Toward Understanding Disgruntled Workers

Toward Understanding Disgruntled Workers

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 2004

Abstract

The rapidly increasing professional class of workers has failed to assert itself with any sense of authority. It remains in the lap of luxury seemingly more interested in protecting a career than establishing one, more focused on benefits than job challenges, more committed to the moment than connected to the future. Professionals show little inclination to self-manage. They complain but seldom to management. They sense they are expendable, but they are no more than management. They esteem the traditional hierarchy, which is in trouble. Management has merged with and has become indistinguishable from the professional class, but it is receding as professionals are emerging. Work is returning to a state not unlike the industrial guilds of the pre-Industrial Revolution, where workers according to skill level contributed to a common project with directed autonomy within defined boundaries.

This in turn redefines leadership, which rotates according to the nature of the project and skill base requirements within a project. No discrete manager need be involved.

Authority then is not in position power, but in a flowing organic work cell, which is functionally designed to perform certain tasks and generate certain outcomes. Aspiring to management has been a preoccupation with professionals to date, often at the expense of their skill base. In times past, engineers, scientists, and technologists would leave their expertise behind, a discipline in which they were competent to realize the benefits of management, where they were not.

While the management track is becoming a phantom ladder, managers continue to be paid more than professionals. Workers are disgruntled for this reason, but don’t know what to do about it. They are waiting to be rescued, for a miraculous paradigm shift to occur without cost to them in the scheme.

The function of work has changed but not the structure, which seeds the conflict and provokes the frustration. Work has become a crippled giant unable to walk because it cannot find its legs.

Workers no longer need managers. Workers have the skills, but not the confidence to be self-directed or to self-manage. This is so because they have been programmed that way. They remain other-directed and passive looking to others for solutions. They have moved from management dependence to counter dependence on the company for their well being.

Meanwhile, companies struggle to find their way through a new kind of wilderness, and in a state of flux. There are no guarantees anymore, for workers or companies. However, both have become used to such guarantees. There are no more certainties, if there ever were, but certainties are still craved. There are no companies or job categories above extinction, but the rhetoric of guarantees continues unabated.

The actual trend is not unlike professional sport, where players accept the dynamics of thee marketplace, selling their skills on short-term contracts, where teams survive by changing the mix of players as requirements change.

The new reality is that professionals must hone their talents, and expect to move from company to company not unlike athletes going from minor to major league teams. Most professionals, as with most athletes, are likely to work for several companies in a career.

This situation has taken more than one hundred years to develop so it should come as no surprise that there is a large degree of angst among workers and companies who sense something is awry, if not understood, as change has been a tectonic phenomenon.

* * * * *

Personality becomes a mere selling device. Friendship
becomes contacts. The urge to improve deteriorates to mere
acquisitiveness. Money becomes the measure of accomplishment. So much intellectual energy is devoted to outward market research that there is none left for inner observation. The language of commerce obliterates the vocabulary of morality.

David Brooks, On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense (2004).

Purposeful work is a matter of this delicate balance: The structure of work determines the function of work. The function of work establishes the workplace culture. The workplace culture seeds the dominant behavior in the workplace. Senior management is the architect of this delicate balance. So, it falls to executive vision, leadership and competence as to whether an organization is purposeful or flounders. Modern workers have a passion for work when it is designed for success. Conversely, they are apathetic when it is not. Purposeful work is not a matter of serendipity nor does it happen in a vacuum. It is a question of executive purpose. There is far too much evidence this reality is not perceived.

James R. Fisher, Jr., Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge (1998).



1. History

When the 20th century began, ninety percent of the world’s workers were involved in agriculture.

The working guilds of craftsmen and artisans were still very much in place. Workers in small groups had no hierarchy, position power, or remote authority. They participated according to their skills in making hand tooled finished products. The collaborative model was not yet invented, but was much in evidence in work.

There were employers, but they were craftsmen, too, working beside fellow workers. Job descriptions and role identity had to wait several decades for social engineers to create the nomenclature.

In the early 20th century, the Industrial Revolution would take off with rail and ship transportation connecting with markets near and far. The world was exploding with new inventions, among them the radio, telephone, airplane, motion picture, automobile, and electric power plant. Industrial centers were hastily created in urban areas hungry for bodies to run them, causing a rapid shift of workers from the farm to the city.

In 1914, World War I broke out in Europe. As with all wars, this fueled technology development. The Panama Canal was finished and opened. Robert Goddard successfully launched a rocket propelled by liquid oxygen and gasoline. Weapons of war became more sophisticated with German submarines and Allied attack planes and battleships. Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington founded modern theoretical astrophysics. David Wark Griffith launched motion pictures from a curiosity into a viable industry with “The Birth of a Nation.” Alexander Graham Bell developed instant communications, making the first transcontinental telephone call from New York City to San Francisco to Dr. Thomas A. Watson, with the message, “Mr. Watson, are you there?”

Education was changing, too, with the curriculum ideas of John Dewey. He encouraged students to be independent thinkers and problem solvers rather than rote learners. Albert Einstein published his theory of relativity. Even food preparation was changing. Clarence Birdseye invented the freezing and packaging of fresh foods, and called the products, “Birds Eye.” Farming was changing as well with the gasoline-powered tractor replacing the oxen driven plow.

The wake of the Great War brought disillusionment, then prosperity, and then reckless indulgence. While artists and writers proclaimed the death of culture, and saw themselves as members of the “Lost Generation,” flappers and their beaus introduced the “Roaring 20s,” dancing the Charleston to a Jazz Age beat.

That is until the party ended in 1929 with the crash on Wall Street heard around the world, followed by the Great Depression.

Against this backdrop, a new business class was evolving. Small guilds of tool and die makers, fixture manufacturers, machine shop operators, and electrical component makers were merging into large corporations such as General Motors, Ford Motor, General Electric, Western Electric, Westinghouse, and American Telephone and Telegraph. These companies were being financed by common stock issued to stockholders. These investors were absentee owners with no direct connection to company operations.

Few former guild owners would emerge in control of operations as Henry Ford did. Managers were hired to oversee operations, and boards were created to set company policy. Most skilled and unskilled workers were introduced to a new concept of repetitive “piece work.” This would turn into the assembly line of mass production, a process perfected by Henry Ford in the manufacture of the Model T and Model A Ford.

As the wealth creators such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and Thomas Edison removed themselves from daily operations, executives were placed in management roles, often family members, to run these companies. These executives, like all other workers, were reduced to employees. The uncanny thing, executives, family members or not, from the beginning assumed the psychological identity of owners. To a degree it was true as part of executive compensation was in company stock. Yet, today, given this rationale, with eighty percent of company employees likely to own company stock, few think in these same terms. This has proven significant.

With the worldwide Great Depression of 1929, everyone suffered from the economic collapse but none more than the poor. They had been forced into cities to work the factories separating them from the land. Now, they were without jobs, no longer having farms to return to. Millions wandered the country looking for work. John Steinbeck captures their plight in The Grapes of Wrath (1939), a powerful indictment of capitalistic society, illustrating the dangerous void between the rich and poor.

Even employed workers lived in hovels or city slums. Children as young as eight worked beside adults in factories. Working conditions were horrific. Serious accidents and even deaths on the job were not uncommon. Workers had no medical benefits, unemployment compensation, and no recourse to sue their employers. They were the working poor, the underclass, and came to see themselves as victims.

Labor unions evolved with workers participating in walkouts and picket lines. A terrifying period followed. During the 1930s, confrontations between thugs hired to protect company interests and union workers blackened society and led to much bloodshed most of which is hidden in footnotes in history books.

The growing interdependence of the world’s nations was increasingly apparent as economic chaos in the United States spread swiftly around the globe. This climate proved fertile ground for fascism in Germany with Adolf Hitler coming to power in 1932. The 1930s ended with Germany invading Poland. History’s greatest conflict was set to begin, World War II. Americans claimed it was not America’s war until a surprise attack.

On December 7, 1941, the United States was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu. Four battleships were sunk, including the Arizona, four more disabled, eleven other ships were sunk, 188 aircraft were destroyed on the ground, and 2,330 servicemen and 100 civilians were killed. It woke up a giant.

The combination of America’s manpower, management acumen, technology, natural resources, economic wealth, and common commitment would produce tanks, planes, ships and weapons faster and in greater volume than all the Allies and Axis Powers combined. It was management’s finest hour.

The United States came out of the war the dominant military and economic force in the free world. While Europe and Asia were decimated, their cities destroyed, and means of production in ruins, America was untouched. An unprecedented American boom would follow.

2. Management

A management class evolved out of World War II. It took pride in the critical role played in that war. Now, it was unencumbered to do as it willed.

Management gurus stepped in and created a corporate blueprint. They defined the corporation as an entity housed in a central authority and controller of companies and divisions spread across the land meant to follow its policies to the letter, and reporting back significant results and developments.

The corporation was a rational ordering model – a place for everything and everything in its place – where workers were things to be managed. This model was exceedingly successful for more than a quarter century after that war. Management had governance over specialized knowledge, possessed position power, hierarchical authority, controlled recruiting, hiring, promotions, and firing with few if any challenges to its clout.

A set of primary tools was developed to ensure this control and efficiency, tools, which now are ineffective. Management by Objectives or MBOs involved taking the corporate goal, dividing and subdividing it among companies and divisions until every function and individual had a piece of it. Collating followed, and voila! We have our goal! Of course, it worked on paper far better than otherwise. It didn’t matter. Business was good. Strategic planning, another time consuming ritual, often proved wide of the mark, but there was always the luxury of mid-course corrections. Time was not a huge concern. Performance appraisal was the third staple in this tool kit, ostensibly designed for performance enhancement through personal development, but it drifted to become a routine ritual with little impact on either score.

MBOs, strategic planning, and performance appraisal were solid control mechanisms as long as people behaved as things to be managed. Until 1970, people pretty much did. Then the Viet Nam War hit the consciousness of young people. They rejected the war, and the managed society that conducted it. History was made.

A totally disenfranchised segment of society successfully stopped a war. Nothing would ever be the same again. These management tools lost their relevance. They continued to be used but nobody took them seriously, especially young professionals. Their protest of the war had been overt. Their protest of work rituals was covert, masked in indifference. Tools, which had been designed as means to given ends, had deteriorated into ends in themselves.

MBOs are in conflict with the fluid reality of the organization today, where everything is in a constant state of flux, and everyone is connected to everything else in a transparent and transforming configuration. Thinking is different when the organization is perceived as a whole, rather than in discrete parts.

Strategic planning is often if not always a panic driven process. I had access in Europe to 13,000 employees in eight countries as director of human resources planning & development for an international corporation. A subsidiary in Switzerland of 400 employees, of which 80 were in management and administration, was in trouble. Strategic planning was considered the answer. For ten straight days the executive staff worked nearly around the clock to create a strategic operational plan to be reviewed by corporate management from the States. A four-hour PowerPoint presentation followed. When it was concluded, the corporate fathers were not satisfied, telling these managers to return to the drawing board. The executives went back without a whimper, but the secretarial staff, 20 women of this contingent of 80, who had put their families on hold for ten days, refused. They could see the insanity of the exercise. One said, “Did anyone ask the Americans what they expected?” No one answered because no one did.

Performance appraisal (PA) has become the justification for merit increases, minuscule as they are, when it is supposed to be a developmental tool to aid in assessing worker performance from the previous period. Tens of thousands of hours are spent on PAs, producing little more than payroll corrections. There is little inclination to confront workers with performance problems, or in fact to downgrade workers who exhibit them.

Any organization has 15 percent hard chargers and 15 percent foot draggers. In one organization of 4,000 employees I monitored, where 600 should be in some state of performance deficiency, the PAs revealed six workers were to be given downgrades, or reductions in salary, and four workers were to be cited for “needing improvement,” but kept at the present salary level. Everyone else received increases.

These corporate tools, which may have worked 50-years ago, no longer work anymore, and yet management appears reluctant to put them aside and develop something more relevant. Few will dispute they are not working, but would justify them just the same as there is nothing at hand better to replace them.


3. Interventions

During the 1942 – 1945 wartime period, where less than ten percent of American workers were college graduates, and less than fifty percent high school graduates, where workers were dependent on management for direction, where decision-making by management was undisputed, and where position power included knowledge power, workers would jump through hoops even if ridiculous hoops at that.

Workers were children and expected to act like children and to appreciate like children and not to challenge authority, criticize superiors, go over their heads to lodge complaints, or to act in any way like self-directed responsible adults. The way to get ahead was not to make waves, keep your head down, and be a safe hire.

The 1950s and 1960s continued the boom, then came the 1970s, and American markets started to shrink: electronic parts, computers, glassware, televisions, microwaves, processed steel, and finally automobiles. South East Asia, especially Japan, South Korea, and Singapore were making quantitative leaps with quality products made more cheaply and reliably than those made in the United States, and Americans were buying them.

Panic set in, and corporations looked for answers. They studied competitors and discovered they were using quality control processes invented in the United States, processes that fit nicely into Asian group normative cultures, but were ignored by American companies.

A period of schizophrenia followed. There was a failure to note how different American individualism was to Asian group norms, and that success was mainly with blue-collar workers. Meanwhile, the professional class of American workers was growing exponentially. By 1980, it was four times greater than Asian workers with 80 percent of the American workforce white collar versus 20 percent for Asia. American blue-collar workers responded enthusiastically to this intervention, but the problems they solved were confined to such matters as workstation lighting and noise (cosmetic), not such problems as product design (managerial). American professionals did not respond enthusiastically to these interventions. They saw these exercises as “by-the-numbers” rote techniques. This difference was ignored.

A stream of initiatives followed such as Total Quality Management, Quality Management, Quality Control Circles, Quality of Work, Quality of Work Life, Total Employee Involvement, and Empowerment Management, while the structure of organization was not changed. These were programs. Quality is a process. It is a mindset. Quality depends on the integrity of the structure to support it. This did not exist. Everything was still structured as it was 50 years ago, freeze framed in 1945 nostalgia. This compounded worker frustration.

Work has changed dramatically from brawn power to brainpower, and workers have changed intellectually with it. Now, nearly 90 percent in high tech industries are college trained; yet the structure, function, workplace culture, and worker behavior remain in cadence with the past.

Consequently, workers have not changed emotionally. They still complain about how things are instead of realizing they have the capacity to change them, still look to the company for relief of their anxieties, and still behave as dependent children. It shall remain so until the structure of work is changed. The challenge is real.

Management responds to a clever form of corporate blackmail: the craving for rank, not necessarily to do a better job, but to climb the rungs of the executive ladder. First line supervisors aspire to become managers so they toe the mark. Their colleagues above them do the same in the hopes of climbing the corporate ladder: from manager to department head to director to regional manager to division vice president to corporate vice president to divisional president to corporate president to CEO and chairman.

It is a nerve-racking cognitive process. Intuition would be too risky, too iffy. So, why should we be surprised when people get to top and can’t lead? Leadership is cognitive and intuitive, one of depth of character as well as a winning personality. A winning personality (acquired self) may have got them there, but they need to their essence (real self) to keep them there.

Once there, the freedoms are considerable, but also the temptations. The majority mined their time, assume a low profile, and muddle through their watch. But then there are the others. They are the ones we read about. The media is replete with cases of corporate fraud. The media profiles executives who use wealth realized unseemly. We have had many instances of late, but it is not new. Machiavelli wrote about it 500-years ago.

Who created these Sybarites? Society did. Who structured the organization as it is today? Society did that as well. Who is society? We are. These executives didn’t fall into scandal without an assist. Our culture provided that. So, better we should work to change the structure than to be preoccupied with a handful of sinners.

The present structure supports pyramid climbers “managing up,” telling their bosses what they want to hear, covering for their gaffs, letting them take credit for triumphs of others, and being obsequious to a fault. This has become a career survival mechanism, requiring full-time campaigning, leaving little time for real work.

Most companies through 1975, despite these seductive temptations, operated with surprising prudence. Ethical standards were high and maintained with few exceptions, and then executive conduct seemingly unraveled as the organization went crazy.

There has not been enough attention paid to the impact of the youth culture and its obsessive influence on the corporate body, where shock and noise are important components, where the body is treated as an instrument of play, and where values are flaunted when previously they had been respected.

4. Workers

Information technology has transformed the workplace. Workers are now knowledge workers, more flexible, informed and better able to make timely and accurate decisions on the job. They have access to what is needed and when it is needed at the level of consequences. This is very close to a magic bullet.

Clearly, central control has become counterproductive. The insistence on managing from a central authority propels the organization toward entropy and disintegration. We have seen this happen in 100-year-old companies such as Montgomery Wards. Nothing is forever.

The one antidote workers have been crying for is “directed autonomy.” Here workers are empowered in this structure to take responsibility for what they can legitimately contribute in response to boundaries that have been laid down at by the central authority. The role of management is to lay down these boundaries and then to get out of the way of productive work. This is not the final but first step in structural improvement.

Directed autonomy shows how corporations that are especially international and multicultural, as many are today, can deal with swiftly changing situations effectively, while avoiding obsolescence, chaos, and fragmentation that have doomed so many.

Workers are ready. They are more knowledgeable with information technology than their management, more computer literate, more flexible, more understanding and more able to leverage this technology if given the opportunity, along with the authority within boundaries.

The hypocrisy of the veil of compliance should be lifted to realize cooperation. This is a matter of trust. Workers have passed the point of being limited to information on a “need to know” basis. They require access to all information necessary to do the job. Corporate secrets, once used as leverage, no longer apply, thanks to the Internet.

Workers have an obligation to be critical of authority where necessary, but respectfully so. It is not appropriate for workers to be simply polite, obedient, docile, passive, uncritical, submissive, apologetic and dependent with no will to influence decision-making. Workers have an obligation to inform management when corrections are necessary. Many switch from being active persons outside the job to passive workers on the job. They behave as adults at home but children on the job believing that is the only way to survive.

A self-fulfilling prophecy follows. Executives complain, why can’t workers behave as adults? We give them everything! They fail to see giving not attached to performance creates the mindset of the dependent child.

The function of work follows how the work is structured. This determines the workplace culture. The workplace culture defines the dominant behavior in the company. So, if technologists are discretely separated from administrators, decision-makers from doers, managers from workers, then workers are likely to act sycophantically as pleasers. Such workers exhibit the passive and reactive mentality that often prevails at the expense of timely work. Workers will not behave as adults if treated as children. They will clamor for approval.

It took the better part of the 20th century for management as a class to distinguish itself, and it is likely to take some time, brilliant as workers are, to escape the stigma of passivity that persists. Sadly, there has been a failure of management in many cases to listen to their timid voices when they do rise to ask questions. The myth persists workers work only for a paycheck; that the actual work is of only secondary importance. Not true. Work is their life because it gives them identity.

5. Words

Words have lost their meaning. They have spiraled into rhetoric. We once believed we had “security,” and then 9/11 happened, when foreigners with box cutters hijacked commercial passenger jet airliners and used them as missiles.

A few years ago an ancient British bank was made insolvent by the speculation of one of its trusted employees in Singapore who made a “call” that he couldn’t cover. The bank had sophisticated security in place, and a competent staff, yet they were blindsided by a young man out of control. This 400-year old bank will never see another day of banking.

More recently, a teenager created a computer virus “bug” that spread about the globe closing down air terminals, banks, businesses, hospitals and costing $billions in lost revenue and untold disrupted lives. It took the genius of software detectives to track the boy down who said he did it just for “fun.” It was a “terrorist act” by a non-terrorist.

“Terrorism” is a word that haunts us now, as this otherwise unremarkable boy put “fear” or “terror” in our hearts across the nation and around the globe, but we still don’t know what the word means for sure. The “Boston Tea Party” in our American Revolution history was an act of terror, but by “patriots.” You see the problem.

A perfectly innocent smiling face can be doing terrible things, things that disrupt our lives and even endanger them. Yet, we smile back because we do not know.

We are fighting a war in Iraq in which we see ourselves as “liberators” and many Iraqis see us as “occupiers.”

We don’t have the same confidence in words we once did. We don’t trust them, and we don’t trust people who write or speak them. They don’t mean the same things to us. We call the different feeling behind words “semantics,” but that is just another word. The ambiguity of words tells us we must be more the learner than the teacher, more the listener than the teller, more a believer people have the answers than we have answers for them.

Words such as race, religion, color, and culture define and separate us when we are more the same than different. These words are like bullets in a loaded gun, and can destroy the spirit as surely as any bullet can destroy the body. Words in the workplace such as engineer, manager, scientist, director, and so forth can put us on edge as well. One time a colleague of mine and me were talking to this gentleman in a construction tent at a hospital. It was a very comfortable conversation until the gentleman rose to leave, and handed my friend his card. My friend fainted. The gentleman was CEO of Westinghouse.

And so, in the workplace, words must be understood for their explosive quality. Words such as teaming, empowerment, and employee involvement are on one level simply words, but on another level, they promise something, and if not delivered they can kill the spirit.

It is no longer sufficient to have the will to implement empowerment or employee involvement, or other desirable interventions. You must have the structure to do so, otherwise it is just rhetoric. And that is the problem.

Words have become a substitute for action, and workers know this. Workers don’t need pep talks, don’t need promises, don’t need celebrity executives being beamed into their workplaces with glowing reports on how good things are, and how they are going to get even better. What workers need is action in the trenches where words have legs.

For words to have legs, the structure must exist to support them. This gives them functional meaning. Words become trusted when the culture embodies them. In such a setting, when the word quality is mentioned, there will be no fear that quality will be compromised if it is a choice between it and meeting schedule.

We are not there yet because we haven’t been able to get inside words to the hidden language they suggest which is beyond words.


6. Work Cells

Just as the structure of organization has invited the executive scandals related here, it has also laid the groundwork for disgruntled workers. The reason professional workers have not attempted to assert themselves in restructuring efforts with any focused objective is because they are hedonistically still in the lap of relative luxury, more interested in their personal well being than calibrating their performance, more committed to what they can get than give, and more preoccupied with their segmented happiness than making choices, or entertaining sacrifice. They complain among themselves but hardly ever to management. They reason they are expendable, not realizing everyone is.

The vertical organization is becoming a specter of the past, and management as a class is regressing indistinguishable from professionals with which it is merging. We are returning to a state not unlike the guilds of pre-Industrial Revolution time, where people according to their skill level complemented each other at work in a work project. If the project were, for example, the making of a grandfather clock, the clockmaker would assume the dominate role, followed by the finished carpenter who would design and build the clock’s body, and followed by painters, and so on. Should the next project be a rocking chair, the designing carpenter would take the lead. In other words, leadership would be determined by the project. There was no position power. Leadership would be in the project, but not in a specific individual, per se

Today, we still see engineers, scientists and technologists leave the professions they love, and in which they have high competence, to enter a field in which they lack affection, and have little competence, but feel in good conscience they have no choice as the pay is so much greater, and that field is management. The irony is that management, albeit increasingly redundant, is still generally compensated at a higher level than skilled professionals. This creates an awkward state of affairs.

It is for these reasons competent workers are disgruntled. They feel they are forced to make choices that they abhor. They know where they fit, but not where their future lays, thus the dichotomy. It is for this reason there has to be an effort made to redesign work to fit its function, to fit its personnel and demographics, to fit the requirements of work. Moreover, it needs to be structured to ensure parity, which may allow workers, if they choose, to remain where they feel they can be most effective.

Workers no longer need managers. They have the skills but not the confidence to be self-directed. That is why directed autonomy within boundaries is ideal for them. Work cells provide this.

The complex organization is in a state of flux and so are workers. Loyalty is a word that has lost its meaning. There can be no guarantees during dynamic change, as companies cannot afford to make arbitrary commitments and inflated promises. The work cell provides a bridge between what was and what will be.

The reality of work in the future may not be unlike professional sports, where workers with marketable skills become contract players signing short-term contracts to meet an organization’s short-term requirements. Such workers may be journeymen going from company to company, while others may spend their entire careers with one employer, just as in sports. Athletes accept this reality. Workers can learn to do the same. This may see professionals going from one work climate to another as they progress in their careers, similar to athletes going from the minor to the major leagues.

The complex organization is dissolving tectonically and most certainly into a new configuration. It is doing so because it has become too lethargic to move to the temper of the times. Entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates and Stephen Jobs have been ahead of the curve in creating work cells to generate their diverse products. They have been able to see, and still feel comfortable with the need for constant restructuring of work, from project to project, placing key people in leadership roles on each project, which I call work cells, and making members accountable for results, then rewarding them accordingly.

Key people in these Microsoft and Apple Computer work cells are given the scope, design, time line, cost control budget and tools for the project – in other words the boundaries – and then the directed autonomy to go confidently to work. As Bill Gates said on one occasion, “I am happily surprised every day by the performance of my people.” These companies have a multiplicity of cells (work centers), which have clear objectives, but at the same time enjoy operational autonomy.

For far too long 50 percent of the workforce, women, has not participated fully in professional work. Even today, female engineers, chemists, and other technologists are likely to make 80 percent of what men make. The more equal distribution of funds, which is not gender discriminating, is in service roles, such as nursing and social work, or in the lower rungs of the unskilled area. We know that less than one percent of CEOs in Fortune 500 companies are women, and that approximately ten percent at the director level or above are women. This is equally true in academia where you might expect parity, as nearly 50 percent of teaching academics are women.

But in the new scheme of things where work cells will come to dominate the workplace, this is likely to change. As with the guilds of old, the complementary nature of skills will prove significant. The male-dominated executive model, where reasoning is primarily cognitive, should be strengthened with the complement of intuitive wisdom, most commonly associated with women. The practical application of traditional thinking often involves argument, adversarial clashes and dialectics instead of calm exploration, again the preferred interaction of women.

There is a natural flow and self-organizing process in complementary thinking, in which information is transformed into ideas, perceptions into processes, rational objectivity into subjective clarity, and linear positivism into non-linear caution. Women often have the patience to explore this continuum, whereas men desire to bypass it and get to the bottom line, which is frequently a mistake.

This is not to suggest that men and women have different brains, but only that experience indicates they tend to use them differently, which is to say in a complementary fashion. Men tend to pride themselves in being analytical. Women are analytical as well, but have a knack as synthesizers. There are other complementary indicators such as male competitiveness blending with female cooperation. Also, men seem to prefer the concrete, whereas women seem comfortable with the conceptual or abstract. Men tend to see matters in discrete parts of a whole. Women see the whole from the start. Men attack problems while women gauge them with finesse, and so on.

These represent the complementary strengths of men and women. This bolds well for synergism in the work situation. In that same connection, and because of the changing nature of work, women are likely to have leadership roles in these work cells, as gender dissolves into a non-factor.

7. Measurement

Work cells will be composed of workers with complementary skills to accomplish the tasks at hand, indiscriminate of gender. Manpower, machines, materials, and measurement are maintained in electronic data files, available in tracking work progress, highlighting concerns, and recording remedial corrections, among other things.

There is no need for posturing, or campaigning for the next position because position power has vanished; no need for playing up to authority because leadership is in the work cell and it is fluid; no need to compare and compete outside the cell because the cell will be evaluated on the basis of its task and in terms of its success relative to quality, schedule, budget, and delivery of product. Those within the cell will be awarded consistent with this, and the roles they have assumed in the project.

It is because of information technology that a record may be maintained automatically in the conduct of the work, and as the process unfolds. That is, it can be seen and assessed at will. The leadership can gauge the complementary working of multiple cells simultaneously, evaluating where they stand at any given moment as they motor toward a common objective. That is why the leadership can allow direct autonomy within boundaries. There is no risk of losing control of the project. It is built into the software.

Thus, there is no need for a contingent of supervisors and managers, no need for an army of department heads as work cells are made up of inter-disciplinarian professionals. The leadership can track activities at all levels, regional, divisional and corporate with confidence. There is only a need that work cell electronic records, updates and process concerns get into the proper hands on a timely basis.

Employee performance is in the electronic record so there is no need for performance appraisal, but there is a need for continuous professional development, the original charter of PA, which it failed to discharge. Individual contributions in the work cell are a matter of record. So, when a cell is assessed, it is assessed as a unit in terms of its success. Work cell members have a common incentive to perform because if the cell succeeds they all benefit. Likewise, if a work cell fails and has to be scraped, they all suffer. Pointing fingers is not relevant. Working through difficulties together is.

8. Déjà vu

Many instruments of traditional management have lost their efficacy: Management by Objectives, Strategic Planning, Performance Appraisal, supervisor-subordinate roles, and so on. These mechanisms are anachronistic and position power is atavistic. It has taken the wild technological ride of the 20th century to bring us back down to a less complex, more simplistic, and more natural arrangement of work. That is the pre-Industrial Revolution guilds. Only, these work cells are monitored and measured with sophisticated electronic information technology, and cell members are not artisans but engineers, scientists, technologists, technicians in rotating leadership roles.

Work cells are being used today in many software companies, but are not called work cells, nor are they measured in the manner suggested here, but in a quasi-traditional manner with supervisors and managers, PA, and so on. It is the view here that work cells will soon be common, as they once were more than 100 years ago in a less feverish age.

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About the author: James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., an organization/industrial psychologist is author of international bestsellers Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge (1998) and Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership & Dissonant Workers (2000). He may be reached at TheDeltaGrpFL@cs.com