the danger. He has a tendency to reduce everything to public relation speak with cavalier flamboyance, when this is far from the facts of the situation.
He sees his role as the little person on the shoulder of the giant giving directions. This has some merit. The problem is that the spin-doctor manager can come to believe in his own rhetoric, ultimately leading to credibility issues.
Assessing explosive or exploding issues, and putting a positive slant on them, is no small achievement. Wariness is his by word, as unstated implications of a situation can destroy momentum. So, he must be quick to interpret and translate events into believable terms. It is the skill of the illusionist who changes the complexion of the problematic with sleight of hand cunning, giving the chaotic situation an orderly context, a down surge in business an uplifting forecasts, a crisis situation the umbrella of calm.
The danger is to proffer short-term solutions that bypass long-term implications. He is apt to be quick-witted, congenial, decisive, and less a public than a backstage performer. Vital as he is he cannot afford to become manic. As Eric Goffman puts it in Relations in Public (1971),
The manic is someone who does not refrain from intruding where he is not wanted or where he will be accepted but at a loss to what we see as his value and status. He does not contain himself in the spheres and territories allotted to him. He overreaches. He does not keep his place.
Overstepping his role can be a disease most deadly for his every word is trademark to his purpose.
13. The Reluctant Soldier
The reluctant soldier manager is neither fish nor fowl, neither leader nor follower. He is seldom there. He simply is. Everyone knows him. Everyone tolerates him. No one expects anything from him, and therefore nobody does anything about him. He is in the same job and at the same level that he has been for years. He exists. During that time, he has received increased compensation and improved entitlements for doing less and less. He is retired on the job and sees little reason to act otherwise.
The reluctant soldier is the benefactor of a spoils system where favoritism resides. To call him lazy is an oversimplification. A greater stretch would be to see him a “rebel.” He is neither, but a person who has wandered into a job and found a home.
He is often crafty with survival his sharpest tool. This he plays to perfection. Once he was painfully unhappy, but that was so long ago that his memory is inured to it. When first employed, he was considered a “safe hire,” then promoted and forgotten. Statistically, he is a member of the 15 percent “foot draggers,” which plague most organizations.
14. The Unforgivable Prodigal Son
The unforgivable prodigal son manager once stumbled badly. This caused embarrassment to him and the organization. His faux pas was of such magnitude to embarrass the company but not sufficient to warrant dismissal. It would have been better for all concerned that it had been. Once he was punished for this indiscretion with a suspension without pay and his rate frozen for two years, his personnel jacket was expunged of his crime.
Unfortunately, it didn’t end there. The prodigal son manager returned to his job but without forgiving grace. He became a pariah with his guilt whispered behind his back with his every act. There was nothing he could say or do to change the climate. He was stigmatized, and might as well have worn a scarlet letter on his forehead.
New people arrive, and are told to stay clear of the unforgivable prodigal son manager. “He is poison,” they advise without being more specific. He doesn’t make matters any easier for himself jumping the gun telling new people of his crime before they ask.
It matters little that he becomes an efficient manager, the guilty whispers still continue. What behavior could be so reprehensible? In this case, and this is one of a pattern I’ve observed, the prodigal son manager “betrayed” the company and his colleagues. He leaked a story to the media about unsavory company practices. An investigation followed, the company was sanctioned, several customers terminated contracts, and people lost their jobs.
The company was careful not to punish him as a whistle blower, but for breaching company policy, which called for reporting such findings in writing to one’s superior. He didn’t, arguing if he had the company wouldn’t have done anything anyway. So he injudiciously took matters into his own hands. His assessment may have been correct but not right under the circumstances.
Still, if the perception exists that an organization is a closed system, a person is likely to ignore the chain-of-command when exasperation reaches its limits and indeed go over management’s head. This would be tantamount to insubordination, a crime in an uptight operation. Such a culture labels a whistle blower a “snitch” with the unspoken but pervasive word if you want to win promotion and be accepted by your peers, keep your mouth shut! The person fares much better being simply incompetent.
Puritanical justice is actually a double-edged problem. The accused and the accuser are wrapped in the same cloth and painted with the same brush. Trust is destroyed and silence rolls through the organization like thunder. No one is confident to say anything for fear of reprisals. The ultimate loser is the organization. Sincerity is the first casualty. Much talent and energy is wasted in posturing. It is assumed more important to make an impression than a difference, to wax mellow as a personality than to cut to the chase as a performer, more prudent to play it safe than to gamble on venturing outside the box.
As for the unforgivable prodigal son manager, unlike the example above, he is apt to become increasingly irresponsible for what difference does it make? If he is particularly malicious, he is inclined to spread disinformation with a desire for vengeance. He thinks, ‘what have I got to lose, so why not stir things up a bit?’ As his personality becomes increasingly warped, his venom spills out in sarcasm questioning the leadership and its fairness to the troops. Whatever happens, he twists it to reveal an ugly side. Gossip and innuendo are his weapons of mass emotional destruction.
This is precisely what happened to a police captain put on permanent nights for an indiscretion. In this medium sized metropolitan area this meant that he was exposed to all patrol officers as they rotated shifts. In time he riled them up so much the 350 sworn officers went on strike in a state that does not allow public employees to strike. Bedlam followed. Experts of all description were brought in. I was one of them fortuitously stumbling on this cause. Once uncovered, the officers quietly returned to work, embarrassed that somebody they trusted had duped them.
The unforgivable prodigal son manager often shares many of the attributes of the victim manager. What is regrettable is that he is frequently able with passionate drive. This drive has been turned inside out with hate triumphing over love, maliciousness over kindness.
That said, it is dangerous to place him in a position where he could poison the minds and hearts of those reporting to him. The best bet is to isolate him from people until reason wins out. If this seems extreme, this consultant has seen organizations ruined once this Iago is allowed to rant.
15. The Over Achiever
The over achiever manager is inclined to educate himself beyond his intelligence, pushing his ambition to the brink, or beyond his capacity, exposing him to situations past his comprehension. He epitomizes the leaderless leader because action is his call and shooting from the hip is his modus operandi.
He has a surface acumen that is engaging and catches the eye of his superiors. His intensity is contagious. He is likeable and agreeable and seems never to sleep. His attractiveness extends beyond what he does to what he is, a human dynamo. He has lived so long with his limitations, which he hides in a swirl of activity, that they have become assets.
Others assess his performance in his long hours in pursuit of a goal, never pausing to wonder if he might be a more effective reflecting more, and acting less. “Ready, fire, aim” is his inclination. So long is he of this persuasion that he could not fathom it any other way. Nothing is done with ease. This finds him attempting to cover everything rather than focusing on the critical 10 percent causing the problem.
The over achiever manager is not actually an achiever. He is a drone who micromanages to a fault and finds it difficult to delegate. People who accomplish assignments with ease are suspect, as he equates accomplishment with time and intensity. Because of the tornado that he is everyone thinks him competent. They see the whirlwind process and not the marginal product.
He needs help. A career development plan may redirect this tortured manager into a repetitive function he can perform with satisfaction, for example, data collection. Where he has broad discretionary power, such as commanding people, his ineptitude is likely to surface. He is better suited to manage things than people. What is appalling is that working hard is likely to get more attention than working smart. This coats the skids for the over achiever manager.
16. The Messianic Manager
The messianic manager sees himself as a savior. Where he differs with the unbending idealist is that he has a conceptual approach to modify reality. The unbending idealist only has the rationale to explain reality away.
The change masters of the 20th century might never consider themselves sponsors of the messianic manager, but they are. They have worked around the problem of a changing working society with the false assumption that there is a “Holy Grail” core. There isn’t. A brief explanation is warranted.
Douglas McGregor’s (Human Side of Enterprise 1960) “Y” style of manager, Robert Blake and Jane Mouton’s (The Managerial Grid 1964) “team manager,” Carl Rogers’s (On Becoming a Person 1961) “employee center manager,” George C. Homans’s (The Human Group 1950) “informal work behavior,” Chris Argyris’s (Personality and Organization 1957) “humanistic value system,” Frederick Herzberg’s (Work and the Nature of Man 1966) “motivation-hygiene theory,” and Elton Mayo’s (The Human Problem of an Industrial Civilization 1933) “humanistic management,” to name only a few interpreters of leadership and worker motivation, set themselves the noble but impossible task to identify what pushes both leaders and workers off the dime and on the same page, and they have all failed.
With regard to leadership, they have not departed from the 2,000 year-old model of somebody in charge calling the shots and somebody else responding. With regard to motivation, they have assumed motivation can be defined when it is as slippery as an eel in the hand. Put simply, it’s the culture, stupid. The culture dictates behavior, and the culture is driven by the structure and function of work, which is dynamic and ever changing.
Create the culture that supports the interests of the organization and fulfills the needs of the worker and, voila! Leaders and workers get off the dime, move on to the same page and work gets done, the work that moves everyone to where they want to go, not to where they usually end up.
An idealistic concept has driven management in the direction of the messianic manager called “humanism.” Human Resources has been the interpreter of this humanism, selling the leadership on the idea that giving workers everything but the kitchen sink will cause them to applaud their leadership with conscientious, efficient high-level performance. This hasn’t happened. Not only has this failed to materialize into an interdependent leadership-worker partnership in a “culture of contribution,” but it has stumbled instead too frequently into a permissive “culture of complacency,” where nobody is seemingly in charge and workers waffle suspended in terminal adolescence.1 The messianic manager is one of humanism’s most persistent creations.
He is like the missionary that goes into a culture of 4,000 years with the idea he is going to save that culture from itself by changing it into his. Albert Schweitzer (Reverence for Life 1969) comes to mind as a messianic manager, as he brought Western culture to West Africa, setting up a hospital and clinic. Noble undertaking? For me, this is troubling. It has the hubristic feel of Western culture hegemony with “progress society’s most important product” looking down from its mountaintop at this primitive society, and saying, “Don’t worry, we’ll fix you.”
This is characteristic of the messianic manager. He believes he has answers and understands the workings of the minds of those that he plans to save. He has cause and they are his beneficent effect. Schweitzer has admitted in his writings that his motivation was atonement for the excesses of his culture. But in that atonement he assumed the arrogance of saving another culture through the sacrifice and saving of himself. A faulty premise.
It is as if there is a right way and a wrong way of doing everything, and he knows the right way. He takes pride in his humanity, but is it not benign paternalism, and isn’t paternalism what is anachronistic? Moreover, he sees himself as considerate and compassionate, which he tends to be, as long as people respond to his largesse. His group is a family with him as its head. Rather than deal with his people individually, allowing them to assess their individual strengths and weaknesses and to design a system that they can own, they must fit in his. For those who fit, it is like milk and honey; for those who don’t, it is vinegar and acid.
The messianic manager gets rid of the bad apples by converting them into good ones. If this fails to work, bad apples are ignored until they dry up and fade away. Fairness is a weapon and his scepter.
A complex individual, often an able one, he has a passion to contribute but only on his terms. So blinding is this ambition that he will sacrifice people “for their own good,” working them beyond reason as described in Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of the Machine (1981) for a cause bigger than everyone. It is on these grounds that he requires special attention or he may go haywire.
17. The Pained Participant
The pained participant manager could be easily confused with the victim manager and the reluctant soldier manager. He has a separate place in this typology because early in his life, he discovered two things: one that he was able, and two that the world was organized against him. A tragic figure, he is like a Dante who has lost the keys to his own inferno, permanently caged in the pain of self-pity, seeing his situation as unique and his dilemma untenable. He wrestles with his confusion in dialectic all too common, which he will gladly share with you. This dialectic was the same when he was twenty as it is now when he is fifty. Life has been stacked against him because he didn’t have the right parents, the proper educational opportunities, and the breaks that everybody else seems to have. Then too, he is too old now to do anything about it, as he was too young before when he was twenty for the same reason. He is in a cage of his making with an invisible ceiling enclosed in invisible walls.
Somehow he got into management and treats his subordinates as buddies sharing with them his personal woes, which they dutifully listen to at their profit. Life, the system, the company, circumstances have all wronged him, and much as he would like, Kafkaesque, he cannot forgive them for what they do.
Remarkably, the organization is strangely tolerant of the pained participant manager’s obsessive-compulsive inclination. It chooses to ignore his masochism with a blind eye, and always at its peril for he is apt to promote passive behavior among the ranks. This may destroy the organization’s infrastructure as inconspicuously as if social termites invaded its sinews.
No matter how much the organization attempts to mitigate the pained participant manager’s anguish, this only raises the bar of his self-pity. Incredibly, the organization forgives him his transgressions but he never forgives it theirs. His anxieties plague operations. With no cure in sight, the best therapy is to allow this manager to go elsewhere to appease his long suffering soul, but no longer here.
18. The Missionary
The missionary manager, like the messianic manager, has a mission. The difference is that his mission is not that of his own making but that of the organization’s. He has made it his business to spread the gospel according to the corporate fathers to the ignorant. He does this without question or reflection. He is an acolyte and they are his knowing masters. When this mission is consistent with what is needed, everything works smoothly and he is recognized. When the mission is in conflict with what is needed, derailing momentum and causing increasing organizational tension, unlike the victim manager, he takes personal responsibility for this failing like a willing martyr and thus lets his corporate fathers off the hook. He is a believer!
A missionary manager works from the premise that human nature is fundamentally good, that people are therefore basically good but are capable of doing bad things. He sees that goodness drives his masters and this goodness will ultimately triumph. They are the light and the way and beyond the pettiness and greed of common men.
On a personal level, no one is more crushed than him when he discovers his masters have feet of clay, and do bad things such as cook the books, acquire unpaid loans, fail to report income from stock options, and so on. Remarkably, he deals with this by sticking to his principles -- that is, disembodying goodness to the greater cause -- turning a blind eye to whatever does not fit or is not consistent with these principles.
A missionary manager often has a peculiar tick. He can be driven up the wall by swearing, smoking, kidding, wearing facial hair, dressing differently, always having a cup of coffee in hand, keeping office door shut, cracking knuckles, bending company policy, whistling, doodling, disappearing for hours, or any number of other irritating behaviors, but experience little problem with the corporate greed of his masters.
His righteousness may extend to race, religion, ethnicity, politics, or ideas. He has decided what is appropriate to work and what is not. That said, some guys like to talk about sports of a morning to get their blood flowing. If the missionary manager is not into sport, this too may grind against his decorum. Chances are he has a code for everything, adopted from his masters, which has little to do with the job at hand, and much more to do with his comfort level. He is on a mission to help people help themselves to be in sync with corporate policy when they may in fact feel no such need. A holy war may evolve as the missionary manager thinks with his heart and rules with his head.
He is present in every organization with a zeal, which may or may not be appropriate. If the mission is consistent with legitimate concerns, it might best be tested at that manager’s level with his people. Success here will be its own conduit to a larger stage. On the other hand, if the mission is conflicting, it may fuel discontent and disrupt productive work.
This manager is likely to have a strong character but a narrow point of view. The mission is everything. Inconvenience, costs or possible negative impact do not matter. It is what his masters want. He is not interested in obstacles or what can’t be done. He is a man of consequence and puts a tiger in the organization’s tank. Providing that is what is needed, he is someone to reckon with.
19. The Professional
The professional manager is an oxymoron. The professional is seldom a manager albeit carrying the title. This title designation is often used to justify his entry-level pay grade and benefit package. Nor is the manager of professionals necessarily schooled in the discipline of his charges. There exists the belief in management that a professional manager, thanks to Harold Geneen of ITT (Managing 1984), can manage anything whatever the business or discipline, as management is a science. I have seen such arrogance create colossal chaos.
Take the case of the manager who downgraded a systems analyst of a high tech defense contractor because he observed he was “dogging it.”
“The guy doesn’t do a damn thing,” he complained. “Sits there at his desk mumbling all day, tapping his pencil.”
Systems analysts threatened to bolt. They demanded he be restored to full status, and even given a raise. Brouhaha followed, which revealed the offending systems analyst was actually the best problem solver in the group, and revered by his colleagues. The manager didn’t have a clue. How could he? He didn’t know what they were doing. This is not an isolated example.
The professional manager is more often than not educated in a discipline, which has little to do with managing, motivating, and mobilizing a cadre of folks in a given function. Even business school grads are more skilled in managing things than in managing people. In this increasingly technological climate chances are the professional manager picks up what skills he has in leading and developing people on the job in a one-dimensional company management-training program. Moreover, the majority of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies have technical degrees supported by MBAs, which offers little insight into this mood-driven-demanding-self-centered-mercenary system called a person.
Three things are essential to managing people: know them as individuals, treat them as individuals, and develop them as individuals.
Once the professional manager generalizes, he moves into the deep yogurt of no man’s land. To know-treat-develop people as individuals, he must understand their work. In a broader sense, this extends to the business.
Lee Iacocca was a great automobile executive because he knew and loved cars and the people that made them. He had the wisdom not to be pulled into a business he didn’t know. He is the exception.
The professional manager today spends an inordinate amount of time in a factory called a university. He comes out of this institution with a certain slant on how the world works, especially the business world, and feels that he is ordained on that basis to position power, perks and concomitant authority still with a wet nose. No entry-level salary or job for him! He feels he has spent his time in the minor leagues of industry and commerce in academia, and now is entitled. He has this romantic notion of being instantly gratified with affluence, prestige, privilege and trust without the necessity of earning any of it because he has a piece of paper that states he is qualified. Qualified for what?
Actually, for nothing, but that’s not the point. He’s made a six-figure investment in education, has delayed gratification four-to-six-to-eight years, has paid his dues, and now it is time for society to fess up!
Somewhere lost in this scenario is the importance of experience, the benefit of failure in the learning process, and how life and career are a journey, not an end. People fresh out of these academic factories come into the system to demand salaries and benefits that eclipse what people in the system spent ten, twelve or twenty years to accumulate. Small wonder there is dissension.
For many, acquiring professional credentials was a way to avoid struggle. Struggle has gone out of work, pain has taken leave, and the motivation to work has become confused. The professional manager wants a position, not a job; desires authority without concomitant accountability; and expects to be measured in terms of time spent doing rather than results. It is hard to measure work, in any case, when mainly spectator to it, or indeed worth when results are not in the equation.
Of all the monsters we have created the professional manager is the largest. In an age when much work requires basically self-management, when maturity is essential to deal with ever changing and conflicting circumstances, the professional manager epitomizes the spoiled brat generation that feeds on itself and the system. If this seems harsh, consider this when it comes to promotions: having presence is more effective than purpose; making an impression more defining than making a difference; having a winning personality more the focus than performance.
This is how the professional manager has been programmed and this is how he is apt to behave. Campaigning for the next position is a full-time job. There is no point in blaming him. We have programmed this multi-faceted and potentially capable person in learned helplessness and nonresponsibility. Many as I write are marching into middle age suspended in terminal adolescence waiting for their golden parachute.
Summary and Conclusion
My typology is not definitive or all-inclusive. It is not even, dare I admit it, scientific. So, you may discount it entirely, of course, I believe at your peril. What I have seen in nearly four decades of working at all levels of organization, here and abroad, as a working drone, executive, consultant and graduate school educator are all grist for my mill, and I sense within the bounds of many of your own experiences.
You may take issue with many of my ideal type descriptions, but my bet is that you have had more than a passing acquaintance with most of them.
Our institutions are failing across the globe, and such failures are always human if also circumstantial. The fact that scandals and failures grow grosser is evidence only that we have a problem. Nothing else. It is not a morality issue. It is a contextual problem. Obviously, people are failing and this is the reason for the typology.
A typology has the ability to describe perhaps better than any other way the humanness of this failure. If you see more failure than successful ideal types here, it is because I have encountered more.
I must confess that I have struggled for clarity in seven books and scores of articles to describe these crumbling walls within workplaces without defining an architectural scheme to eradicate the problem. I am confident that more gifted carpenters of the mind will put their craft to work on such a new design. I don’t apologize for this deficiency, but simply state it, as I cannot divine what will replace CEOs or presidents or pontiffs, but believe they will be modified if not committed to history in due course. Why? Because leaders of extant institutions no longer know how to lead and have never learned how to follow. Their eyes are guided by history, not vision, by what they know, not what they can find out, by what has worked before, not what is failing now, by a sense of power, not a sense of people.
Circumstances, mainly brought on by the technological explosion, are forcing a reevaluation of “leadership.” I suggested more than a decade ago that work could be conducted much better without managers (Work Without Managers 1990); that performance appraisal was a sham, a costly time consuming ritual without substantive results, and that the total quality movement was an expediency driven by a crisis management. Time has not changed my mind.
Little real change is realized when you superimpose a methodology, exquisite as it may be, on a faulty foundation. The Malcolm Baldridge Award for Quality, for example, does not change institutional behavior any more than quality control circles have changed individual motivation. The fat still comes back in both cases.
Leadership discussions assume everyone is talking about the same thing. I don’t think they are. Leadership is often personified in a charismatic leader (President Kennedy), a central figure (Pope John Paul II), or a person that sits at the top of the organization (CEO). It can be called “service leadership” or “competent leadership,” or whatever but leadership invariably is reduced to an individual at the helm. I find this too narrow a perspective. For one, I don’t think charisma is relevant, if it ever was. Nor do I think leadership is personified in a central figure. I believe leadership is far more universal, pervasive, organic and encompassing. Put another way, everyone is a leader or no one is!
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Dr. Fisher’s books and ideas are on other places on the Internet, including his website: www.peripateticphilosopher.com
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