WHY WORK HAS GOTTEN A BAD NAME! MANAGEMENT LOST IN THE SHUFFLE!

WHY WORK HAS GOTTEN A BAD NAME

MANAGEMENT LOST IN THE SHUFFLE

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

© April 18, 2014

 

REFERENCE:

The response across the globe to these little vignettes from my proofreading and editing of “Six Silent Killers” finds me supplying another. 

You may be in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Germany, Russia, the Ukraine, South Korea, China, or Taiwan for you are part of this vast audience and constant viewers of this blog.

Each workplace has its own unique culture, which either works for workers and managers, or it doesn’t.  This vignette may give some insight into the problem as discussed in this book.  For within each of these nations, the workplace has an indigenous culture that reflects its history, industry and its workers and managers.  Chances are it is experiencing contretemps especially in these difficult times.  We may speak many different languages, live in various national cultures, but the culture, wherever we are on the globe, is most likely to be unique to that particular workplace.

 

EFFECTIVENESS IS A MATTER OF CULTURE

Culture, as defined here, is the workplace climate and the shared values, beliefs, and expectations of workers and managers.

Culture is a recent managerial obsession, triggered by its emphasis by the human resources department (HRD). Over the past several years, HRD has attempted, unsuccessfully, to untangle the sins of organization with cultural manipulation.

Senior management can now mouth the words, such as climate and culture, without understanding their meaning. What is not communicated is that cultural bias dictates behavior. Unless the focus is on cultural bias, all cultural modification will be essentially cosmetic and ineffective.

Established rites, rituals, and rhetoric dominate the will of the organization, with the informal group controlling the ebb and flow of how these established practices are working. Inherent in this informal structure is the current mindset, not only toward these cultural biases but toward the organization as well.

The combination of this mindset and these biases dictates behavior—what is tolerated, expected, believed, valued, and experienced. There can be no discernible change without first understanding and then dealing with this reality. It is natural for the organization to resist change no matter how good the change might be—logic does not operate at this level—because it prefers to sustain its known value and belief system. To ignore this fact and to go plunging ahead without first dealing with it is to spell inevitable doom for the change process.

The formal organization is essential to generate an appropriate operating philosophy, consistent policy with a mission focus, and a fair-minded value system for growth and development. It creates the rites of passage, the rituals of operation, and the message of the mission. Once this is done, the informal group reacts to these directives and interprets them in its own best interest.

The interpretation and reaction to this set of interventions determine the workplace culture. It is this relationship between senior management and operating personnel that spells success or failure in any organization. Culture is always created from above and interpreted from below. If both are on the same page, everything runs as smooth as silk; if not, operations bound out of control.

Management exerts little real influence on informal behavior once the cultural variables are defined and assimilated. Should they be changed, workers must be involved in the process for verification, acceptance, and support.

What we have seen in recent times is that circumstances have forced organizations to change quickly to stay afloat. Expediency became policy. Panic was reflected in a series of faddish activities—from “T” (sensitivity) groups to Quality Control Circles (QCCs), from team building to sensitivity training, from Muzak to ergonomic work centers, from worker-wellness programs to company-sponsored beer blasts on Friday night, from Managing by Objectives (MBOs) to Total Quality Management (TQM), from 40-hour work weeks to flex time, from company daycare centers to employee assistance programs (EAPs), from shared management to symbolic management… and on it goes!

There is nothing wrong with any of these interventions except for one thing—they were done to the workers and for the workers with little or no input from the workers before the fact. They were gratuitous interventions—like giving candy to a baby not to cry—which made workers feel even less in charge than ever before. Workers didn’t show their resentment up front. They went underground and surfaced with the “six silent killers”: passive aggression, passive defensive, passive responsive, approach avoidance, obsessive compulsive and malicious obedience behaviors.

These interventions were tactics, not grand strategies. They demonstrated the panic of buying time.

Work has changed. Workers have changed. Real work has gotten a bad name or gotten lost in the shuffle. Value change, which is essential to behavioral change, is served poorly by cosmetic changes. Fad merchants know their clients and their impatience. The quickest way for them to lose a sale is to tell senior management that it has to change first, which means the structure and function of work,  before anything else changes. Management, consequently, has gotten what it expected and wanted—quick fixes and non-involvement.

Management remains obsessed with the idea of culture while becoming compulsive in its actions toward it. There is no point in assessing blame. No one could have predicted the incredible changes or the demands of these changes in the workplace in so short a time. Management, in its naiveté, thought that whatever it did would get it to where it wanted to go. That has proven false.  Preoccupation with fads has found the workplace going from the Culture of Comfort (management dependent) to the Culture of Complacency (counter dependent on the company or organization), at the expense of the Culture of Contribution (interdependence between workers and managers).