WHEN THE LEADER LOST THE TRIBE -- PART FOUR: MAJOR LAYOFFS & WHAT THEY MEAN!

When the Leader Lost the Tribe

Part Four



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



I think it’s nothing less than a prostitution of good sense that the Federal Government bails corporations out of their excesses while workers are made to take the pain. In years past, it has been working slobs like myself who have gotten the pink slip at Christmas time, but now, guess what, there ain’t many of us. So I’ve got no tears for college boys and girls getting the heave ho at GM, Merck and God knows where else at this time of year. See how they deal with it!

An email from a reader of www.peripateticphilosopher.blogspot.com


You listen to Market Place on National Public Radio and the commentators are in euphoria because the market has gone up with GM set to fire some 30,000 employees over the next few years, while Wall Street is not quite so elated at Merck’s promise to trim its workforce by some 7,000 workers, having expected it to be more. Most of these workers being “let go” are white collar or indirect labor, that is, they don’t touch the product in production.

This is the fourth in a series of essays on the leader and the tribe. These little essays have not been meant to provide the solution to the problem but to frame the problem so that those experiencing it can more accurately define it. Once defined in content and context, mistakes can be examined, changes made, and some sense of recovery initiated.

My remarks have been limited to corpocracy in a non-military context, but the same behavior is equally endemic to the military as it is to commerce, industry, academia and the religious. David Brooks and other journalists have been trying to understand the military in Iraq. Typically, the coalition forces launch a successful attack on an insurgency strong hold, wrought out, kill or capture the enemy, and then leave. Insurgency fighters reclaim the area, and launch their counterattacks from the same place, only to have another coalition force repeat the same insanity again. The military comes away with the phrase “not enough troops,” which is no less ridiculous than a corporation claiming “not enough profit,” trimming its operations of tens of thousands of workers, then turning around and doing massive rehiring as profits rise, only to again repeat the same scenario a year or two later.

Crises may be caused, or corporations collapse, not necessarily through some extraordinary chicanery in the first place, but from multitudinous cases of petty betrayal, or individual neglect, the kind that has become so rampant in today’s society. This betrayal or neglect goes relatively unnoticed until corporations clean their hands once again, and divorce themselves from their honored commitment to their employees.

A corporation’s announcement to investors that it will “save $5 billion” by releasing 30,000 workers, sends the stock price inching up, and creates the faux feeling of relief that a couple feels after a stormy marriage is dissolved, or a bankruptcy is put behind them.

Each sees the situation as a “second chance,” but unfortunately, is likely to repeat the same petty betrayals that put it in this position in the first place. The casualties of these excesses are buried in individual neglect of the workers in the case of the corporation, the children in the case of the couple, and creditors in the case of the bankruptcy. We see little learning in each of these instances because national statistics inform us that they are all on the rise.

“The soul and spirit that animates and keeps up a society is mutual trust,” writes English writer Robert South (1634 – 1716).

Trust is at issue and trust is what has created the great divide.

The leadership doesn’t trust the workers; doesn’t understand the workers; doesn’t confront the workers; doesn’t demand of the workers; doesn’t make the workers suffer the consequences of their untoward and disruptive behavior; attempts to bribe the workers into compliance and conformity with entitlements and praise; fails to tie rewards and promotion to productivity, allowing eighty percent of the work to be accomplished by twenty percent of the workforce; falls prey to the eighty percent whose largest contribution is showing up for work, spending the rest of the time politicking, socializing, flattering management, dividing and conquering, spawning rumors, and playing games of misdirection.

Power always has the most to perceive from its own illusions. Leaders in memorial have incurred more hazards from the follies of their own that have grown up under the adulation of parasites -- the eighty percent non-performers -- than from the machinations of their competitors.

I have participated in downsizing, redundancy exercises, and I can assure you that the eighty percent most assuredly that should lead the roles of the “let go” seldom are. The reason is simple. While the twenty percent doing most of the work are performing, the eighty percent not doing the work are measuring the lay of the land, and creating failsafe positions when the pink slips are handed out. These workers, whom I have described elsewhere as suspended in terminal adolescence in arrested development, know one thing, and that is that the leadership is not confrontational, and will avoid conflict at nearly any cost.

Paradoxically, the twenty percent doing most of the work have little time for games, and may grovel and complain amongst themselves, but take their pink slips and go out with little fuss.

The leadership knows this, and to its disgrace, uses it against such workers, which means it uses itself against itself. Indeed, the adulation of parasites does more to drive a wedge between productive workers and work, and a climate of trust than all the corporation’s competitors combined.

The clarion call to the younger generation of professional workers is to set principle above expediency in the approach to employment. I am not suggesting that these workers imitate the behavior of the eighty percent I allude to here, but that they protest frequently and politely wherever or whenever there is a breech in fairness, consistency, ethics, the equity of rewards and punishment, and opportunity and promotion.

The realist faces and deals with the facts, and the only facts he is likely to see, unless he is especially attentive, are those presented to skip suspicion or challenge or doubt. If that is the case, there can be compliance, which is always coercive, but never cooperation, which is always voluntary. Cooperation comes from challenging directives and directions until they are understood and agreed upon as consistent with one’s ethics and standards. Workers cannot go on indefinitely sitting on the safety valve.

In the context of trust and in terms of finding a bridge between the leader and the tribe, three things are eminent: the recognition of the essential value of people as persons; the belief that all workers have a contribution to make; and that they should all have not only an opportunity to make it, but that they should be expected to make it.

One of the charades that the leader has allowed to develop which has taken the workplace off course and out of focus is the liberal idea that all men are created equal in ability, talent, and capacity to perform. They are not.

Liberalism that has invaded the workplace was not meant to proffer the idea of equality. It actually meant to provide the provision of reasonable opportunity for all workers. Where liberalism was right, but made a wrong turn is in its rightful rejection of authoritarianism, which is anachronistic in today’s world, sponsoring instead the spiritual values of justice, freedom, and tolerance. Where liberalism made a wrong turn was making these higher than the ideals of discipline and efficiency.

Leadership didn’t have to throw the baby out with the bath water; it didn’t need to scrub the value of discipline and efficiency from the equation in order to emphasize these other values. After all, they are natural complements in a competitive world.

What the leadership needed to do, and hasn’t yet accomplished, is to realize that discipline and efficiency don’t need paternalistic authority to make them work in a liberal and liberating environment, because the interdependent partnership between leaders and workers involves them both.

It is in a spirited community where discipline and efficiency are married in happy enterprise with these liberating values that things get done, on time, and with the minimum of wasted effort or expense.

Draconian measures of massive layoffs brought an email to my attention, and prompted these thoughts. It saddens me to see this happening knowing that such measures are not the answer to the problem. They only make it more apparent why the leader has lost the tribe, and how the distance between the leader and the tribe continues to grow.

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About the author: Dr. Fisher has been a corporate executive with international experience with Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe, Ltd., having worked on four continents. He continues to write about these experiences in several books and articles. Check out his website for more information: www.peripateticphilosopher.com