THE GENESIS OF LEADERLESS LEADERSHIP and DISSONANT WORKERS

The rapidly increasing professional class of workers has failed to assert itself with any sense of authority.  It remains in the lap of compliance seemingly more interested in protecting careers than in establishing them, more focused on benefits than jobs, more locked in the moment than liberated to the future.

Professionals show little inclination to self-manage.  They complain to each other but seldom to management.  They esteem the hierarchy, which is disappearing as management becomes increasingly indistinguishable from them.   Leadership is being redefined and rotates according to the nature of demands of the system.

Authority then is essentially minimizing position power flowing naturally to knowledge-based roles.  When professionals aspire to management, they invariably leave their competence behind to enter a function where they are not.

Despite the management track now a phantom ladder, managers are paid more than professionals on average.  This disgruntles these workers but they don’t know what to do about it.  They wait to be rescued by a miraculous paradigm shift without any cost to them.

The function of work has changed but not the structure of work.  Consequently, this seeds conflict and provokes frustration.  A crippled giant, professionals are unable to walk for they cannot find their legs.  They have the skills but not the confidence to be self-directed.  They are a product of their outmoded programming.  As a result, they remain other-directed rather than self-directed, passive rather than engaged looking to others for solutions they alone possess.

Meanwhile, most companies struggle in a state of flux in a new kind of wilderness.  There are no guarantees anymore, if there ever were, but certainty is still craved as its rhetoric continues unabated.  The new reality is that professionals must hone their talents and expect to move from company to company through the span of their careers.

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 DELICATE BALANCE OF PURPOSEFUL WORK

We have gravitated to being a corporate society, and thus the collective waste of human capital and individual talent is a corporate sin, and the reason for this book.  This is not the way to leverage or develop people to purposeful performance.  It requires creative leadership as architects of the appropriate culture.  This commences with leaders:

(1)   Recognizing that there is no such thing as an idealistic corporate or workplace culture.  All differ.  All are unique with specific histories and biases and therefore distinctive requirements;

(2)   Tabling the idea of searching for the ideal workplace culture.  It doesn’t exist.  They should devote themselves to the business of creating the appropriate culture.

(3)   Acknowledging that the impetus for change invariably comes from the trenches not from mahogany row.  People at the bottom have little to lose and therefore are spirited for change.  In contrast, people at the top believe they have everything to lose in abandoning the status quo;

(4)   Knowing we are in the midst of a quiet revolution in which not only the color of the workers’ collars is changing but the complexity of their individual and collective will;

(5)   Understanding the key to purposeful performance is the Culture of Contribution where adults, not obedient children man the controls.  The appropriate work climate is not a program but a working process represented by the mindset of change;

(6)   Admitting that they dropped the ball when they vigorously defended the status quo and business as usual practices, which cut them off from reality and effective engagement.

Although disruption and the need for change emanates from the bottom, the architects of change have come traditionally from the top.  Since gridlock and stalemate dominate the breach, CORPORATE SIN keeps knocking at the door.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

When the twentieth century began, ninety percent of workers were involved 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, telephone, airplane, motion picture, automobile and electric power plant.  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 pervasive cynicism.  Artists and writers proclaimed the death of culture claiming to be members of the “Lost Generation,” 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, which was heard around the world, and led to 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 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 perfected 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 in such terms.

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 separating them from the land.  Now, they were without jobs, no longer having farms in which to return.  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 illuminating the dangerous void between the rich and the poor.

Even employed workers were likely to live in hovels in city slums.  Children as young as eight worked beside adults in factories.  Working conditions were horrific.  Serious accidents and even deaths on the job were not uncommon.  Workers had no medical benefits, unemployment compensation, and no 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.  This proved fertile climate for fascism in Germany with the rise of Adolf Hitler to power 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.  It woke up the slumbering giant.

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 management’s finest hour.

MANAGEMENT CONTEXT

World War II established the management class.  It took pride in the critical role it played in the war, and now it felt a license to do as it willed.

Management gurus surfaced to create a corporate blueprint 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 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 tools was developed to ensure this control and efficiency: Management by Objectives (MBOs), 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.  It 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 founders.  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 worked 50-years ago but it no longer works at all.  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 management was 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 where they did not the American workplace.  By 1980, already American professionals were four to every one among Asian workers.  

The 20 percent of American workers who were blue-collar responded to this intervention as they did to Elton Mayo 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 exceptions 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 avarice 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 will 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 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 refining what is known with little interest in venturing into the unknown.  It is obsessed with competition and therefore imitative, unimaginative, predictable and myopic.  Trapped in a 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 seduced 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 leadership, as no one seems in charge with everyone’s head down only now in some electronic contraption.

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 directed 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 polite, obedient, docile, uncritical, submissive, apologetic and dependent with no voice in the decision-making.  No longer can we afford for workers turned the switch 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 cry, “Why can’t workers behave as adults?  We give them everything!”  Not true. 

Workers are seldom treated as equals when often they are more than equal to whom they report.  Workers are monitored and tracked and watched with surveillance cameras to indicate they are not trusted, not respected and not accepted as colleagues.  Workers are pitted against each other for pay increases and promotion as well as for perks, which drives them into passive behaviors. 

Executives created a system that predictably often brings out the worst in workers.  Then to add insult to injury, while workers are the soul of the machine, executives run off with the booty 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 that same century 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 only being interested in a paycheck.  Work has always been the workers identity.

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 3, 2012