The A, B, C, D, E and F Primer of Corporate Leadership in the 21st Century

An A, B, C, D, E and F Primer of Corporate Leadership
in the 21st Century

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 2003

Abstract

A man I know is the soul of his public service organization, not because he leads or follows, not because he has a lot of clout or is feared, not because he has a high visibility and is a charismatic figure. He leads because he is the soul of his organization. He is not an “A” or hard charger, nor is he an “F” or a foot dragger. He is an “E” who has grown into a “D” and matured into a “C” and has come into his own as a “B.” He epitomizes and personifies what the organization is created to do, in this case to pursue the interests, well being and development of children of special needs and special circumstance. He does this unobtrusively and effectively. Meanwhile, the CEO lobbies religiously with the government for more money, and the board for more power and status, and everyone to cotton to her every desire. Consequently, all the players know it is not a game of teamwork but the business of looking out for oneself. This is a $20 million public endowed operation, which can’t get the work done, except when individuals follow the example of this man. This is not an isolated case, but repeated millions of times across this nation every day in every enterprise without exception. It is the reason for the need for a primer of corporate leadership in this new century.

Greater the chaos the greater the cry for structure.

We see chaos and the cry for structure in Homeland Security post September 11, 2001; in Iraq with the demand for more troops, trained police, and law enforcement; in Israel with the building of a wall to control terror. We see this in the frantic pursuit of quality with the creation of prestigious awards; in education in the frantic pursuit of excellence by ranking of schools on contested criteria; and we see it at the college and university level in a quest for student readiness by the phantom dependence on SAT and ACT scores.

Too often the cure has proven worse than the disease with 20th century thinking lock stepping into the 21st century with the blinders on. It is time for a primer on 21st century corporate leadership, not as a grand surreal schematic or digital projection, but leavened with the basic reality of workers as people trying to do the job.


Alphabet Soup of Corporate Life

In my experience there are six segments of corporate life; each dominated by a letter designate. The A’s are the fast trackers, the so-called “high talent” that 20th century management spent so much time nurturing and tracking, seeming obsessively so. They are in the first quadrant and the top 15 percent of the worker population bell curve.

The A’s are always campaigning for the next job at the expense of the job they are paid to do. They are pyramid climbers with a quest for the next rung up the ladder, which finds them looking to take credit for success when their roles are only ancillary, or taking cover-your-ass positions when failures are eminent. The A’s will be there only until they smell smoke. They won’t wait for the fire. They’re gone! They’re out of here! -- Pursuant of several options cultivated for such contingencies.

You cannot count on A’s, especially when it comes to the long pull. The whole idea of “high talent” and building for the future and concentrating on the “A” group is ludicrous. Fast trackers have their own agenda, which may only incidentally dovetail with that of the corporation. Their perceptive skills focus on who has the power and how best to prove indispensable to that power by learning power think and power speak language, then wrapping their minds in its body and marching onward and upward to its tune.

With the A’s, if the company is going somewhere, they’ll be there. If the company is going nowhere, they’re gone. Leadership doesn’t have to bother about them. Learn from them. Use them while they are there. Tolerate them if they are leading the corporation where it wants to go, but never misread them. They are expendable and might be better off somewhere else, starting their own company or hitching a ride to a new star. With them, everything is a matter of timing.

The F’s are the foot draggers and in the bottom quadrant or the lowest 15 percent of the worker population bell curve. The irony is that the F’s have much in common with the A’s. For one, they are equally self-indulgent but here destructively rather than creatively so. Likewise, they are often the obsession of management to “save them” from themselves, when clearly they are not salvageable, mainly because their self-worth is twisted to the extreme, and they are not interested in being saved. They’re only interested in using the organization to meet their every need, to exploit its naiveté and largesse, to put it on the defensive when confronted with failure, to use its corporate weakness against its strength.

Long before the company came on the scene the F’s exploited co-dependency to an art form. The more you give them now the more they want. The more they have the more they complain they don’t have enough. They are always looking for a reason for being unhappy, and they find plenty. They want comfort, not challenge, to be taken care of, not given opportunity, to remain on automatic pilot for 40 or 50 years. They want a caregiver, not a job, benefits and entitlements, not risks and uncertainty. They see $100 a day jobs slipping away to Third World Countries where workers do the same work for less than a dollar a day, and are incensed, but see themselves as a non-factor in reversing the equation. Foot-draggers are suspended in arrested development and terminal adolescence with the emotional maturity of a twelve year old in a fifty year old body, counter dependent on the company for their total well being and see no way that they might have contributed to this circumstance.

F’s are being lost by attrition and a global economy, which continues to radicalize and revolutionize the matter of employment. This will continue over the next fifty years. It is too late to save them. The challenge is to desist in producing them.

The B’s, C’s, D’s and E’s carry the company!

B’s, C’s, D’s and E’s are “backbone of the company.” They are the people who respond to leadership. They know the organization. They know what it does well and what it doesn’t. They know what products are efficiently made and what ones are not. They know when quality is truly characteristic of the company and when it is not. They are the ones who determine whether a company is going to succeed or not. They are the workers without managers in the trenches.

If the company can activate, leverage and accelerate them in the direction of company objectives, the company will succeed. They are becoming a well-educated majority of the company’s employee base. Unlike in the past, the “backbone of the company” doesn’t respond to rhetoric, recognition certificates or their pictures on the wall. Nor do they respond to all the arbitrary childish standards, which have been used seemingly forever to motivate them such as external stimulation with impersonal demands, parental persuasion, demagogic direction, diffident expectations, redoubtable fear, retaliatory reprisals, and a system of juvenile rewards and punishment, which as flawed as it is, continues to be inconsistently applied. It is no accident that most employees never grow up. Corporations fear mature adults as much as they fear challenge to their authority.

Workers cannot be expected to act and think as mature adults when they are treated as if dependent children subject to the capricious and condescending standards of leaderless leadership.

B’s, C’s, D’s and E’s are loyal employees who want to do a good job, to earn their keep, to grow in their jobs. They respond to having high expectations to their achievement, for making them responsible for the consequences of their actions, showing no favoritism in this regard, and being reasonably benefited when the company succeeds.

They don’t want high profile exposure, don’t want to be slaves of the organization on call 24/7, and don’t want to be responsible for the actions of others. They just want a job, to make a living, and to get on with their lives. They believe in the company, in its management, and take pride in its industry. They are by nature followers, and respond to leadership in compelling ways, ways that can be measured in a company’s bottom line, its prestige in its industry, and its growing industrial or commercial base.

B’s, C’s, D’s, and E’s are the backbone of the company and the reason it stands tall and moves forward, why it has the stability to handle internal turmoil and overcome external accelerating demands. If they feel ownership of what they do, and identity with what the company claims to be, no adversity is unmanageable, no goal unattainable.

If B’s, C’s, D’s and E’s are lost, the company is lost. If they are confused, the company is confused. If they are sitting on their hands, the company is sitting on its haunches. If they are not productive, the company is going nowhere. If they are protected from the consequences of their actions, not allowed to fail and therefore succeed, not given a voice of control over what they do, not lifted up with high expectations, nor given the straight answers when reversals occur, they and the company are doomed to mediocrity and ultimate demise.

The Secret Weapon of Corporations

Many company failures can be traced to excessive concentration on high talent or the hard chargers along with an equal preoccupation with foot draggers at the expense of the backbone of the company, the B’s, C’s, D’s and E’s. It is easy to take them for granted. Too often they are the ones who suffer for the lack of attention, resources, time, money, materials, training, and psychological reinforcement. They are a breed apart from the A's, but can easily fall prey to the malice and malaise of the F’s.

The hard chargers, since they are always campaigning for the next job, tend to mirror if not exaggerate the weaknesses of their superiors as they have a sycophantic and symbiotic connection to them, attempting to think, move and act identical to their superior’s shadow. As a result, they obliterate and neutralize any creative impulse they might have to compensate for rather than exaggerate their boss’s ineptitude.

The Bs, Cs, Ds and Es are the secret weapon of corporations, but are they the same in all companies? The answer is yes and no. Yes, they embody the will and the way of the company, as they retain the company’s passion and spirit, generation after generation. And in that sense, they are all the same. But from that point on they differ from company to company.

What got the company to where it is today was not through the A’s, but through the B’s, C’s, D’s, and E’s. When the company became an entity of rank and substance, managers and workers brought their histories, personalities, geographies, and demographics with them. These melted into a corporate culture that distinguished it from other corporations. B’s, C’s, D’s, and E’s brought their essence as well as personalities to the company to create this unique identity, an identity which is not rigid and undergoes tectonic shifting from its beginning. It is the failure to recognize this constant but imperceptible shifting that kills 100-year-old companies.

A company is constantly changing with a new infusion of workers, new technology, and new challenges in the marketplace, and now a shrinking global geopolitical configuration, as well as a changing mix of doers to thinkers. This climatic shift redefines what constitutes work, workers and the workplace. Corporate culture is an evolving phenomenon and cannot be treated as a static given.

What brought the company glory will not ensure its survival if selection falls prey to this sequential interviewing formula:
Am I comfortable (with the recruit)?
Will he (she) fit in our operation?

Is he (she) qualified?
The rationale of comfort and fit take precedence over qualification when this is the practice with usually dire consequences. We like to be associated with like-minded, like-thinking, like-oriented people irrespective of what is required of the job.


The Charade of Measurement

There is an obsession with measurement, a holdover from the 20th century, which felt security in replicated indices, creating the illusion of excellence, stability and control as if human beings were machines.

I.Q. tests are designed to measure native intelligence, SAT tests to measure college readiness in language and quantitative skills. This genre approach has won corporate appeal with executive profiles to measure the potential for excellence of performance. In a word they are screening mechanisms that have not had a happy history.

In Florida, for example, schools are designated with A, B, C, or F ratings on the basis of standardized tests given to students. Grants and scholarships are distributed on the basis of these results. Likewise, companies often equate quality operations with the winning of prestigious quality awards. But are these measurement indices reliable? Put another way, do these possibly deflect the focus of effort from legitimate measurement to snow job?

People take crash courses on IQ and raise their IQ scores by several points. Have they increased their intelligence? S.A.T. scores are on the rise; influenced no doubt by literally tens of thousands of prospective college students taking crash SAT courses. Meanwhile, the majority entering classes to American colleges and universities in 2003 indicated a lack of readiness for college entry-level mathematics and English composition requirements to be successful. Remedial programs are standard operating procedure to make up the deficit, not only in land grant institutions, but also in some of the most sacrosanct institutions in America.

Education and quality and leadership are a process, not a product. You cannot short circuit the process by avoiding experience, learning, making choices and sacrifices and expect to come up with the prize of being educated, acquiring quality results or demonstrating leadership in the end. Crash courses in passing such tests are nothing but window dressing and as phony as baloney.

There is a whole industry devoted to prestigious quality awards which are designed to create a culture of quality in operation, but is that the case? The quality award can become an end in itself. Too often when pressed between meeting schedule and sustaining quality, the latter is sacrificed to meet the former. The A's take this reality with measured cynicism, the F's with indifference, but the B's, C's, D's, and E's with bewildering disappointment.

Paralysis of Analysis

The 20th century demonstrated that we are better at reacting to circumstances than in anticipating them. Planning, especially strategic planning has been a major component of business during the past 100 years. Yet on close examination it has failed, mainly because of business planning’s inability to involve the work force in the planning dialogue and thus too often to misread the troubling signs, chronic problems and challenges ahead. Companies have taken comfort in putting their planning into the rubric of Managing by Objectives. The idea here is once the strategic plan is blessed it is parceled out to functionaries in various departments and disciplines. The theory being if each accomplishes its objective than the overall objective is accomplished. In my more than forty years in senior management of Fortune 100 companies I don’t ever recall a function or discipline failing to meet its objectives, but yet the company often failed to meet its.

Another ludicrous measurement with which I was associated with was performance appraisal. It is designed to be a developmental tool in which a manager and worker reach consensus on what the worker does well (strengths) and where he needs help (weaknesses) and what can be done about it (training, coaching or counseling). In practice this has not been my experience. It becomes a discussion and negotiation for a rate increase, promotion or a merit bonus. As mentioned earlier, a typical work force finds 15 percent high and low performers with the remaining 70 percent falling in the middle zone. Of the 4,000 employees at Honeywell Avionics, Clearwater, Florida when I was a management and organizational development psychologist, I made it my business on one occasion to check performance appraisal results. Given the likelihood of 15 percent foot draggers, there should have been some 600 employees in some state of a performance problem. Instead, only six employees declined in rating, and four were designated as “needing improvement.” Everyone else received rate increases, or promotions or merit bonuses, or all of the above. It was a charade, eating up thousands of hours that could better have been spent on the job.

Actually, performance appraisals is an opportunity for the A’s to swing into high gear and flaunt their stuff prior to the exercise to put the best spin on their contributions to increase their negotiating leverage. The B’s, C’s, D’s and E’s take it as a routine activity as meaningless as so much fluff, but part of the drill. F’s know their performance is not up to speed, and so wily control the interview by not talking, daring their boss to downgrade them, knowing he hates this process as much as they do. In pure active fact 99 and 44/100 percent, what Ivory Soap used to call its purity test, were given from modest to substantial increases, which shouted loud and clear that they were exemplary employees, when clearly they were not. The process was sham, the results were ludicrous and the lessons learned were buried in denial. There would be no point in mentioning this if this were an isolated situation but it proves the pattern to a practice that continues everywhere.
We can go a step further and look at Florida’s incentive programs for achieving excellence in primary and secondary schools. Schools who achieve “A” ratings receive more funding while schools achieving “D” and “F” ratings receive less funding, when clearly it is the “D” and “F” schools that need the additional funding and not the “A” schools. And so the “A” schools get better and the “D” and “F” schools get worse.

Again, this is not an isolated case but an example where analysis often leads to paralysis and not to the desired goal. It is 20th century thinking squared and failing to take account of how the mindset of society has changed radically in the past fifty years with seemingly the least informed are those in charge.

Demographics of a New Age

Consider the changing character of the work force. The work force has been changing since World War Two. The GI Bill created tens of thousands of new professionals who otherwise might never have gone to college. Industrial production and international expansion rushed to fill the void created by a war torn world. Out of this rose a new moneyed middle class bent on consumption as the therapy of an anxious age. This was the era of the Cold War with the threat of nuclear holocaust a pressing concern.

This new mix of upward mobility, wider education, and now broadband technology and the Internet has resulted in a power shift from the precious few to the vital many. Given this set of circumstances, one would think strategic planning would anticipate a day when the Ivory Tower, mahogany row, the Board of Directors, and Harvard, Yale, Princeton Elitism (HYPE) would have sensed the wisdom of assimilation into the new demographics.

One would think that the structure of enterprise would become more attuned to its actual power base, which is the knowledge worker as plenipotentiary. Instead, there appears a preoccupation with the malfeasance and duplicity of a few that don’t seem to get it.

Lip service has paid homage to this power shift with little actual disruption to the infrastructure or how it has been managed since 1945. With heads tumbling from high perches across industries, little attention is being given the fact CEOs are atavistic and management as practices is anachronistic, while Boards of Directors as organized are good old boy networks that no longer have a function. The axe has yet to fall on them.

The A’s magnify CEOs weaknesses by mirroring them. They are pleasers, not confronters, cheerleaders, not creators, providers of the best spin on bad news as they dream of one day being CEOs themselves. They master the corporate speak of a “good economy,” which is reflected in a good stock/price ratio, good return on investment, good dividend. It is the phantasmagoric of electronic transfers.

What defines a good economy for B’s, C’s, D’s, and E’s are the answers to these questions: are their jobs for everyone who wants one; can working people afford decent housing and adequate medical care; is the currency maintaining its value so people can save for retirement; are taxes both low and equitable; is the gap between the rich and the poor shrinking instead of expanding?

Knowledge workers, who could cripple the economy in an instant, have been subjected to the paralysis of analysis from mystic gurus to self-image psychologists, from “one minute managers” to “search for excellence” authors, from pillar to post, and expected to trust those in charge to guide them out of their despair.

Meanwhile, our economy wavers. Too many educated workers are unemployed or under employed, or trying to live on unlivable wages and deal with escalating taxes. Housing and medical costs are skyrocketing, while real incomes are actually dropping. American jobs are being exported and cheap labor in the form of illegal immigrants is being imported. Jobs are being exported under the guise of free trade instead of fair trade. Corporations have discovered that they can pay sweatshop wages in Asia and sell their products at high prices in the United States.

Kannapolis, North Carolina, a one-industry town of 30,000 citizens is dying. The textile plants have closed there throwing thousands out of work as Asian workers make their sports wear for 80 cents a day versus $100 per day for Kannapolian workers. These goods are then sold back to American consumers, relying on advertising and celebrity endorsements to peddle them.

From Passive Aggressive to Active Responsive

What has to happen to stop this requires knowledge workers to step outside their disciplines to invent a system and infrastructure of work in which enterprise can penetrate the status quo and create a more realistic, balanced and equitable distribution of power, wealth, and happiness.

The paralysis of analysis is indicative of a system that refuses to change in any real sense. That is why B’s, C’s, D’s and E’s must step out of character and contribute to the fray. Does this mean wresting power from the powerful? No, it does not. It means coming to a common understanding that we must find our way back to resourceful and energetic growth by seeing and dealing with the work force as it is, not as it once was.

The discussion here was opened with a “B” who represented the soul of his organization, remaining a high performer despite crumbling chaos around him. I was brought in to make an assessment. In this instance the CEO confessed that her major concern was in turning her company around, which was mired in inertia. The company was 80 percent professional workers, many with Ph.D.’s. A process flow analysis indicated why the work wasn’t getting done. The CEO took my report as a personal affront to her leadership. It appears she vaulted herself into the CEO position by making a similar assessment of her predecessor’s administration. Thus my analysis indicated that under her leadership not only had there been no improvement, matters had gotten worse. It was apparent that the Bs, Cs, Ds, and Es were not listening to her, but doing their own thing, operating pretty much as they always had without structure or penalty of missing deadlines. The A’s were in contempt of her and were undermining her authority, while the F’s were where they had always been, just getting a paycheck and waiting for the weekend.

This is consistent with the failure to be professional with what is the problem. There is no point in making an analysis if you are going to be paralyzed with the results. Likewise, there is little point in being paralyzed with being obsessed with analysis at the price of taking action. The Bs, Cs, Ds, and Es know what is wrong. They experience it every day because they are part of the problem and they are the substance of the solution. They know what works and what doesn’t; what systems are consistent with productive effort and which was aren’t; what is good for the company and what is not. But they have families and careers to nurture and aren’t likely to step out of their roles and challenge the status quo. They prefer to hope for the best and go with the flow. They thus by default become reticent participants in their company’s demise.

Leadership is dependent on the Bs, Cs, Ds and Es being on board. To put this in the vernacular, if leadership fails to recognize this, it is out to lunch and won’t get off the dime because no one is on the same page.

1. What is the soul of the company?

The organization is a living organism with a body, soul, spirit and intellect. If these components are not working together, then it is likely they are working against each other. This will create stress, conflict, dissension and dissipation of effort. If the organization is preoccupied with itself, if it is not a healthy entity, then it will not be able to handle changing or accelerating external challenges to which is subjected, almost daily. The window of opportunity and the window of despair are the same window. A company is in a constant game of survival no matter the industry. A company that plays not to lose always loses in the end. A company that is driven by simply comparing and competing eventually loses because it has lost its own unique identity. A company that becomes a stranger to itself not only alienates itself from its soul, but from its industry and market, and therefore its future. In a word a company has a psychology, and that psychology is either one of confidence or fear, paranoia or trust. It is one in which the soul of the company of trust will modify, redesign, reinvent itself organically to ensure survival. It will do this by not emphasizing one of these components at the expense of the other but orchestrating them into a symphony of collective and synergistic action. It will do this to remain consistent with the mind, morality and opportunity of the times.

2. Is the dichotomy between managers and workers real?

Yes, it is real and persists even though it is no longer relevant. It grew out of the 20th century’s need to manage and allocate resources in mechanistic ways, whereas today this can all be done digitally. Less than 100 years ago, a guild mentality had sway to the conduct of a company with an owner working beside workers, and all sharing in the success or failure of enterprise. Job descriptions, performance appraisals, management by objectives, incessant meetings, perks and entitlements, and hierarchies of authority grew into boilerplate reality after World War Two. Out of this came an elite who fought this war as officers, and now took up their positions in civilian life as its managers. The independent owners of businesses before the war, who were now facing inordinate competition, lack of capital, and with cash flow problems, found the answer to their problems in offering stock. Now these owners had investors, and these investors were often people who never put a foot in their companies. Then the most important thing became an unholy attention to making profits and keeping stockholders happy. So, the management class solidified itself around profits before people to please these investors, organized around a board of directors to set the policies that would guide the operations by management. Aggressive management won that war, and the nostalgia for replicating that success has never left the American workplace. In fact the United States has exported its manner of doing business to the world with the world as manager dependent as it is. Today, it is assumed that workers must have managers, and managers must have authority with the right to distribute responsibility at will. Knowledge workers with an eye to pleasing authority often do so at the expense of the job at hand. Often that authority acts as an obstacle to enterprise rather than a conduit to it, out of ignorance of the technology, usury use of position power, or sheer incompetence.