An Interview: Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr.'s Views on Leadership

An Interview

Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr.’s Views on Leadership

AQP Journal Editor
Prepared April 06, 2001

Christina: What roles do today’s manager’s fill? Is it that of leader or is it that of a guide?

Dr. Fisher: It certainly isn’t that of a leader. There is a painful dearth of leadership in society much less management, per se. The role of leadership is the vision to see present and future challenges clearly, and the desire to serve in the interest of rallying people and resources to those challenges. Management has never been programmed to lead and people need to be led. Management has been culturally conditioned to manage things. Managers are good at management people only when people behave as things. Fortunately, for the better part of the 20th century, people behaved as things-to-be-managed. People were polite, obedient, obsequious, reactive, conforming, punctual, and submissive. Their most important job was to show up for work on time. People reacted essentially to external stimuli, as if they had no moral compass or center. The manager was their guidance director. The resultant passivity worked reasonably well in a staid organizational climate where the knowledge base was mainly skewed towards the manager. It fails to work today, however, in an ever-changing work climate where the knowledge base is increasingly in the hands of doers. What is disconcerting is that little reality testing of this power shift is evident with academics, consultants, or operations management, except cosmetically.

Christina: Could you amplify on this?

Dr. Fisher: Management has taken a semantic page from psychology and sociology and created psychobabble to rival both. Language is a code, either spoken or written, that stands for things. Words are not things. “Empowerment,” for example, is a word. The word is not self-actualizing, self-direction, or indeed, a power shift. We have had a plethora of word concepts: “total quality management,” “total employee involvement,” “self-directed work teams,” and so on. Verbal concepts are not the real thing. They are abstractions, which is to say meaningless. Workers know this, which only heightens their skepticism. We should try to keep our language as close to reality as possible.

Christina: You see these interventions as cosmetic?

Dr. Fisher: Most interventions of the past thirty years have been little more than cosmetic attempts to maintain the status quo, but a wink at reducing management’s control, influence, authority, and power. This has proven a myopic strategy. It has resulted in a work force conditioned in learned helplessness and nonresponsibility when initiative and accountability are critical components to survival. Consequently, when management preemptively reverses itself, and gives people their power back, the intended don’t have the slightest notion what to do with it. Management without leadership is now paying for its corporate sins.

Christina: Would it be fair to say, then, from your point of view, that the manager is acting as parent to employees?

Dr. Fisher: Precisely! The manager has unwittingly become the surrogate parent to the worker, the caretaker and caregiver to satisfying basic needs originally provided by parents. I will go even further. I suggest that in the typical organization, either high or low tech, it doesn’t matter, the majority of employees are either management dependent or counterdependent on the company for their total well being. They behave as if still in adolescence with the emotional maturity of obedient twelve-year-olds, or they complain and criticize management as if they have no power to change their situation, when they have most of the power in their knowledge, skills, and competence.

Christina: What then is a manager’s role?

Dr. Fisher: A manager’s role is to lead. Self-management is the role of the worker. Dependent workers are a luxury no company can any longer afford. Leadership takes vision. Vision is two phasic. First, vision requires an assessment of the situation in terms of the manager’s specific function in the enterprise, followed by a careful evaluation of workers’ competence, adapting this skill base to synergistic action. Workers need to be personally coached and counseled. This enables workers to do what they can and will do. Coaching is an assessment tool. It is adapting assignments congruent with workers’ skills and interests. Counseling is a listening tool. It is hearing the inner voice of workers where their spirits reside. Today’s workers are problem-solvers and doers. They have enormous talent, but excess emotional baggage due to cultural conditioning. The manager who gets in the way of work often cripples productive effort. Once the vision aspect is firmly in place, the manager’s role is that of servant to the organization. This is achieved by acting as a partner with workers bringing the proper mix of skills and competence to the problem solving.

Christina: Do today’s managers, as matters now stand, earn their keep?

Dr. Fisher: Not only do most managers fail to earn their keep, they are essentially atavistic, vestigial organs without a viable function. This was my thesis in Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (1990). My research indicates that the bromides of MBOs, performance appraisal, sensitivity training, job descriptions, organizational charts, staff meetings, and even the vaulted “management by walking around” are actually impediments to performance. They particularized effort into fragmentary pursuits of confusing purpose. These interventions result in little change in the efficacy of the work population: 15-20 percent are hard chargers, another 15-20 percent foot draggers, with the remaining 60-70 percent going with the flow, and hoping to stay out of trouble. Translated – roughly 80 percent of the work accomplished is by 20 percent of the work force. Incidentally, few performers are managers because their main focus is on the next job. For them, it is imperative to make an impression rather than a difference. This creates a climate for what I describe in Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge (1998) as killing covert passive behaviors, which destroy a company from within as if managers and workers were social termites. Too often the problem is not recognized until it is too late for damage control.

Christina: Given this assessment, do you see managers disappearing from today’s workplaces?

Dr. Fisher: Yes, and no. There are less levels of management in most organizations. But the behavior of managers has changed little. Most managers believe their job is to “manage,” to “supervise,” and make “decisions” for workers. Otherwise, why are they there? On the other hand, today’s workers want to know why: what is expected of them, what resources are required, special perimeters of the job, and what is the time line? Workers have the knowledge, and creative skills to make timely decisions at the level of consequences, but they lack the authority, or leastwise, perceive that they do. So, they defer to the manager who is often ignorant of the complex nuances of the problem, which delays appropriate and timely response. Productive work is the casualty. Frustration fills both sides of the void.

Christina: But can today’s professional workers actually manage themselves?

Dr. Fisher: That is the crux of the problem. No, they can’t. They have not been trained to lead, and they no longer know how to follow. They want to enjoy the perks of management without the responsibilities. They cry, “Let management handle it!” They fail to see “They are the company!” This puts them and the company in no man’s land. It is the essence of my book Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leaders & Dissonant Workers (2000). A century ago, when the Industrial Revolution took hold, compulsory education established explicit skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic, while generating an implicit curriculum of punctuality, conformity, and obedience to authority. This created the passive monster of learned helplessness that plagues enterprise today. Additionally, as more of the work force pursues college and graduate education, convergent thinking dominates. Convergent thinking is deferential to authority, less trusting of feelings and impulses, more mannered and self-controlled. Convergent thinkers are less sure of their personal opinions, more prisoners of institutional biases. These traits are consistent with finding pre-existent technical solutions to problems set by authorities. Essentially critical thinkers, these managers and workers are limited to what they already know. They are knowers rather than learners, tellers rather than listeners, and neither leaders nor followers.

Christina: You paint a bleak picture. It would seem that you imply our whole societal culture is antithetical to leadership?

Dr. Fisher: But it is, isn’t that apparent? The subtitle of Corporate Sin of “leaderless leadership and dissonant workers” makes it apparent that neither management nor workers can be exonerated. These are the two faces of Janus. What is needed for managers and professionals to show leadership is creative thinking. This is the complement to critical thinking. Creative thinking involves two sequential stages of processing information -- divergent or lateral thinking followed by convergent or vertical thinking. Our culture is obsessively solution driven (convergent thinking) often at the expense of defining the problem (divergent thinking) properly – “Ready, fire, aim!” The dominant vertical hierarchy of authority and thought is gone but not yet buried. Vertical thinking is limited to logic, cause and effect analysis, objective quantification, and what is known. It is reflected in the paralysis of analysis. Lateral or divergent thinking is intuitive, conceptual, subjective, and embraces the unknown. Vertical thinking exercises the masculine (left) brain, while the feminine (right) brain -- where lateral thinking resides -- passively complies. It is not enough in a dynamic, chaotic, ever changing society to be half-witted. Before men and women can truly work together, however, both halves of their brains must first be in conversation with each other. In contrast to convergent thinking, divergent thinking is rebellious towards authority, never accepts things at face value, and is more trusting of feelings, more independent of attitude, with an easy self-esteem and spontaneous self-expression. The divergent thinker has a fire in its belly. The convergent thinker needs a fire under its behind. Convergent thinking is the basis of institutional education and sustainer of the status quo. Divergent thinking is the domain of the artist and the humanist where people are treated as persons and not as things.

Christina: What other evidence do you have that managers lack an understanding of the leadership/followership continuum?

Dr Fisher: What I have just described is a one-dimensional society dominated by the masculine aspect. To have a two-dimensional society requires equal participation of the masculine and feminine aspect, first in each of us as individuals, then by extension in society collectively. There is little evidence that this is understood. Just as the masculine and feminine aspect are two sides of the same brain; leadership and followership are two sides of the same coin. Complete followership precedes perceptive leadership. A leader can only take people where they already want to go. Cooperation is always voluntary, while compliance is always coercive. To know where people want to go leaders must first immerse themselves in followership. It is not authority that drives leadership. It is humility and a passion to serve. By implication, then, charismatic leadership is not leadership but “leaderless leadership,” or manipulation. Charismatic leadership appeals to the vanity of a one-dimensional society, a society like ours, where leaders lend themselves to caricature. Charisma is a function of form, or manipulation. Leadership is a function of content, or enabling. Leadership is making in the mind of many from one. Most managers are culturally programmed to please their superiors at the expense of being immersed in servant leadership. They see themselves as crossing the great divide. Evidence? It is everywhere. This is why polls are popular, best selling lists of books, films, music, and lifestyles, why communities all seem to look alike, why pretty people present non-news news on television, why people are other-directed rather than self-directed, bent on pleasing others than in pleasing themselves, why competition is practiced while cooperation is advocated, why imitation marks most identity, why there are few great philosophers, composers, novelists, or thinkers in our time, why materialism competes with spiritualism, why science is the new religion, equally as dogmatic as any institutional religion, why the environment is polluted with economic justification, why AIDS, drug addiction, obesity, violence, obsessive drinking and gambling look for miraculous palliatives, why a mania for self-control finds most out-of-control, why people don’t want to grow up or grow old, why ethnocentric blinders shade reality, why crisis management is personified in redundancy exercises, streamlining, refocusing, plant closings, mergers, and reengineering without collective protest.

Christina: You imply the leadership/followership continuum is a societal problem.

Dr. Fisher: I think it is. Leadership is not just a boss in the corner office holding court, a CEO promulgating a video message about the globe, or a president, governor, or congressman on the stump. It is the corpocracy disease of our time. It is the professor who reads little more than the general public, and whose class notes are ancient. It is the medical doctor who prescribes drugs he hasn’t researched. It is the engineer who can’t see beyond the discipline. It is the scientist who doesn’t consider the consequences of research. It is the lawyer who worries more about billing hours than litigants.

Christina: Yet, given all these “Corporate Sins,” you still appear to insist in your writing that professional workers are equal partners with managers, and should be treated as such.

Dr. Fisher: I do. Because it is the only way the organization can survive. The answers are no longer one-dimensional or the exclusive domain of managers. Every organization must be two-dimensional as answers to problems are now distributed throughout operations. Nor is one functional group more elite or important than another. The second half of the 20th century was dominated by management centered operations. Workers were either management dependent (Culture of Comfort), displaying the temperament of well-behaved children, or counterdependent on the company (Culture of Complacency) for their total well being as spoiled brats. Workers forfeited control of what they did for security, i.e., “lifetime employment” and entitlements. This fixation with security suspended workers in adolescence, where most workers are found today, whatever their education or profession. Corporate leadership, when challenged by Japan, the Pacific Rim countries, and Europe in the 1970s, thought it could purchase motivation without sacrificing control. It failed to understand emerging mature adult workers and what motivated them. Mature adult workers are not afraid to ask questions. They don’t expect something for nothing. They resent being micromanaged. Campaigns, fads, and slogans make little sense to them. Nor do they have much patience with executive gamesmanship. They don’t see themselves as part of “one big happy family.” Family is personal and separate from work. They have little interest in working hard, only in working smart. They are confrontational and don’t back away from a necessary conflict. Nor are they intimidated by position power. Yet they are annoyed with cosmetic change because it fails to change anything. They are threatening to the status quo, to mediocrity, to bosses who use feint praise to motivate. They are the new emerging work force driven by interdependent management (Culture of Contribution), expecting full participation in the fruits of their labors. They focus on the vital few “right things” rather than the “trivial many.” They are the 20 percent that make 80 percent of the difference. They are in short supply, and getting shorter.
Christina: I sense in you a deep frustration. Some might call it a rage. How do you respond?

Dr. Fisher: Meaning no disrespect, this is how my critics neutralize what I have to say. They put the focus on me, not on what I say. The subtitle of Work Without Managers of “a view from the trenches” is also literally true. I came out of the trenches, starting out as a laborer in a chemical plant summers while going to college, working in research & development as a chemist, then on the line as a manager, then a field sales engineer, followed by a field sales manager, then a corporate executive, working on several continents across the globe, then again as a student taking a Ph.D. in the soft sciences (psychology) to match my hard science (chemistry) training, then working as a consultant and adjunct professor, then returning to the corporation as an organizational development psychologist, and finally as an executive on the staff side as a director of human resources in Europe to match my line executive experience. It was at this point that I turned to conducting seminars across the country, publishing articles and books, and forming a consulting and publishing company. So, yes, in a word, I’ve been in the trenches and boardrooms. From this experience, always listening, I am saying what most workers have said to me over the years at every organizational level, but were afraid to say. Others have said, “You don’t give us any solutions.” They are right. Americans love solutions. They are far less interested in defining problems. They like studies of exquisitely successful companies so that they can copy them. That seldom if ever works. You don’t search for excellence. You create it. You create a workplace culture that fits your company’s values:

Structure of work + function of work = workplace culture = dominant company behavior

A company culture is unique to it. Like a person, a company can become fixated with counterproductive cultural practices that eventually spell its doom. Thus the challenge and the paradox: the need for cultural change comes from the bottom, but only those at the top can orchestrate cultural change. We are in the midst of a quiet revolution with the color of workers’ collars changing rapidly, but the workplace culture lagging badly. This could become explosive. The key to everything is people. People are the spiritual embodiment of a Culture of Contribution. This culture cannot happen unless the leadership is ready to commit to such a cultural change, and is willing to become totally involved in the design, promulgation, and implementation of the cultural change. This takes leadership, not management. I see senior management reluctance to heed this challenge, and that is why I deem management the architect of a failed system. This is its challenge.

Christina: Thank you, Dr. Fisher, you have given our readers much to think about. I find the energy of your personality matching your published works. It has, indeed, been enlightening.