WHEN THE LEADERSHIP LOST THE TRIBE - PART TWO

When the Leadership Lost the Tribe – Part Two

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


To suggest that the advent of professionals in the organization has doomed the workplace to divisive separatism is easy to reject. Why so? The idea as a gradually definitive expression has no meaning as a concept taken out of context. That is the reason for this continuing elaboration.

Departure from a common goal where workers and managers once pulled together, but are now pulling apart is a cultural rather than a demographic condition. Look at an organization and there are managers, workers and professionals all seemingly working toward the same purpose in complementary functions. That is a demographic circumstance, which is hardly a cultural certainty.

The sentiments of traditional workers and managers are deep-rooted and ineradicable in the human psyche that borders the traditional organization consciousness overriding demographic borders. They once melted into a common entity, but a wedge has driven them apart with the intrusive presence of professionals. Professionals have little history and have ridden the tsunami of technological development. In other words, there hasn’t been time for integration, but worse yet, there hasn’t been a mind, will, or belief that such integration might be necessary.

Managers and workers have diverse but complementary roles. Their relationship does not depend on individual rights or shared powers so much as on security for the way they contribute to each other’s success and therefore the organization’s.

Power, and again I am speaking in traditional terms, does not reside in their numbers, but in the sovereignty and synergy they display toward a shared purpose.

Put another way, managers and workers are a common resource in which power or clout or control, call it what you like, is manifested in the right of each individual worker and manager to enjoy the freedom to contribute with a sense of identity and dignity toward a common purpose.

With apologies to the discipline of physics, resources and purpose are not unlike mass and energy, that is, expressions of the same thing but in differing states. We know, for example, that a common pencil has the condense mass to release the energy equivalent to a nuclear bomb. Likewise, when the condense resources of an organization are converted to a common purpose the resultant energy released is not a one-to-one ratio, but could easily be a one-to-one hundred result. Just as human intelligence is reported by social scientists to represent a manifest 10 percent of an individual’s latent capacity the phenomenon of resources to purpose has an even more incredible potential.

The failure to think in such terms has been delimiting. Now, with the advent of professionals on the scene, whom I see presently disruptive to organizational purposes, and contributory to the disconnect between the leadership and the tribe, mainly because of leadership’s failure to launch a meaningful integration process, the potential might be an incredible one-to-a-thousand outcome. Imagine what an organization could do with its people if it understood this possibility.

Too much time is spent on quantitative design and chronological time, and not enough attention is given to qualitative results and psychological time. Design is destiny, and thus general principles have a universal validity.

Alas, the leadership has lost the tribe because of flawed assumptions. It has been too dependent on a philosophy of human resources management that asserts that different people – in this case I am referring to managers, workers and professionals – can and must work in constant harmony, and that this will be experienced only if each group is free to maintain those unique qualities, features and characteristics that are in accord with their interpretation of their separate identities. Keep reminding a manager, worker and professional of such differences and he will use it against the leadership and organization at every turn. Conversely, emphasize a common design and destiny and sovereignty and synergy result.

Harmony has been pursued at the expense of honesty, failing to recognize or acknowledge that harmony remains essentially at the expense of conflict avoidance. Conflict is a natural phenomenon and expression of honesty. The management of conflict is the glue that holds an organization to its purposes. By channeling the explosive dynamic of human conflict, the condensed energy of the collective resources of managers, workers and professionals explode into manifest destiny. Every organization I insist, barring none, has the creative verve compacted, latent and not yet manifested to surprise the world.

The proposition that professionals are a separate resource is a priori false; since its predicate falls outside the meaning of the subject, work.

The sickness of the complex organization is a symptom of a world sickness that can and must be cured and only by the medicine of sanity, justice, tolerance and understanding that work, workers, and the workplace have changed forever. It will never again be the same as the nineteenth century model upon which everything in society is built, and stubbornly remains the context of the disenchantment of the West and its leaders.

It is this, which has created the gulf between the leadership and the tribe. The complex organization has evolved with its new style of professionals, while continuing to operate as if nothing has changed in the husbanding of its resources or pursuant to its purposes. This is not a manifestation of leadership pigheadedness, or resentment of advice from organization observers. It is more basic.

Leadership sees itself as a separate entity to the followership, that it is ordained by its role to pursue what it thinks is where the organization should go and that the followers should fall in line with that mindset. It feels that leadership accords it the privilege of rank to disregard the inexorable human realities that surround it to focus on a higher purpose, of which it, alone, is privy. This mindset is never present in the rhetoric, but is manifested in the reality.

That said the primary duty of the leadership is to pay attention to the actual conditions which confront it, internally and externally, and to identify them, and to sort them out, and attempt to understand the pieces of this giant human zig-saw puzzle.

I have no doubt that such a process of sorting out to re-establish connection of the leadership with the tribe is a precondition for the success of any organizational policy.

A social scientist can provoke thought, but he cannot guarantee action. Only the leadership is equipped to do this. The leadership deals with the real world, but it cannot succeed unless and until the culture is brought to fruition with the greatest efficacy. Boldness is called. We have seen in recent times that the intellect would as soon consort with violence as with virtue. We have it on the good authority of the mild-mannered Scottish philosopher, David Hume:

“When a passion is neither founded on false suppositions nor chooses means insufficient for the end, the understanding can neither justify it nor condemn it. It is not contrary to Reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”

The organization doesn’t need saviors, nor does it need crusaders. It needs leaders to engage the role of leadership, to push for maturity in managers, workers and professionals alike, to demand a good day’s work for a good day’s pay, to see that everybody is responsible for the consequences of their actions indiscriminately, and finally, to move away from the froth of pseudo-liberal effusion which has cursed the organization for nigh on a century now. Design is destiny, and it rides on fairness.

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See reference to Dr. Fisher’s books and articles on his website: www.peripateticphilosopher.com, and his blog: peripateticphilosopher.blogspot.com. He is available for consultation and consulting.