QUESTION OF “MATURE ADULT WORKERS” –
Excerpt from THE WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN (2nd
Edition)
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 15, 2014
Most workers
within my experience take it on the chin as victims far more often than they
fight for their jobs and rights as victors. They behave as dependent children
to management, or counter dependent adolescents to the company. Workers fail to
fight for their jobs and rights before they are put in jeopardy, because
behaving as children, they fail to pay attention.
This could
not happen to mature adults for reason:
Mature adult workers question work related decisions
initiated by top management, because it is far removed from “where the rubber
hits the road,” and therefore clearly ignorant of all the requirements of work.
Mature adults put their special knowledge to work at the level of consequences
in a timely fashion, or where and when problems occur. Mature adult workers
find it easier to ask forgiveness than permission when something vital to
operations must be done, now!
Mature adult workers question a company’s aberrations,
such as its obsession with productivity criteria, fastidious bureaucracy or
specialization, when production levels lag and diversity is ignored. Mature
adult workers question a company’s philosophy which focuses on “not losing,”
rather than driving hard “to win.”
Lagging
production and failure to cultivate new markets ultimately translate into lost
jobs and reduced security. If the market is shrinking, mature adult workers
want a voice in the why.
Perhaps they
have ideas which could make for a turnaround.
Mature adult workers question entitlement benefit
packages. These are treated like
Christmas candy, which implies undeserved generosity of the company, for they
are not tied to results.
Mature adult workers know there is no free lunch. They
have seen their real wages decline precipitously, and their benefit packages, too.
They want an end to the charade. Mature adult workers want the company to level
with them, to treat them as full partners in enterprise, not just hired help.
Executives are employees, too.
Executives
have no more stake in the company’s future than they do — perhaps even less.
Mature adult workers are committed to a long term
commitment to the company, while many executives attempt to put the best face
on their watch in the interest of short-term career mobility.
Mature adult workers don’t need to be told their worth.
They know their worth. They don’t need to be romanced with “touchy-feely” human
resources programs. These turn them off and tune them out. They want full
accountancy of the company’s health on a regular basis, not when the company is
about to go belly up.
They resent
the patronizing twaddle that attempts to keep them in line. They desire a
reasonable voice in the conduct of business and a fair portion of the economic
pie.
Mature adult workers resent slogans, campaigns, fads and
copycat programs. What worked elsewhere worked because it was well suited to
unique conditions. A plethora of failures in copy-cat programs, however, still
fails to push this fact home. Mature adult workers question the emphasis on
“quality participation,” when they see themselves herded into improvised
meetings, where the level of discussion is restricted to nonoperational
incidentals such as the company picnic, while executives, “down the hall,” vote
themselves stock options for the next quarter. Selective differentiation hardly
begets teamwork or quality performance. Nor does the frenzied pursuit of
quality awards mean much to mature adult workers. They see quality in six-sigma
terms or as a daily concern and not as corporate or executive gamesmanship.
Mature adult workers question the value of rhetoric,
which advocates a culture of contribution, but supports the twin cultures of
comfort and complacency. A culture of contribution is dynamic, rife with
conflict and confrontation, a spirited exchange of ideas of equal partners.
Conflict, not harmony, is the glue that holds a company to its purpose. Mature
adult workers recognize pain, risk, uncertainty, failure and limits as
necessary components of real performance. An investment in failure is
acknowledged as the price of success.
Mature adult workers question cosmetic organizational
changes brought on by real or imagined crises. Mature adults abhor solution driven
approaches to structural problems, which they see as, at best, naïve if not
faddish appeasements to stockholders.
They
recognize that defining the problem is hard work, and nigh impossible if the
working culture is driven by personality, not performance; by making an
impression, not a difference. Making an impression has no place in a climate of
purposefulness. Where making a difference matters, there is no fear of failure,
so success can take hold; no place for arrogance, so confidence can be expressed;
no need for pretension, so happy debate can lead to consensus strategies.
Mature adult workers are threatening, not only to the
company, but to the existing social fabric of society. From attending school to
taking a job, from paying homage to the church to the state, from birth to
death, citizens are expected to behave essentially as obedient, disciplined,
punctual and not problem children. Schools teach students to conform to
authority. Jobs are described and managed in the same manner. The tenets of religious
faith are written as if to starry-eyed children, while the conduct of
government could not demonstrate a lower opinion of the human species.
Society is
afraid of mature adult workers, afraid of the madness that adulthood demands,
for with such madness things are seen much more clearly than by those who claim
to be sane. Ergo, The Worker, they see society running from itself, cowering
behind its authority and autocratic rule. The evidence is overwhelming.
Self-hatred is manifested in society in the form of violence and crime. Love no
longer recreates itself. Love has been replaced by pervasive hatred, which has
become like the rich, aromatic stench of the garbage dump.
A
paternalistic driven society prefers workers never grow up, that they remain
perpetually obedient, submissive, indulgent and manageable children. With
mature adult workers, control no longer resides in the parent-figure as
overlord. It is in the mind, heart and hands of workers, where it belongs. The
agony of our times is that children become parents, but skip adulthood. Parent figures,
as an ideal-type, bully their children as they had been bullied. Bullying
behavior is then repeated with family members, workers, worshippers, students
and finally, with citizens. Failing to become mature adults, workers regress to
learned helplessness and seek guidance, direction and control as if suspended
in terminal adolescents as obedient twelve-year-olds in fifty-year-old bodies.
Despite this characterization, the redemption of society still depends on the
production of mature adult workers.
Even if the
dedicated mission of society were to produce mature adult workers, it would
most likely take the better part of a century to see it realized. Cultural
conditioning of modern workers is that extensive. Most workers are programmed
in self-negation, feeling a compelling need to conform to group norms, to avoid
conflict and confrontation at any cost, to comply with arbitrary standards no
matter how ridiculous, rather than to cooperate with a sense of commitment to
something meaningful and to which they can believe.
Most workers
value the thoughts of others over their own thoughts. They are isolated from a
sense of their own worth. It is as impossible for them to think differently as
the majority as it would be for them to defy gravity and fly.
It would
appear they are not happy campers that they have lost their moral compass and
thus their way. In the end as in the beginning, what is invaluable to the
individual, worker and citizen alike, is trust. No trust is more important than
self-trust.
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