What One Does One Becomes: Response to a Query

What One Does One Becomes: Response to a Query

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2005


A correspondent reacts to my missive with exasperation and frustration from his own personal experience. This is my response to him with self-effacing personal references, as the problem of organization and our relationship to it is deeply personal.



You say you have taken two things from what I have written:

(1) You sense that I am implying that you should give up and not care because the organization cannot see beyond its kind or its vital linkage to the community.

I sense your angst in this perception. But organization is the nucleus around which we wrap our lives. Therefore, it is as impossible to give up and not care for the organization, as it would be to give up and decide not to breathe anymore.

The organization is not an inanimate thing. Nor is it "out there" separate from us. It is as connected to us as bone, sinew and blood are part of our bodies. Make no mistake; the organization has a soul, a soul that can die just as our souls leave our body when we perish. And like humans, an organization that ultimately dies gives up long before it gives out.

Put another way, the organization is as real as personality. It is the best and worst of us, the good, the bad, and the ugly, the petty and the courageous, the cruel and the generous.

Each organization has a matrix of connections to every other organization. This forms community. Communities provide a composite portrait, or extant profile of life as we experience it. Joseph Wambaugh, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) sergeant turned author, once wrote, "A community gets the police it deserves."

The same applies to organization. If an organization is misguided, it is because the people in it choose to be misguided. If an organization is not doing what is best for it, look to its people's failure to understand and deal with the why of it.

In my attempt to understand why organizations are not performing, I have come to focus on leadership and culture. Paraphrasing Wambaugh, I would suggest that the organization gets the leadership and culture it deserves.

So, should a caring and concerned individual give up? Of course not. I would suggest that instead that same individual use his faculties to get through false images of what the organization projects to what it really is. This should provide you with a clue as to where it is going.

Don't turn cynical. Cynicism is idealism without a cause. Plow forward. Remember what St. Francis said, change what you can, accept what you can't, and recognize the difference.

An organization, like an individual, prefers to think it is on top of things when it is not, in control when chaos reigns. Just as there are personal relationships that enhance or eviscerate identity, there are corporate relationships of the same hue and cry.

Know this: a corporate culture can change us, but we are unlikely to change it.

For example, if we are complacent and enter a culture of contribution, we are likely to shed our complacency, and discover new found maturity, or decide to leave because the demand is too much. Likewise, if we are a conscientious performer and find ourselves in a culture of complacency, we will be pressed to become complacent, or be forced to leave to retain our self-respect and dignity.

Cultures are brutal, definitive, and deeply engrained. All too often the person thinks there is something wrong with him, when it is the wrong culture for his temperament and drive. Don't be fooled by the placards posted about the organization. Study the dominant behaviors and reward systems.

Love is not the expression of words, but the act of demonstrating love in action. The same is true of organizational behavior. It is not the rhetoric but the reality that counts.

(2) You agree with my premise that a job seeker should seek personal satisfaction in his work, seek employment where his skill base is needed, and focus on a specific job. You further claim that this is what you did but found you did not belong to the "tribe."

By the "tribe" I sense that you did not belong to the club, which is a euphemism in current parlance for having connections.

You mention a posh lawyer on the board with experience only in manufacturing was awarded a senior position in the healthcare field, over a highly qualified professional in that field, adding, "Go figure!"

There is no figuring to it. This is a no brainer as it is the rule rather than the exception. Leadership sees itself as a separate entity from the work, or the doing, in other words, the led.

You see, we have become cynical of leadership. The rhetoric is that leadership and the led are one, but in practice leadership is chosen on the whim of its influence quotient, not on the basis of its contribution connection. Contribution is up to the led. Gladhanding and cheerleading no longer form a bridge between leaders and doers. Rah-rah doesn't resonate with doers who hold the keys to all the tool kits.

In my years among the executive ranks or as a consultant, I have never once seen companies I have worked or consulted for skipping executive bonuses in down years. I have witnessed during those same periods, however, massive redundancy exercises, realignments, reorganizations, and other cost cutting schemes.

No one seemed to notice that the companies were in trouble because of too many executives doing too little. The executive ranks always had a vocabulary to explain and justify their existence and the down times: inflated or deflated dollar, cost of oil, and other raw materials, worldwide deflation or inflation, unstable international economic climate, or market change, and so on.

Consequently, for every one hundred doers discharged one executive was reassigned, as opposed to being let go. Since executives were doing the trimming, they would always take care of their own. I was often a part of this charade.

Leadership, you see, is chosen with little if any regard for the led. The led are essentially disenfranchised from the process. They have no vote. Leadership sees no problem with this, and the led have never given it much thought.

This translates into the leadership being cavalier about the subtle nuances that make up the symbolic and real connection of the leadership to the led. I have been told on more than one occasion that I have exaggerated its significance. Yet, that is essentially all the leadership does. It leads symbolically. It thinks it makes decisions, but the decisions are made by those that do, and if they are not in the decision-making process, it doesn't spell much hope for the future of the organization.

The unintended consequences of leadership without doers' input are that it develops grand schemes that fail to resonate with those meant to carry them out. If you want to know how healthy or sick an organization is, you don't sit in the boardroom and visit with executives, you wander about the operations and talk to the doers.

The sickness appears here. It shows its face in frustration and anger, and in depressing cells of polarity where malcontents fume with indignation in passive behaviors. These behaviors literally destroy the organization from within, silently and certainly with no one the wiser until it is too late for damage control.

The sad thing about this masochistic behavior is that it hurts only the led, never the leadership. The organization, of course, is placed in jeopardy, but again the leadership always survives. It doesn't work paycheck to paycheck. The leadership will go on to deposit its influence quotient elsewhere, because it belongs to the club, while the led will frantically search for comparable employment once the organization folds with unlikely success.

This has happened so often in recent times that it has become a very sad melody.

The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, but in ourselves. We have elevated leadership to the point of omniscience, when it is not omniscient at all. We have anointed leadership with the divine rights of kings, when it operates in atavistic nostalgia of centuries past. Meanwhile, the led go ignominiously along with the deception.

You cannot change this, but you can change your heart and mind to recognize what it is and why it is so, and then deal with it on a personal basis.

By that I mean, you can leave and seek a more suitable climate. Once I was told by a young engineer when I suggested this, "Doc, I'm paid a dollar more an hour than I can afford to quit." When my face didn't register support, he added, "I've got obligations."

Current leadership is counting on this mentality, and it has not been disappointed.

You mention how age discrimination prevents qualified people in their 50s from getting positions of merit simply because of age. This, too, is true.

You cite the example of the leader/founder of a poverty law center, who was beyond that age, and would never have had a chance of being considered for the position today. That drew a smile.

When I joined Nalco in 1958 as a young chemical sales engineer, some fifty of us had been handpicked, out of more than a thousand applicants interviewed. To make the final cut, we had extensive interviews with company executives, had to submit to an intelligence test, and then had to endure an exhaustive interview (three hours) with a psychiatrist. We had earned degrees in chemistry, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering or electrical engineering. And we were all recent college graduates -- i.e., young and privy to the latest technologies in our disciplines.

Nalco had ambitions to become a major player in the specialty chemical business and spent dearly to acquire the people it expected to take it there.

When the cofounder of Nalco addressed us, I can still remember his words, "If I were to seek employment with my company today, I wouldn't get as much as an interview." Nalco had been formed only a short twenty years before.

The cofounder was a salesman without technical credentials. His legacy was to establish salesmen's mystique in Nalco. Most executives were promoted up through the ranks of selling. This created an elitist culture which echoed a reverberating sentiment: "you research chemist, you accountant, you plant worker know that you would not have a job were it not for these people in the field beating the bushes to grow the business."

So, you see, the more things change the more they remain the same.

You mention that the hard charger that companies hire have filled up their dance cards with all the right names -- right degrees, right schools, right previous jobs, right pedigrees, right connections -- and then work to build a reputation while always looking for greener pastures elsewhere, seldom within their current employer.

That is relatively new. It has become the modus operandi of the professional since the pyramid collapsed. There are no more pyramid climbers. These were people who constantly campaigned for the next job, seldom finding time to work their current job. Now, pyramid climbers are dinosaurs of the past as the organization has flattened. I endured the pyramid climbing culture, worked for them, fought with them, and later would write about them.

What has not changed is that clueless working stiffs, the led who take these hard chargers as being truly the anointed ones, have failed to realize hard chargers do it on the backs of the led, riding them to their purposes. This is not limited to corpocracy. It is equally apparent in academia as in other institutions.

When I was in graduate school as a senior person, one of my professors noted that I wrote with some facility. "How would you like to breeze through this place?" he said. I waited, and then he continued. "Since you write well, I was wondering if you would mind editing some of my work for publication."

What he meant was, would I write his work to be published with his name, not mine as author? I said, "No thanks." He not only made my student life difficult but also tried to eliminate me from the program. It is not an uncommon experience of mine.

Some at Nalco thought I was a naive hard charger, who allowed my boss to take credit for a lot of my work, which I did. What my boss didn't expect, nor did I, was that my work drew the attention of top management. I could sell and most technical people at Nalco could not. They would wow the customer with technology, which developed distrust. I would try to understand what they needed, which formed a partnership.

A vice president came out to ride with me one week. He saw the connection I had with people from operations to the general manager. He said, "I think a lot of our people would like to know how you do it."

Well, I didn't have a clue because I had no training in selling, but only in Nalco's technology. I was operating intuitively, naturally. I had to read selling books to learn the vocabulary to what I was doing.

This led to my being invited across the country to give speeches at Nalco regional meetings, for which I received no compensation. I saw it as part of my job. From that exposure, however, I became known and the rest is history.

Imagine your boss has kept you in place, and then you jump three intermediate positions to associated vice president in the international division, and are sent off to South Africa to form a new company. That is what happened.

One day I saw a confidential report in Nalco's headquarters. It was an unflattering evaluation of my executive talent by my former boss. He had been asked my readiness for this promotion. His comments not only failed to derail the promotion, but essentially derailed his career. Yes, it was that malicious.

This would happen again under different circumstances, but it begs the question: do I bring out the venom in my superiors or are my superiors confounded by my lack of obeisance? It is probably a combination of the two. The irony is that no one has gleaned the fact that my naiveté is simply a function of my idealism, and not of a hidden agenda. I don't put anyone above or below anyone else. I don't see intellect, or talent as something personal, but a gift to be used, not to be advertised or abused as a personal advantage.

This is shared with you because how the world accepts or rejects us as individuals is immaterial and irrelevant. More important is how we accept or reject ourselves. To know where we stand with ourselves, we must first examine our lives in the light of our experience.

There is a pattern here, and the examination is like the turning of the pages of a novel, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The pattern has a consistency, continuity, and confluence that identifies who and what we are, and even where we are. The payoff of this process is self-acceptance. Everything is possible when we accept ourselves as we are, because then we cannot but accept others as we find them.

Self-hatred, on the other hand, is much more destructive than any other kind of hatred. We can choose to be miserable or happy. The content of happiness is not our comfort level, nor is it our security or possessions, but the context of our self-acceptance and willingness to deal with our circumstances.

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Note: Soon I will add to my series, "So you want to be a leader?" The title: "When Leadership lost the Tribe."

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2005