The Conundrum of
Leaderless Leadership and
Dissonant Workers

Something Is Wrong!

We all feel it. There is something fundamentally wrong in the workplace, wrong between workers and management. Mainly, despite lofty expectations, the new and growing majority class of workers has failed to achieve lift-off. As a whole, professional workers have failed to assert themselves with conviction.  Sadly, this enormously capable segment of the workforce seems content to linger in the bosom of comfort; more concerned with protecting positions, than forging careers; more focused on reaping than the sowing, more fascinated with the present than excited about the future.

Frustratingly, professionals have shown little inclination to self-manage. They do complain however, and often with reason, but seldom with any purpose in mind, seldom with conviction.  Instead, professionals have shown they highly esteem the traditional hierarchies of corporations, being obsessed with surmounting the corporate gauntlet for the promise of power and prestige. What they fail to see however, these relics of position power are about to vanish. Traditional management methods and structures, although pervasive, are now obsolete.  In the context of a professional workforce, industrial age management techniques are old technology.  Unfortunately, when professionals aspire to be managers, they abandon their own province of expertise, and enter a realm where the essential tools and methods of their discipline, their craft, are superfluous and potentially a handicap.

Assigning Blame

We could throw the blame on managers for creating this problem; management methods specifically, and we would be right; partly right that is. And, most people would not argue. But that would be letting professional workers off the hook. We would be saying, in essence, that professional workers are allowed to forego personal and professional obligations the moment they become employees. That is, each day as he or she walks through the office door to work, miraculously, a professional worker transforms from responsible adult, to obedient child. We cannot, in conscience, condone such a deliberate renunciation of obligation.

Where Professionals Go Wrong

As the management track dissolves into a phantom ladder, managers continue to be paid more than professionals. This unsettles professional workers, who seem not to know what to do about it. So, they wait, indefinitely, to be rescued by a miraculous paradigm shift at no cost to themselves.

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)

The function of work has changed, yet the structures around work remain the same. Inevitably, seeds of dissatisfaction are sown, provoking frustration. Like a crippled giant unable to walk, legions of professionals seemingly cannot find their legs. They possess the necessary skills, but not the courage to become self-directed, to stand on their own two feet. They are a product of outmoded human programming and they remain externally directed rather than self-directed, passive rather than engaged. Pathetically, they look to others for the solutions they alone possess. The new reality is that professionals must strive, are expected to enhance their talents and their places of work.

In tandem, companies struggle in a state of insecurity, wandering in a new wilderness. In business, there are no guarantees anymore, if there ever were. Nevertheless, certainties are still sought and expected, while the sustaining rhetoric persists. This merely adds to the confusion.

The Delicate Balance of Purposeful Work

We are a corporatist society and, accordingly, the waste of human capital and individual talent, in total, is a grave corporate sin. It is the reason for this book. Corporations, on the whole, do not understand how to leverage or develop their people, to maximize human potential and thus maximize their own. What is required is nothing less than a revolution; creative, courageous, leaders acting as architects of healthy, supportive work cultures. At the outset, corporate leaders, managers and directors, must:

(1)   Reject the notion that there is as a single ideal corporate workplace culture. Suspend the outside search for the model workplace culture. It doesn’t exist;

(2)   Devote energy and talents to the business of creating a beneficial work culture;

(3)   Accept that the impetus for change invariably comes from the trenches not from mahogany row. People on the front lines have less to lose, and therefore are eager for change;

(4)   Realize that people near the top, corporate executives, feel they have everything to lose by  surrendering the status quo;

(5)   Appreciate that we are in the midst of a quiet revolution, in which not only the color of workers’ collars is changing, but also the complexion of individual and collective will;

(6)   Understand the key to purposeful performance is a culture of contribution; adults, not obedient children directing the activities of work; their work;

(7)   View the pursuit of the optimal work environment as a work in progress characterized by ongoing change, experimentation and adaptation; not a remedial program or fixed goal;

(8)   Admit that management fumbled the ball by vigorously defending the status quo and business as usual practices, disconnecting from reality and respectful engagement.

Although disturbances representing the need for systemic change naturally bubble up from the bottom, the professed architects of change invariably emerge at the top. Since gridlock and stalemate are the bitter fruit of top-down change initiatives, corporate sin, the wasting of professional talent, continues unabated.

Historical Context

When the twentieth century dawned, ninety percent of workers were employed in agriculture. The working guilds of craftsmen and artisans were still very much in place. Work was primarily in small groups with no hierarchy, position power or remote authority. Hand tools were used to make finished products. The collaborative corporate model was not yet in evidence. Job descriptions and role identity had to await the arrival of social engineers to create the nomenclature.

The Industrial Revolution was about to take off with rail, plane and ship transportation connecting markets near and far. The world was exploding with new inventions among which were the radio, telephones, airplanes, motion pictures, automobiles and electric power plants. Industrial centers were hastily created in urban areas hungry for bodies to run their factories causing a rapid shift of workers from the farm to the city.

In 1914, World War I broke out in Europe. This fueled a new iteration of technological development. The Panama Canal was finished and opened. Robert Goddard successfully launched a liquid oxygen and gasoline rocket. Weapons of war became more sophisticated with German submarines and Allied attack planes and battleships. Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington founded theoretical astrophysics. David Wark Griffith turned motion pictures from a curiosity into a viable new 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 new 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.

In the wake of the “Great War,” the war meant to end all wars, inconceivable prosperity turned into reckless indulgence against a backdrop of pervasive cynicism. Artists and writers, portraying themselves as members of the “Lost Generation," proclaimed the death of culture while flappers and their beaus embraced the “Roaring Twenties,” dancing the Charleston all night to a Jazz Age beat. That is, until the party ended in 1929 with the stock market crash on Wall Street, reverberating around the world, and triggering the Great Depression.

Against this backdrop, a new business class was emerging. Small guilds of tool and die makers, fixture manufacturers, machine shop operators, and electrical component makers were merging into larger enterprises. They spawned corporations such as General Motors, Ford Motor, General Electric, Western Electric, Westinghouse, and American Telephone and Telegraph. These companies were financed with common stock issued to private investors who became absentee owners with no direct connection to company operations. Enter the management class.

Few former guild operators would emerge in control of operations as Henry Ford and Thomas Edison did. Managers were hired to oversee operations and boards of directors were created to set company policies. Workers were introduced to a new concept of repetitive “piece work.” This would turn into the assembly line of mass production refined by Henry Ford in the manufacture of his Model T and Model A Ford.

Once wealth creators such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison stepped away from daily operations, executives in management roles, often members of the family, replaced them. These executives were employees, the same as all workers, family members or not, but quickly gravitated to the psychological identity of owners. To be fair, this was true to a point as part of executive compensation was in company stock. In contrast to this mentality, although 80 percent of employees are likely to own company stock today, few think as owners.

With the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s, everyone suffered from the economic collapse, but none more than the poor. They had been forced into cities to work in factories isolating them from the land. Now, they were without jobs, no longer having farm properties to call home. Millions wandered the country with their families looking for work. John Steinbeck captures their plight in The Grapes of Wrath (1939), a powerful indictment of capitalistic society highlighting the dangerous chasm between the rich and the poor.

Even employed workers were likely to live in hovels in city slums. Children as young as eight worked alongside adults in factories. Working conditions were horrific. Serious accidents and even deaths on the job were common. Workers had no medical benefits, unemployment compensation, or recourse to sue their employers. They were the working poor, the underclass, and came to see themselves as society’s victims.

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

The growing interdependence of the nations of the world was apparent as economic chaos swept the globe. The resulting societal turbulence proved fertile soil for the rooting of fascism in Germany and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in 1933. The 1930s ended with Germany invading Poland. History’s greatest conflict was set to begin as World War II. It was not America’s war until a surprise attack.

On December 7, 1941, the naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on the United States 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 women and 100 civilians were killed. A slumbering giant became aroused.

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 America’s and American management’s finest hour.

Hence, World War II established the management class, as we know it today. It took pride in the critical role it played in the war, and now it felt a license to exercise its muscle.

Management gurus surfaced dispensing corporate blueprints that defined the corporation as an entity housed in a central authority dispatching directives to divisions spread across the land to submit to corporate policies to the letter.

This rational ordering model treated workers, as things to be managed, functions, not people to be led. This model was exceedingly successful during and immediately following World War II. Management possessed position power and hierarchical authority controlling recruiting, hiring, promoting and firing with few if any challenges.

A set of standardized management tools followed, designed to maintain this control and efficiency. They were the following:

(1)     Management by Objectives (MBOs)

(2)     Strategic Planning

(3)     Performance Appraisal

Management by Objectives (MBOs) was a process of dividing and subdividing objectives among departments and divisions until every operation had a slice of the same objective pie. Collating the results followed, and voila! We met our goal! Not quite.

MBOs worked much better on paper than in purposeful performance. It didn’t matter. It was a ritualistic exercise that gave managers a sense of being involved sharing in the big picture. Besides, business was good to great.

Strategic planning, another time-consuming ritualistic practice, often proved wide of the mark, but mid-course corrections was a luxury management took for granted.

Performance appraisal was the third staple in this toolkit, a process meant to enhance performance through continuous development. Unfortunately, it drifted off that track to be a conference on salaries and merit pay.

MBOs, strategic planning and performance appraisals were solid control mechanisms as long as people behaved as manageable profit making centers and not as persons to be led.

Everything changed in 1970. It was then that the Vietnam War hit the consciousness of young people, who in mass rejected the war, as well as the managed society that sponsored and orchestrated it.

This disenfranchised segment of society stopped that war. Nothing has ever been the same since. Management’s tools lost their luster and relevance but continued to be employed as if nothing had changed. Protests of the war had been overt. Protests in the workplace had been covert, as they continue to be.

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. 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 and leadership. There is far too much evidence this reality is not perceived.

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

Any organization has 15 percent of hard chargers and 15 percent of foot draggers with the other 70 percent falling in the middle as safe hires doing what told to do but little more.

The corporate toolkit may have worked 50-years ago, but it no longer works today. Incredibly, few will dispute this, but still there is little movement to change, or inclination to buck the trend.

Interventions

During the 1942-1945 wartime period, where less than 10 percent of American workers were college trained, and less than 50 percent high school graduates, where workers were dependent on management for direction, where decision making was indisputably an exclusive managerial right, and where position power trumped knowledge power, workers jumped through hoops even if the hoops bordered on the ridiculous.

Workers were treated as children and expected to act like children, as only managers were the grown-ups. Workers shied away from challenging the authority of the lowest supervisor, or going over that supervisor’s head to lodge a complaint. The way to stay out of trouble was to keep your head down.

The boom continued through the 1950s and 1960s then the calamitous 1970s came. The United States was losing the war in Vietnam; American markets were declining in electronic parts, computers, glassware, televisions, microwaves, and finally, automobiles. Japan, South Korea and Singapore were making quality products more cheaply and reliably than those made in the US.

Panic set in, as corporations looked desperately for answers. They studied their South East Asia competition only to discover they were using American quality control technology, expertise that fit nicely into Asian group oriented cultures, but ignored by American companies.

A period of schizophrenia followed. First, there was a wild dash to superimpose the Asian success model on Americans without recognizing the clash between group and individualistic norms. Secondly, blue-collar workers dominated the Asian workforce whereas they did not the American workplace. By 1980, already, American professionals outnumbered, four to one, every Asian professional.

The 20 percent of American workers who were blue-collar responded to this intervention as they did to Elton Mayo's intervention in 1927 at the Hawthorne Works at the Western Electric Company in Chicago. The workers were flattered for the attention. Fast-forward to the 1980s and these workers didn’t mind the problem solving being confined to cosmetic change (e.g., workstation design, reducing noise, changing lighting). This was not the case with professionals who saw this attention as “by the numbers” rote exercises.

A stream of interventions followed: Total Quality Management, Quality Control Circles, Quality of Work, Quality of Work Life, Total Employee Involvement, and Empowerment Management. Essentially, nothing changed.

These were programs. Quality is a process, a mindset that depends on the integrity of the supportive structure. This was not developed. So, everything drifted to how it had been freeze framed in 1945 nostalgia, which compounded worker frustration.

That said, work has changed dramatically from brawn to brainpower, and workers have changed intellectually with this. Now, knowledge workers occupy 90 percent of the critical mass in high tech industries. Yet, with the exception of these industries, most workplace cultures remain in cadence with the distant past.

Given this scenario, professionals complain about how things are instead of realizing they have the capacity to change them, still looking to the company for relief of their anxieties as dependent children and still behaving as dissonant workers.

Management is not leadership. It has opted for pyramid climbing by always campaigning for the next position never having time to do the job paid to do. Now that the pyramid is collapsing and with it its position power it has become avaricious to the extreme. Why, then, should there be any surprise when those that climb to the top can’t lead?

Leadership combines vision and values with resolve and power.

Henry Ford and Thomas Edison demonstrated leadership inconspicuously and quietly.

Ford didn’t invent the automobile or the assembly line. He used both to create the working middle class that could afford to buy his automobile by using the assembly line to make the vehicles cheaply.

Edison didn’t invent the light bulb but created the first practical incandescent light. Whereas other confined their efforts to laboratory applications of light bulbs, he concentrated on its commercial its use in homes and businesses by mass-producing long-lasting light bulbs. A system of generating and distributing electricity followed, which led to the establishment of the first electric utility in the world at the Pearl Street Station in New York City.

Ford and Edison were known as something of curmudgeons and hardly charismatic figures. Leadership with them wasn’t an act but a behavior.

What is construed as leadership today is a managerial process of refining what is known with little interest in venturing into the unknown. As such, it is obsessed with competition and therefore imitative, unimaginative, predictable and myopic. Trapped in this habit of mind often leads to corporate fraud and malfeasance with those in leadership roles using their positions unseemly. This is not new. Machiavelli wrote about it 500-years ago.

Who created these sybarites? Society did. Who structured organizations to spawn them? Society did that as well. Who is society? We are. Top executive pay that has skyrocketed from 100 to as much as 1,000 times that of the average worker didn’t happen without an assist. Our culture provided that, and right at a time when leadership is rising in Ford-Edison fashion from the bottom of the tree.

This is truly unfortunate as companies as late as 1975 still weren’t tarnished by runaway executive compensation, as ethical standards were high and maintained with few exceptions. Everything seemed to unravel with compensation going crazy to parallel the cyberspace era. Lost in the shuffle has been true leadership, as no one seems in charge with everyone’s head down in some electronic distraction.

Professional Workers

Information technology has transformed knowledge workers into a breed apart, as work, workers and the workplace have been made redundant with no efficacious model to replace this vestigial organ. Central corporate control with its phalanx of electronic tributaries is also redundant as is its management. This dinosaur is a relic fit for the museum.

A possible antidote is guided autonomy of workers in a more natural setting where cooperation and trust and connection materialize by sponsors without hidden agendas.

It is passé for workers to be simply polite, obedient, docile, uncritical, submissive, apologetic and dependent, with no voice in the decision-making. No longer can we afford for workers to switched-off and be passive on the job and proactive off the job. No longer can we afford for them to behave as children at work and adults at home.

Executives protest, “Why can’t workers behave as adults? We give them everything!” Not true.

Professionals are seldom treated as equals, when they are often more than equal to those in charge. To add insult to injury, professionals are monitored, tracked, and watched with surveillance cameras, plainly indicating they are not trusted, not respected and not accepted as colleagues. Professionals are deliberately pitted against each other for pay increases and promotion as well as for perks, driving them into passive-resistive behaviors.

Managers have created a system that predictably brings out the worst in these professionals. While they are the soul of the machine, executives run off with the proceeds, as if that is the most natural thing to do.

It took the first half of the twentieth century for management to flourish and the second half of the century for management, as we know it, to move perilously close to extinction.

Management acumen at mid-century was deemed leadership, when it was clearly a survival strategy. Even at its apogee it misread workers as being interested only in a paycheck, motivated only by self-interest. Work has always been the workers' true interest, professionals in particular. The work is the reward.

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.         © December 3, 2012