THE TWENTY-FIFTH (25TH) ANNIVERSARY OF DR. FISHER'S CAREER CHANGING SPEECH -- PART THREE

THE TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY OF DR. FISHER’S CAREER CHANGING SPEECH – PART THREE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 30, 2009

REFERENCE: 1984 DCAS FORUM, FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 1984, CARIBBEAN GULF RESORT, CLEARWATER BEACH, FLORIDA 33515

“PARTICIPATIVE MANAGEMENT – AN ADVERSARY POINT OF VIEW”

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REFERENCE TO PART THREE:

This third part of the March 30, 1984 speech deals with the disposition of American management, and the habits of organization which have come to dictate organization behavior, which has often operated at cross purposes to its intended function.

At the time of this speech, I had spent precisely (almost to the day) four years in the trenches of this 4,000 employee high-tech facility of Honeywell Avionics, a company primarily in the Department of Defense (DOD) and NASA business.

This was the Reagan Years with the president a gladiator of the first rank from "Star Wars" to conventional weapon production. The Defense Budget as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was the greatest in peacetime, if you can call the "Cold War" peacetime.

My career before Honeywell had been two years as a chemist (Standard Brands), ten years as an international executive (Nalco Chemical), and ten years as adjunct professor and self-employed national consultant.

I mention this here because my career was essentially in line operations versus staff administration, or in the direct doing versus the indirect serving function. Moreover, I had never before operated in a closed bureaucratic environment. I had an office, to be sure, but was mostly on the road where I didn't have to attend meetings, which I abhorred, or play pyramid climbing games, which I thought childish and counterproductive.

Remarkably, I had spent my entire career, with the exception of being a chemist, as a free wheeling on-my-own boss not confined to an office, and largely flying across the continent or about the world by the seat of my pants.

I was used to being judged on the product I delivered without filters or litmus tests. My success or failure was not judged by a committee but by unambiguous results.

Honeywell was a new experience. I was pushed in doors into a confined space -- a beautifully appointed campus to be sure -- where politics, pettiness, posturing, and pretense were par for the course.

Here most of the day was spent in coffee breaks -- the campus had two giant cafeterias always open -- talking on the phone to family or friends, flirting with each other planning assignations, or staying in shape -- the campus had a complete recreation center with basketball and handball courts.

It was in a word, a "playground," where work was incidental to the process. This was a new experience and went against the grain of my whole career.

As remarkable as all this was, having earned a Ph.D. in organization-industrial psychology (O/I), and knowing how much my graduate education was "prescriptive truth," I saw it manifested here in spades in what I called "donkey programs," a euphemism for a stronger sobriquet. I write about them and this in this segment.

"Participative Management" was the quintessential essence of this phenomenon. So, when asked to be the keynote speaker, and receiving carte blanche to say as I desired, I went to work writing what is appearing here in four parts. It is amazing in republishing this document 25 years later, how little (if any) human progress we have made in practical matters of conduct.

This brings me to mentioning two types of truth, which do not appear in the body of this work, but which are implied. They are "prescriptive truth," which dominates our times, and "descriptive truth," which is the order of my OD discipline.

"Prescriptive truth" dominates talking heads of the day as well as our president in terms of the current social, political and economic meltdown of our society. It is not the same as "descriptive truth," which is the agreement or conformity of the mind with reality, or with "what is."

"Prescriptive truth" does not have to conform to the way things are but rather conforms to our appetites.

The word "ought" is prominent with "prescriptive truth": we "ought" to treat workers fairly, we "ought" to pay a fair wage, we "ought" to provide job security, we "ought" to see everyone has health insurance, etc. Ethics deals with "prescriptive truth," which is a cacophony of "oughts."

"Prescriptive truth" is right and good and idealistic, and humanistic and all that, but organizational development (OD) is not about "oughts," but about "what is" and "what is not."

I don't mean to get too technical here, but I want the reader to appreciate there is a consistency to my research over the past forty years, and its relevance is not to the "winning of friends" or even in the "influencing of people," but in reminding those who read me that "descriptive truth" is what I am about.

I tell readers when the train is off the track. I remind them of the pusillanimity of cosmetic interventions, which change nothing but only postpone the inevitable -- we are in that inevitability now.

Ethics is important. I'm not discounting ethics. But I am saying this:

In light of the definition of "prescriptive truth" as conformity with the right desire, we can see that prescriptions are true only when they enjoin us "to want" what "we need," and not the other way around.

"Oughts" got us into the current economic mess. In November 2000, President Clinton's HUD department provided $2.4 trillion in mortgages for affordable housing for 28.1 million families because every American "ought" to be able to be a homeowner.

The vehicles for this were Fannie Mae and Freddie Max. It was the largest expansion of housing ever, the brainchild of think tanks, liberals, academics, and lobbyist in the "prescriptive truth" arena. Want trumpeted over need. Need I say more?
JRF


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THE SEARCH FOR A QUICK CURE

Alas, the modern worker is a new entity to the organization. He is different from his predecessors in terms of self-confidence, security, skill, education, and sophistication. He also has different values, beliefs and expectations. In a word, he can separate the bull from the blarney, what is said from “what is.”

He has power. His power is knowledge. He is self-motivated, self-managed, and mature. He is the new kid on the block.

Meanwhile, he comes into an organization that is preconditioned to manage the timid, the insecure, the unskilled, the undereducated, and the naïve. This organization is equipped to demand, to direct, to intimidate, and to dominate on the one hand, and to protect, to exercise, to comfort, to patronize, and to please on the other.

Institutionally, the family, the church, the school, and the community support the complex organization in these endeavors. Each actually mirrors the other. And each in its special way adds to the non-responsibility of the individual for his own actions. For each in its own way, protects him from himself, and from frontal experiences or from dealing with what “he is.”

Instead, each substitutes a potpourri of confusing prescriptions for what it believes aids him, from family activities to more prayer, from more education to more community services. The emphasis is always on “more” or “better.” Meanwhile, good as these answers sound, his dilemma grows more acute. For what is said and what is done remain worlds apart.

So, at the opposite extremes, a workforce gravitates from fierce independence to nearly groveling dependence, from awareness of its power (knowledge) to the ignorance of its miseducation (wrong skills), from captains of its destiny to nervous victims of its fate. This is the context of “now.” This is the dilemma of the modern complex organization.

Into this vacuum, the prescription writers of the day have written simplistic messages across the sky. And disillusioned executives have grabbed these messages as if they were “the sacred tablets.” Item:

Deal and Kennedy in “Corporate Culture” (1982) see the problem in terms of knowing what the company stands for; Waterman and Peters “In Search of Excellence” see the imitation of a few successful companies as the magic formula for us all; even Naisbitt in “Megatrends” (1982) sees transformational visions beyond the pale of the cockeyed optimist; and Blanchard and Johnson in “The One Minute Manager” (1982) see a prescription so simple for success that even an animal can respond to its wisdom.

Prescriptions all, they fail again to deal with the dilemma of all such books. For example, diet books of this genre don’t change beliefs because they don’t deal with the cause, which is “people eat too much.” And why do they eat too much? Because eating too much becomes a coping mechanism, and coping mechanisms are needed because of imagined or real tensions.

Likewise, the modern organization is in a fit of distemper because it is attempting to deal with organizational problems without dealing with organizational habits. These habits I will address now and then return to how we might deal with the new mix of modern worker with the traditional worker, along with some comments of what has to happen in the home, school, church and community to make improvement permanent.

ORGANIZATIONAL HABIT NO. 1: EMPHASIS ON TOP DOWN COMMUNICATION OF DIRECTIVES

For openers, there is a specific function of top management, and that is strategic planning and strategic communications. Operationally, top management is the last to know with the least valid information and strategies. There must be, of necessity, then, bottom up management in terms of technology, problem solving, productivity, and participation issues.

Top down management is important to communicate where the company is going, how it plans to get there, as well as what the company stands for and values. This means the company communicates its “religion of being,” which is its philosophy. Its nature and personality. Its role and its resources. That is all. Otherwise, its role is largely symbolic, that is, with more importance in “what it is” rather than “what it does.” It is the perception of leadership that is so critical here, not actual leadership. The reason for this is quite simple.

The power is not in the boardroom. It is not in the stockholders. It is not even in management. It is in the “knowledge workers” and they are distributed throughout the tree.

Am I saying that management as a strategic factor is not important? Of course not. I am simply suggesting that management has changed. But managers are still acting as if it were the way it has always been, which it is not.

One of the symptoms of this chronic disease is the seemingly forever never-ending process of reorganization. The theory being, “It is better to do something than to do nothing.” Again, when reorganization is initiated at the top with compliance from the rest of the tree it is doing it the old way, which is the hard way and the wrong way.

Another chronic symptom of this disease is to do now and think later. It cannot be emphasized too much how great if not unbearable the urge to do something when crisis occurs. Showing little inclination and less patience with defining the problem, or the purpose of the strategy, or to contemplate the possible outcomes, or options, or alternatives should the plan go awry, the tendency is to go forward at all cost, and hope like hell it works.

There is no suitable mechanism in place to filter the ideas. Moreover, brainstorming, which is a process of collecting ideas without evaluation, is seldom practiced in its prescient form. Ideas are no sooner out on the table, and someone steps on them, thus cutting off all further contributions of any quality.

Top down communication, which is top management’s greatest concern, is done poorly. Either too much and too many ideas are launched to the utter confusion of the population, or not enough relevant information is disseminated. There is a simple rule, which could improve this process considerably:

(1) People are primarily interested in information that directly affects their work, their work area, their pay, their benefits, their vacation schedule, and their future, that is, information, which impacts them directly, and their lives.

(2) People are seldom interested in such matters as return on investment, capitalization flow, new business going into or old businesses getting out of unless the first rule of information applies to them directly.

ORGANIZATIONAL HABIT NO. 2: MANAGEMENT BY OBJECTIVES (MBOs)

Management by Objectives (MBOs), as it is practices, is redundant, counterproductive, and a waste of time, talent, and energy because it obfuscates the reality of work. When the workforce concentrates on “its” objectives, it is usually at the expense of the objectives of significant others in the selfsame workforce.

As matters now stand, since objectives invariably are vertically generated, from the top of the tree down, they appear, in terms of logic, to be cognitively sound, realistic, and systematic. But behaviorally speaking, in point of fact, they are the primary contributor to chaos, idiotic redundancy, sandbagging and disharmony.

There are two basic reasons why MBOs do not work:

(1) These vertically generated objectives are not integrated horizontally;
(2) These objectives are owned by management and not by the workforce.

The failure to integrate the objectives horizontally has resulted in each functional group going for broke to attain their objectives, and “be dammed” the rest of the crew. Incredibly, a common expression one hears is, “Horizontal objectives are not meant to be integrated.” Recently, when I asked someone why, he looked at me incredulously, “Because that is the way the system was designed.”

Apparently, someone somewhere got the idea that the complex organization, in order to function smoothly, needed a bureaucratically driven system of checks and balances to keep the organization on course. But what was created is tantamount to a roadmap for a cross-country land trip in an automobile when the organization finds itself in the middle of the ocean.

For another, management would seem to have disregarded the fact that the workforce is objective conscious if not objective driven. Virtually every hour of the worker’s day is planned for he cannot live without objectives. Granted, these objectives may be broad based, nonspecific, or at least related to his perceived self-interest. But management, instead of taking advantage of this propensity, imposes its will on the worker with MBOs.

Moreover, failing to believe that the worker can operate without supreme guidance, it breaks down objectives into minuscule fragments. Then it orchestrates what is called a “shared ownership of the objectives.” Since this is mainly a con-sultative (with the emphasis on “con”) process, it is hardly ever effective. Add to this the fact that a worker can accomplish 100 percent of his objectives and still fail to do a good job. And you have the basis of the case against the practice. MBOs, on balance then, are simply the wrong device for the present organization.

Another rule of the organization is this:

(1) The lower the skill level and education of the workforce the higher the need for structure, for formality, and for well defined norms.
(2) The higher the skill level and education of the workforce the less the need for rules, policies, procedures, for norms, formally structured and promulgated.

Obviously, the workforce is becoming every bit if not more sophisticated than management. Therefore, should the organization institute a highly structured climate, which goes in the face of the self-esteem of a professional workforce, the behaviors that are likely albeit invisible are nonetheless debilitating:

PASSIVE AGGRESSION: The worker will do as little as he has to do to get by, not as much as he is capable of doing. He will comply with what is asked of him. Compliance is the reaction of coercion. Cooperation is the reaction of free will. He will test the system, the standards, the rules, the polices and procedures as a child would test them. He will come in as late as he can get by with coming in, and he will leave as early as he possibly can.

APPROACH AVOIDANCE: He will accept assignments and objectives which he has no intention of completing. He will say what you want to hear and then do otherwise. He will have contempt for you and your assignments, but will not confront you with his displeasure. He will demonstrate it in his behavior.

MALICOUS OBEDIENCE: He will only give the information you ask for, not necessarily the information you need. He will withhold his special knowledge as a form of protest for the way he is being treated. Conversely, should you give him an assignment which he know is dumb or designed to fail, he will do it to the letter secretly chuckling to himself all the while as he sees it going up in smoke, your smoke.

OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE: He becomes preoccupied with what he doesn’t have, or cannot be. It can be an obsession with organizational perks, the pay system, the promotional process, the preferential treatment of some people, the way business is conducted, etc. Always, it is away from what he is paid to do, and robs him of precious energy and accurate perception of “what is.”

These are invisible behaviors, which manifest themselves, however, in very real terms on the bottom line.

ORGANIZATIONAL HABIT NO. 3: THE NONCONFRONTATIONAL STYLE OF MANAGEMENT

If participative management is anything it is confrontational management. It is nipping the problem in the bud before it exacerbates into a catastrophe. It is determining who owns the problem. It is management and the workforce leveling with each other with what they both can live with. It is creating a “win-win” situation, which requires guts, gumption and gusto on the part of both management and the workforce.

Ironically, one of the reasons management is nonconfrontational is because it cares about the feelings of its people. Like a dutiful parent, management doesn’t enjoy hurting people’s feelings. Moreover, management doesn’t enjoy being the messenger of bad news. Actually, it doesn’t enjoy upsetting the decorum and appearance of tranquility.

Meanwhile, as pointed out in the previous illustration, the hurt festers, and ultimately ruptures at the most inopportune of times. This is because, on the part of management and the workforce alike, there is a tendency to protest infrequently but violently when wrongs (alleged or real) are experienced.

Consider this in face of the fact that people like to know where they stand. And where they stand is as much a mystery to management as it is to them.

I have documented literally hundreds of cases of poor performance in which the worker was not only unaware of his poor performance, but also, as incredible as it may seem, displayed a performance appraisal history which read as if he was an exemplary employee. Yet, ask anyone who worked with him, and they “knew” what a poor performer he was. He, of course, was the last to get the word.

You might say, “Come on now, anyone who isn’t pulling his weight knows it.” Not true. All of us like to think what we want to think. Psychologists call this cognitive dissonance. We change information around to fit our preconceived notions about ourselves. So, over time, we come to believe our self-delusions. We magnify this reinforcement of poor performance as actually being reinforcement of good performance. Consequently, we “believe” we deserve the same increases as the outstanding workers. In fact, when promotions are made, we are apt to be the first ones to cry, “foul” because we weren’t promoted to the disbelief of everyone.

Because of this non-confrontational behavior, the organization operates in somewhat hypocritical terms. It states that it pays for performance, when it actually pays for people behaving. It states that it strives for excellence, when it actually strives for conformity to a set of arbitrary norms. It states that people are to be responsible and accountable for their work, when it shields them from ownership and therefore commitment. Ultimately, what it pays for it gets, mediocre performance with management carrying the workforce rather than the workforce carrying management.

ORGANIZATIONAL HABIT NO. 4: MANAGEMENT MANAGES THE WAY IT IS PAID

If management’s pay is predicated on costs, schedules, and objectives, that is what the organization gets, often at the expense of people. It doesn’t take a management genius to recognize that costs and profits and tasks are more important to the organization than its people are.

In point of reference, how much time does a manager spend with his people in coaching and counseling them? Additionally, how much time does he spend in career conversations with them?

Usually, this is answered between “little” and “none.”

The emphasis is put on the bottom line, not on people. Since this is so, workers commonly see the bottom line as “management’s problem,” not theirs. Imagine what might happen if managers were paid on the basis of their success in developing people. What would this mean in terms of individual growth and contribution to the organization?

Short term wise, obviously the bottom line would suffer. But over time, the return on the individual (ROI) could be a tenfold investment. If you need a reference, look at the Japanese who openly boast of putting people above profits. Whether they do or not is immaterial, it is the perception of what they do, and the net results of this perception that counts.

Likewise, one of the most common problems in high technology organizations is obsolescent skill. Technology is changing so rapidly that the half-life of an engineer is no more than five years without technical training. But this is also true of virtually all the disciplines, which support engineering.

Even so, a conservative estimate places the competency level of the technical organization precariously near marginal because of the organization’s failure to reward the development of people. What the organization invariably does is periodically and frantically recruits new people, while it shelves people already experienced but who are no longer fully operational.

This escalates personnel costs but does broader damage to the morale and motivation of the workforce. It is mind boggling to consider the complacency with which organizations accepts spiraling costs of personnel, and does little if anything to combat it.

Yet, the fact remains that management’s chief role is that of people development, and not the costs or schedules or tasks. These are the domains of the self-managed worker. Train the worker so that he is comfortable and competent in the discharge of his ever changing and demanding work, and he will reward you with performance that belies your obsession with the bottom line. For when it is no longer “your” bottom line, but his, he literally “becomes the company!”

ORGANIZATIONAL HABIT NO. 5: MANAGEMENT HAS LOST ITS SELF-CONFIDENCE. THE RESULT IS A RASPUTINIAN DEPENDENCE ON HUMAN RESOURCES TYPES

In my twenty-year career as an educator and consultant, I have witnessed a remarkable phenomenon. The complex organization has become hemophilic with the corporate powers that be desperately searching for a cure.

Enter Rasputin. Grigori Efimovich Rasputin, you may recall, was the Serbian peasant monk, who was very influential at the Russian court of Czar Nicholas III, and Czarina Alexandria, because of the hemophilia suffered by their only son.

In the garb of a relatively obscure new academic discipline, complete with a catchy vocabulary, a new reason to hope for a quick cure has arrived. Without fully understanding the disease much less the symptoms, the discipline of organizational development (OD), and human resources (HR) management, which is actually an inter-disciplinarian montage of management science, psychology, sociology, and anthropology, has assumed the role of savant if not savior.

Management, in any case, feeling the acute pain of international competition, and decaying plants, obsolescent technologies, demotivated workers, and dwindling markets at home and abroad, has felt its life blood seeping through its corporate pores, unchecked. It has experienced a kind of debility of which it has had no prior knowledge. Perhaps for the first time “survival” is a presaged concern.

What management has done, is doing and doubtless will continue to do to stop this incessant bleeding has been prescribed by this new army of behavioral technologists: from Quality of Life Programs to Quality of Work Issues, from new management styles to new constructions of organization. This army collects the blood from donors and manages the transfusions. Indeed, management, with rate exception, has carried out the every wish of these Rasputin zealots:

(1) OD/HR: “You need more training.” Mgmt.: “Give them more training.”
(2) OD/HR: “You need to survey them.” Mgmt.: “Well, survey them.”
(3) OD/HR: “You should change your management style.” Mgmt.: “We’ll change our management style.”
(4) OD/HR: “You need more facilitators, internal consultants.” Mgmt.: “Then get them.”
(5) OD/HR: “You need more non-work work programs.” Mgmt.: “So be it.”
(6) OD/HR: “The workers should share in the power and the wealth of the organizations.” Mgmt.: “Welll….we’ll think about that.”

There is rapt attention until the recommendation involves “real power,” which in the organizational sense is ultimately the power of ownership, real ownership. At this point, there is a good chance management will balk. Why? Because all of the recommendations before were largely cosmetic, that is, “hygiene factors,” or external to the individual. These factors may change the level of satisfaction of the worker, but not his level of motivation. Moreover, these factors would not require any real change in the status quo of the organization.

Put more bluntly, the OD psychologist and management may have been partners in duplicity, perhaps innocent partners, but nonetheless partners. The OD psychologist has played surrogate to management to administer a process that management admittedly needed guidance in executing, but which it has shown little inclination in assuming on its own. To wit:

Reference:

The primary role of the OD psychologist is to help the worker get out of his own way so that he can get on with the job he is paid to do.

Comment No. 1:

This is the defined responsibility of management. What the presence of the OD consultant indicates is that the manager is not comfortable or confident that he can accomplish this if money or fear fail to motivate the worker.

Comment No. 2:

The OD consultant seeks information by walking around and talking to sensors, that is, workers who epitomize the feelings of the group. He communicates this to management along with how he thinks management should respond to these data. His recommendations are largely the direct input of the sensors. Management finds this brilliant and awards the OD consultant accordingly. Management engaging in the same activity could have truncated this elongated process.

Comment No. 3:

The OD consultant knows that the shortest distance between two points of view is active listening. Were management to do this more effectively it would reduce costs and improve output substantially. But management being busy with things (technology) is more apt to judge the pedigree of the talker than the quality of the thought. What this does to workers in the trenches is makes them cynics and distrustful of the management process, which in turn makes management more reluctant to engage the worker population in discussion.

Interestingly enough, the workforce sees the OD consultant as an inevitable buffer that management has created to avoid dealing directly with the problems of the worker. Consequently, it trusts the OD consultant with good humor if not respect.

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These comments should not be misconstrued as evidence that there is no place for OD study, or OD design in the organization. What I am registering is my concern that management is treating OD as if it were a strategy of the last resort. Remember, legitimate medical doctors told the Czar and Czarina that there was no hope for a quick cure for their hemophilic son. Enter Rasputin, a man of suspect credentials and even more suspect motivation.

To draw the analogy closer, universities are pouring out OD trained specialists at an amazing rate. They are well schooled in the social and behavior sciences, but they are horribly lacking in empirical skills, that is, in life experiences. Therefore, their credentials, as good as they may be, are suspect. Why?

Because the unusual nature of OD demands that the person experience the organization first, that is, live in the trenches, not as “what I did on vacation” exercises, but as real experiences. He needs to labor in the organization, fight for priorities, recognition, and achievement like those he would study. He needs to succeed in acquiring some power. Then to manage people, juggling this exercise with managing a budget and meeting task demands such as costs, schedules and quality issues.

In short, before an OD consultant should draw his first dime as an internal consultant, he should get experience of that which he would call himself expert. Then before he still settles into the organization, he should test his mettle in consulting, where his survival is predicated on how convincing he is to his respective clients. On balance, book learning, as important as it is, represents only a very small part of the preparation for this career; a career, which I repeat, should evaporate once the manager functions as his own OD consultant.

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© Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. This is the third segment of a multi-segment reintroduction of “Participative Management: An Adversary Point of View,” which was presented on March 30, 1984, or twenty-five years ago. The fourth and final segment will conclude with the last five organizational habits. The speech is being presented exactly as it was give a quarter century ago.