When The Leadership Lost Its Tribe

When The Leadership Lost Its Tribe
So, You want to be a Leader!

When The Leadership Lost Its Tribe

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

This is one of a series of essays on leadership in all its aspects, from scientific to intellectual, social to political, moral to spiritual, economic to industrial. One of the great myths of management is that as long as you understand the fundamentals of management you can manage anything. That has proven a costly societal error. Likewise, management is often treated as if synonymous with leadership when management as leadership has constantly failed. Leadership, in the same, is considered a linear concept that can be easily plugged into a discipline or function and succeed. We are experiencing the unhappy consequences of this thinking in the twenty-first century with worldwide corruption, chaos and seemingly no one is in charge. Leadership, like most things in human experience, is multi-dimensional and a complement of many perspectives.



"Either order in the cosmos is real or chaos exists. If chaos reigns then the fragile equalitarian doctrines and emancipating programs of the revolutionary reformers have no significance: for in the vortex of chaos only force and appetite satisfy."

Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797), British statesman and political philosopher


An imperceptible shift in what constitutes work and how it is managed has occurred over the past 150 years. As is our habit; we have addressed it with the flippancy of sleepwalkers. Consequently, at a critical time in our history, when leadership should most be in evidence, it is nonexistent.

Leadership has lost connection with its tribe, and therefore its way. The tribal nation is floundering because there is a new partner in the mix, the professional. This partner builds little of stone or steel, cement or plastic but is wrought from his own light and placid environment, as compared to the hard and harsh environment of the conventional worker.

This partner’s qualities of spirit evoke admiration and envy, but not understanding, nor, indeed, integration into the tribal nation of work. Where machines and mathematics, science and technology, strategy and tactics are involved, there is little that leadership can teach and much that leadership can learn from him. He is passionate, masochistic, and hides his angst in malicious passive behaviors, which is transformed into six silent killers of organization (see Six Silent Killers St. Lucie Press 1998).

The professional is by nature patient, long-suffering and courteous, cerebral and critical, but seldom confrontational. He is capable of great generosity to his profession and kind. College trained with many years in preparation to making a living, he has been brought up to believe that diligence to duty is sufficient to find his way, finding instead that he must conform and comply, be obeisant and obedient, political and polite to make even snail's progress in his career. He is a rebel without a cause and the reason for this essay.

The professional has grown into prominence since World War II, and is unconsciously destroying the organization from within when he is its last hope. Let us now consider why.

Context and Theme of Change over Time

The United States from 1850 to 1900 was in explosive transition. American society was emerging from an agrarian society to an industrial society. The Civil War was the first technological war. It displayed such technological wonders as submarines and steel battleships. Historians point to the supreme industrial advantage of the north in that war. Less obvious is the leadership of a president, Abraham Lincoln, and a general, Ulysses S. Grant, who recognized and exploited the devotion of the tribe to advantage.

America was a tribal nation. Lincoln constantly reminded his audience at Gettysburg of this fact. He and general Grant understood its most evasive nuances, and were able to rally with risk and daring the most common soldier. They knew the cause ran deep in the soldier’s blood. In the tribal nation, there is a seamless connection between the leader and the led, between the vision and the doing, between the body and the soul, between decision-making and execution. This was missing in the Confederacy. It is missing in America today.

From 1850 to 1900, the theme in the United States was open borders. The context was new opportunity for disillusioned peoples. Immigrants were flocking to the American shores from Ireland to escape the potato famine, settling in such places as Lowell, Massachusetts to run the textile mills; from Mexico to escape poverty to pick fruit and vegetables from Texas to New England; and from China to escape repression to build the transcontinental railroad linking the west with the east. A nation of immigrants became involved, too, as speculators panning for gold in California and Alaska. The “get rich quick” theme would always be the American Achilles’ heel, while the American dream of getting ahead with diligence and determination was not.

During this period, more than 90 percent of American workers were employed in farming, living and working on family farms. The complexity and depth of their Christian beliefs, their conception of community as the extended family, their delight in children and reverence for the aged, their view of education continuing through life, their dislike of autocracy, and their conservative political views formed a tribal outlook that pervaded the nation.

A man’s word was as good as his bond. Identity was associated with the land, the family, the Christian faith, and the authority of Mother Nature. Working from dawn to dusk eking out a precarious living was accepted without complaint. Formal education was the experience of less than 10 percent of Americans, as public education was just emerging.

The United States was an insular society where the theme was isolation secure in the context of separation from the rest of the world by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Loyalty to the tribal nation was the foundation of American agrarianism and the explanation of its behavior and moral sense.

The question was not whether one action was good and another bad, but whether the action was in the interests of the tribe. That mentality survives and permeates every segment of the nation today, but in confusion rather than congruence.

From 1900 to 1945, while the world was being decimated with two world wars, the collapse of royal sovereignties across Europe, and the emergence of the Soviet Union and Communist China, the United States found itself a reluctant superpower on a world stage. It could no longer remain blissfully adrift in isolated idealism.

The United States had moved from an agrarian society to a major industrial nation. War had forced men off the farm into the military. Now in peacetime, farming was no longer a viable option forcing many to seek employment in urban centers. War had forced women out of the home into defense factories. Now they were reluctant to give up economic freedom to assume confining domestic roles.

Major technological changes had been a constant theme on every front between 1900 and 1945. Such names as Edison, Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, Einstein, Von Braun, Marconi, Bell, and the Wright brothers come to mind as having had a hand in these changes. The context was the emergence of a technological society on an agrarian foundation with the new business theme, specialization.

Compulsory Education Established

Industrial workers required basic skills. Therefore, every child had to become proficient in the three r’s: reading, riting, and rithmetic. This enabled them to read the instructions, operate the machines and report the results of the work performed. Along with the three r’s, children were also schooled in discipline, punctuality and obedience to authority.

Workers were being molded to conform to the machine with a factory mentality rather than to have the machine conform to them as individuals. First separated from the land, they were now being separated from themselves.

Once workers related closely to the land, where the results of their efforts could be easily identified. Now, the assembly line had been perfected and workers were engaged in piecework in the manufacturing of everything from automobiles to dishwashers to radios to the making of garments.

New words were coined to explain this phenomenon such as anomie, self-estrangement, and alienation. Where idealism and identity had once been the theme of an agrarian society, now specialization was the context of an industrial society.

Initially, this model had a modest agenda as it prepared essentially uneducated farm hands for industrial jobs. As soon as trained, however, these workers enjoyed remarkable freedom. They organized their own work, set up their own machines, ordered their own parts, kept records of their productivity, and had a voice in decisions involving their work. In short, they had control of what they did.

Early in the twentieth century, there were two reasons for such control: work was most likely in a job shop, such as tool and die, with the owner working beside his workers. He valued their input and treated them with respect. Although clearly employees, they were participants in the decision making. General Motors started out in this fashion.

Once General Motors formed into a company of many small job shops, and adopted the assembly line refined by Henry Ford, this was one of the first casualties. The union movement accelerated rather than impeded this transition. The United Auto Workers, for example, stepped in to collective bargain with automakers, and sued for higher wages and benefits at the sacrifice of the control these workers previously enjoyed. Workers have never regained this control.

While the industrial worker remained in place, new disciplines were being created to meet the demands of specialization. Today, there are scores of disciplines in psychology, medicine, dentistry, law, engineering, sociology, anthropology, education, and management.

For a brief interval, the leadership and the tribe forgot their progressive difficulties and renewed their earlier dedication to each other. The nation was at war and survival was in the balance.

World War II: The Miraculous Interlude of the Tribal Nation

The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Honolulu by the Japanese on December 7, 1941 hardened the United States again into a tribal nation.

Nationalism is often treated as a political phenomenon, but in fact after December 7 the roots went much deeper. The sources that fed these roots were remote, diverse, and contiguous elements of the national soul. The individuality of groups of men and women, now committed to the war effort, either in the military or in defense factories on the home front, were as genuine a fact of life as personality itself.

While the military fought in Europe, North Africa and the South Pacific, the assembly lines at home, protected by two great oceans in an age when weaponry could not yet cross an ocean, became the industrial arsenal unmatched in history.

In 1942 and 1943, the United States alone produced almost twice as many airplanes as the entire Axis. In 1943 and 1944, Americans were producing one ship a day, and an airplane every five minutes (David Halberstram’s The Next Century). American Heritage’s Picture of World War Two provides even more remarkable statistics:

From January 1, 1941 (less than a month after Pearl Harbor) until the end of the war in August 1945, the United States produced 6,500 naval vessels, 64,500 landing craft, 5,400 cargo ships, 296, 601 military aircraft, 86, 388 tanks and 2.7 million machine guns.

To do this in less than three and one half years was a miracle. It was American management’s finest hour and American leadership’s most profound connection with its tribe at every level, and in every quadrant of American society.

There was neither time for grandstanding, appetite for egotistical greed, nor any patience with nonproductive impediments between the command and the commanded at home or on the battlefield. Labor and management at home, and officers and enlisted personnel in the military had a tribal mission with a clear objective: win the war and restore the peace. Role demands and self demands merged into clear identities between the leadership and the led.

The moral authority of this tribal leadership lost none of its momentum after the war. Whereas the Allied victors in World War I had imposed humiliating reparations on the defeated, this was not now the case. The Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan paved the way for Europe’s recovery from its devastation, while General Douglas MacArthur was doing the same in Japan.

In 1945, as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in the Far East, MacArthur accepted the Japanese surrender on board the battleship Missouri. He then demonstrated remarkable moral leadership and executive vision by choosing to exercise his unlimited authority over this defeated nation with perceptive prudence.

MacArthur's first act was to restore the Emperor of Japan as titular head of state. He followed this by giving the Japanese people a new constitution with sweeping cultural, political, and economic reforms. His notable leadership would turn Japan into a world-class economic power and staunch ally of the United States.

Truman, Marshall and MacArthur were all born in the 1880s, and epitomized the moral leadership and executive restrain of the first half of the twentieth century, a time when the United States was still a tribal nation. They grew out of the soil of duty, country and the common good, virtues of America’s tribalism.

This tribalism was evident during the flu epidemic of 1918, splintered during the Great Depression of 1929, and again coalesced during World War II. Moral authority always emerged out of the tribe in crisis to show the way. That, too, would change.




America Loses its Moral Compass and its Way


From 1945 to 1960, the United States experienced unprecedented growth as it came to dominate world markets in automobiles, appliances, light fixtures, processed steel, and heavy equipment. Anybody who wanted a job could find a job anywhere in the nation.

However, what had led to victory in the war now became the villain of the peace. The villain was mass production and the assembly line. Now, everything was being mass-produced to realize the lowest possible price. This made it possible for the lowest paid assembly workers to be consummate consumers, first of their own products, and then everyone else’s. Consuming became the therapy for anxious Americans.

Out of this grew an appetite for more of everything for everyone. The mantra became “buy now, pay later,” as plastic credit cards were introduced. This allowed people to spend for things before they had earned the money to pay for them. Instant gratification killed the Protestant Work Ethic, which had glorified work and encouraged saving.

It was no accident that the United States, one of the richest nations in the world, would soon become the poorest saver. Nor would the profile stop there, as the nation would become one of the world’s greatest debtors. America was on a slippery slope, but there was no rush to band together to prevent the slide. Although the evidence was everywhere, there was little sense of crisis, and therefore even less moral leadership. The threat before was always visible, palpable, but now it was not. There was no tribal response because tribal leadership had disappeared.

Instead, wages and benefits of workers continued to escalate, while the girth of management ballooned. No position of authority seemed unachievable. Empire building became a routine activity of managers as they were paid on the basis of their direct reports. Greed became addictive to both workers and managers. Workers always wanted a higher hourly wage, and more benefits; managers wanted more perks, bigger bonuses, and endless promotions. Reality was not factored into this equation.

Incredibly, despite this trend the bond of trust between workers and managers remained in tact through the 1950s, primarily because of momentum of the war, and management’s inability to say “no” to wage and benefit demands of workers. The sky was the limit to an ever-expanding economy.

Then, in the 1960 – 1970 timeframe, many factors intervened. Europe was recovering nicely from the war, rebuilding its infrastructure and economy. Japan and Pacific Rim countries were producing quality products, and finding world markets. At home, veterans of World War II were taking advantage of the GI Bill and acquiring professional credentials in medicine, law, education, engineering, management, accounting, and manufacturing.

Upward mobility no longer was an American dream, but a constant fixation of a nation’s people on the move. By 1970, baby boomers, or children born after 1945, were receiving college educations at an impressive rate, and coming into the workforce. A college education was no longer a rarity in a family.

While a new professional class of American workers was emerging, the business climate was shrinking. Germany and Japan were manufacturing many of the products they once bought, and were now exporting them to the United States. Every fourth new automobile on American streets was foreign made.

A short seventy years before, 90 percent of Americans were farming. Now, only 4 percent called farming their occupation, and this number was shrinking fast.

An economic crisis not perceived was threatening the nation. How could that be? Times were too good, weren’t they?

Then in the late 1970s, OPEC launched an oil embargo, Iran held Americans hostage, and the nation spiraled down into double-digit inflation and double-digit unemployment. The bubble had burst. The United States believed itself invulnerable to what the rest of the world experienced. It could not fathom the idea of World War III being an economic war, and so it remained placid.

Professionals -- the Homeless Army of the Night

In this climate, Americans did not want to be reminded by their president that they had “a crisis in confidence.” These were not consoling words expected of a nation in denial. Progress was America’s most important product, was it not, and was not America custodian of progress?

Didn’t everyone envy America? Didn’t everyone want to be an American? Didn’t the world clamor for American products and American know how?

Ethnocentrism was not an American malady. It was an American mindset. Progress had, indeed, accelerated during the war, but it had super accelerated during the peace. By the 1980s, vanquished nations across the globe had caught up, and now enjoyed their own form of progress. Americans looked for any evidence to quiet their doubt.

They rushed to believe that the US military build up during the 1980s bankrupted the Soviet Union, which couldn’t keep pace, and collapsed the Iron Curtain. A more engaging possibility was that the US exercised influence on Saudi Arabia’s oil production in 1985. Saudi Arabia announced that it would no longer limit production to support oil prices. Oil prices plummeted seventy percent. Oil and gas exports kept the Soviet Union afloat for years. The fall of oil prices started its economic downfall. With that momentous collapse, Russian borders would shrink to what they had been in 1613.

But fixated on false readings of history can and has proven fatal to the American tribe.

To wit, managers and workers had come together with much synergy in a short miraculous four years (1941 – 1945), or during World War II. This miracle has become mythic and drenched in nostalgia. It still holds American enterprise hostage today with atavistic management and anachronistic workers with an organization to match.

Much of work today is conducted without a manager, while workers of the past no longer fit in the dominant scheme of things, replaced by robotics, computers of professionals.

Yet, it was during this brief mythic period that managers and workers understood each other, trusted each other, and were supportive of each other. They had the luxury of common identities and common bonds. Then professionals entered the mix, and everything should have changed, but didn’t, and that is why we are having the problems or organization today.

What is now apparent is that professionals are neither managers nor workers in the conventional sense.

Yet, professionals identify with management while displaying contempt for being grouped with workers. This has generated instinctive suspicions of their motives by both managers and workers, creating polarity and division, with the leadership and the tribe going their separate ways.

In a tribal sense, workers have always looked to the leadership to survive giving it the responsibility to worry about progress. This mindset does not sit well with professionals. Workers have taken the common sense approach to making their survival as pleasant as possible. Professionals have been forced to adapt to this but have done so resentfully.

Workers fit nicely into how Jeremy Bentham described the tribe in the late 18th century:

"Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand, the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne."

The rational guide for workers has been personal duty in accordance with company policy. They expected management to deal with things beyond their understanding, yielding to its tribal authority with loyalty, obedience and submissiveness. In return, they expected the company to provide them with security.

From workers’ perspective, the company had always been fair in the past and they trusted its leadership would be fair in the future. Trust was basic to their well being. Workers had little sense of business turmoil and even less interest. They took comfort in the sentiment, “That’s management’s problem.”

By the accident of being employed during the business boom following the war, however, they enjoyed middle class status without the involvement or commitment, pressure or anxiety of professionals. Paid an hourly wage, workers punched in, punched out, and forgot about it. Professionals, on salary, were expected to work limitless hours without additional compensation, and on occasion, even to take their work home with them.

The combination of a generous seniority system and a management reluctant to say “no” to their demands, workers often enjoyed comparable economic clout to professionals without the agony. This was unsettling to professionals. They had taken years to acquire their credentials, and now were being harrassed by creditors for unpaid student loans, which reminded them of their years of lost income, a predicament only other professionals would understand.

So, from the beginning, there developed antagonism between workers and professionals, implicit distrust and contempt for each other, and nearly a total lack of understanding of their complementary roles. Workers felt professionals punished them with their knowledge. Professionals felt workers had it made in the shade, and didn’t appreciate their sacrifices.

As for management, professionals distrusted it for its failure to appreciate and compensate them to the level of their worth.

The rational guide for professionals was to protect their self-interests and professional status, looking always for new opportunities. They expected to be involved in the decision-making process, and were inclined to be critical when their input was ignored. Accordingly, loyalty was first to self, then to their profession, and finally to their careers. If their current jobs enhanced their careers, all the better, but such status was never taken for granted. It was a marriage of convenience, never one of love.

While workers toiled in submissive collaboration with the leadership, professionals challenged the leadership at every turn, more often covertly than overtly. Professionals showed a distain for position power, while hungering for its perks. Curiously, a lack of interest in responsibility and accountability resembled that of workers. Yet, to suggest this comparison to professionals would drive them to anger. They believed knowledge power superseded position power, which had other demands and created other nuances.

When professionals came on the scene, the tribe was still the organization. They represented a foreign intrusion compared to management and workers as a common entity, a fact you might have thought they would have perceived.

Everything the tribe possessed, including the lives of the workers, was the implicit property of the company. The leadership of the company was not only symbolic, but the supreme recognized authority. Cooperation and harmony were dictated by the like-mindedness of individual workers complicit in this scheme.

Everything changed when professionals entered the mix. At the same time, nothing changed at all, and that is the problem. Professionals were assumed to be workers with a different colored shirt. They were expected to be loyal to their employer and to fall into line with the organization’s protocol, as workers had.

There was no sense that the value system of professionals might differ with that of workers in terms of authority, loyalty, discipline and motivation.

There was no attempt to treat them differently, or to develop a strategy to make them more agreeable to a tribal culture. Since workers had never questioned these dictates, professionals were expected to respond in kind to the reward and punishment system; to motivation by fear and intimidation; and to be polite, obedient, conforming, and submissive to the company’s rhetoric and policies consistent with workers. They weren’t.

From that point forward, the leadership lost the tribe, and derailed into leaderless leadership.


The Fall Out and Its Consequences

Why so? Eighty percent of the workers were now professionals, and as high as ninety percent of costs of a product were in indirect expensing. Put otherwise, four out of five workers, or more never touched the actual product manufactured, but were still treated as if they did. Work Without Managers (1990) addressed this problem, repeated it with The Worker, Alone! (1995), again with Six Silent Killers (1998), and finally with Corporate Sin (2000).

Earlier, a television program got the nation’s attention, but unfortunately, response to it took the country down another road to leaderless leadership.

Tom Brokaw of NBC television alerted the nation to a major US problem in his 1980 broadcast of “Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” He profiled Japan, Inc.’s growing market share of America’s automotive business. Japan was doing it with the quality technology developed by America’s Edwards W. Deming, J. M. Juran, and Peter Drucker.

This technology was spurned by American industry so they took it abroad. Detroit was too busy making huge gas-guzzlers to recognize that neither the roads of other countries nor their pocket books could accommodate their automobiles.

The technology in question was statistical quality control and total quality management. Industries across the country soon came to imitate Japanese quality control practices with quality control circles. Workers in these circles identified and solved work related problems relative to quality performance. There were several reasons why these practices became less effective in this country.

For one, Japan is a group-oriented society and groupthink is natural to its people. America is an individualistic society and less comfortable in an orchestrated setting such as quality circles.

Even a greater difference was the composition of the workforce. Eighty percent of Japanese workers were blue-collar workers acclimated to a feudalistic system where the feudal lords were now its management. Eighty percent of American workers in high tech companies in the 1980s were professionally trained, and found it demeaning to be programmed to such practices as if elementary school students.

I can attest to this fact as I directed the largest quality circle program in the country at the time in a 4,000-employee facility. More than eighty percent of the workers were professionals. They did not take to the quality circle approach to quality. However, workers in some 120 quality circles did appreciate the attention, and the opportunity to have some input into the design of their workstations. Unfortunately, they represented less than twenty percent of the workforce.

It is clear that panic set in when American markets disappeared. The Brokaw television program proved a wake up call, but failed to generate reflection and insight. Instead, it fed a fanatic frenzy to catch up.

A hodgepodge of human resources interventions followed designed to ignite performance by improved policies and procedures, empathic supervision, better working conditions, employee empowerment, as well as increased entitlement benefits and implicit security. Regarding the latter, “lifetime employment” became a buzz word. Unfortunately, none of these interventions were necessarily tied to improved performance. They became “givens.”

Consequently, workers went from being management dependent in a culture of comfort to counter dependent on the company in a culture of complacency with the company responsible for their total well being. Entitlements grew to rival the national debt without any perceptible improvement in productivity.

Meanwhile, professionals benefited from the company’s largesse but continued to bide their time, looking for escape. In the 1990s that came with the electronic boom, which continues to grow exponentially with the Internet, cell phones, lap tops, and every conceivable electronic invasive system. There are no secrets anymore for anything.

Some estimates have professionals spending as much as forty percent of company time today on personal business, using electronic equipment for personal advantage at the expense of the company.

This is not revenge but further evidence that the leadership has lost its tribe. The indiscipline of professionals, the lack of respect for authority, and general permissiveness are assumed to be phenomena of the 1970s. Actually, such conditions have never left enterprise. If anything, permissiveness continues to feed the chaos in which as Edmund Burke observed, “only force and appetite satisfy.”

Today, professionals in the full flush of their new prominence, see the leadership descending to their level. This plays out in their insolence towards the leadership no longer having any fear of it. The teacher now stands in awe of his pupil, the leader in awe of the professional. Knowledge speaks in tongues. As a result, the pupil and professional despise their teacher and leader, and so do pretty much as they please without fear of sanction or retribution.

Experience has come to count for little as young and old are equal, with the young ready to compete with the old in word and deed, while the old feebly imitate the young. So, what is the result of the leadership mimicking the professional? Leaderless leadership.

Can the Problem be Fixed?

Solidarity of authority had grown over 150 years in American society as it transitioned from an agrarian to an industrial society. It had no expectation of the present phenomenon of professionals differing with other workers, and therefore failed to understand the threat of a technological society of professionals.

It anticipated no impetiment to its harmony and tranquility, to its progress and productivity. How so? Because there was no precedence to follow, no models in which to compare its predicament. There are still none today. The United States is the lone nation with such a dynamic, needy, and demanding workforce of professionals as it still sets the bar in the new technological world.

That said the leadership failed to appreciate professionals as being unique even though emerging from the tribe, not outside it. It failed, too, to fathom the impact of a century of cataclysmic war and exploding technological development in the creation of this new order of professionals.

Workers from the beginning were instinctively suspicious of these interlopers, and still are. Deviation from the norm continues to disturb their equilibrium. The leadership was their link between work and that technological world. Now professionals own that world, and speak a language in jargon foreign to them, and have no reverence for their tribal home, its leadership or in fact, them, and now professionals intrude into every aspect of their daily lives.

Can it be fixed? A better question would be, do we have any choice?

Note: This article focuses on professionals in the United States, but similar problems are no doubt being experienced in technological societies in Europe, Canada, Latin America, Africa, and Asia as well.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. is an organizational development psychologist and author of several books in the genre. He is available for consulting and seminars throughout the world.