EXCERPT --- The Worker, Alone!

A Conversation with Stanley

(PART THREE OF THREE PARTS)

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

© May 16, 2015

Stanley writes: “It isn’t likely a corporate board in New York City will have a personal interest in an individual in Clinton (Iowa) who works for the company. Doesn’t the worker need to be part of the decision-making process at the operating level? Shouldn’t he fight for that right as much as for more money and perks?”

Yes, yes, yes! But this takes education. It doesn’t happen by osmosis. Money is the magic elixir of a materialistic society. It is the alchemist’s gold. And gold is the standard by which everything is measured in a world of excess. After the basic needs of workers are met, however, money becomes the substitute for failed achievement, recognition, identity, purpose and influence.

Involving workers in the decision-making process is now critical to operations. There is no other alternative. Expediency demands such input. It also provides the recognition and identity that workers seek. Alas, poetic justice! So, why the problem?

Millions of words celebrate self-management work groups and workers as integral to the decision-making process, yet this connection fails to take hold. Why?

Workers and managers still do not trust each other. They see themselves as different, and so partisan hostility and self-interest continue to dominate the workplace. Logic never rules the heart, and the heart has a long memory. Time, patience and a supportive strategy are necessary to place the head and heart on the same body.

Stanley writes: Isn’t it important for management to show up where the real work takes place? Don’t they need evidence that they know what they are talking about? How many professors could step into a public school classroom and teach?

Yes, it is important. But that is not how the game has been played, until now. With adversity, there also comes good fortune. Management, as we know it, is anachronistic for reason. Managers as a profession for the past fifty years have been essentially expediters and paper pushers. The nostalgia of their role in World War II never was relinquished.

Nostalgia for that mythic time simply grew like a cancer, metastasizing through every fissure of the organization’s body until it was bloated with disease, and on every kind of support system, chief of which was the Federal Government’s Department of Defense.  I worked as an organizational development psychologist for a Department of Defense subcontractor.

For every ten workers, there was a supervisor, for every three supervisors, a manager, for every four managers, a director, for every five directors, a vice president, and so on. Workers were lost in the equation. All the perks and career ladders were set aside for this august group. Even engineers, who were critical to high tech success, remained outside the equation. When managers weren’t pushing papers, they were in meetings or traveling to meetings.

Meetings took up about seventy five percent of their time. While bloat was a corporate condition, purposeful meetings were suspect. This left little time for managers to manage “by walking around.” When managers did, they invariably got in the way of productive work.  Necessity is changing this. Non-doing of non-thing things is a luxury the workplace can no longer afford.

Position power is atavistic replaced by knowledge power which is primarily in the possession of the workers.  If managers don’t have the appropriate skills today, or cannot relate meaningfully to workers with such skills, they cannot manage successfully.

Managers are part of a team, not apart from workers, but integral to them in sharing common objectives. Previously, nearly everyone in the chain of command eventually rose to the level of incompetence. This is a luxury the organization can no longer afford.

How could it be otherwise?  Managers only had so much time and that time was dedicated to activity as an end in itself, not results. Moreover, they were prone to delegate what baffled them, and hold zealously to what they knew. This could only lead to chaos, which it often did, reducing managers to pawns of departmental manipulators.

Manipulation is still the predominant norm in most organizations, in the public as well as private sector. There is a crack in this mirror. The tens of thousands of middle managers now walking the streets without jobs, the scores of former CEOs whose phones no longer ring, and the college presidents and professors, who are being shredded, have much in common. They have gravitated to campaigners, always working for the next promotion with little time to deal with matters at hand. Now, they sit in the offices of headhunters writing resumes.

Stanley writes: Wouldn’t management and workers get along better if they trusted each other? Apparently, the motive of each is suspect. It is probably true that the larger the business, the truer that is.

Yes, managers and workers would get along much better if they trusted each other. Trust must be earned. Once earned, it must be supported with consistency. If it is not, trust once broken is close to irreparable. Trust is a fragile but powerful force in creating and maintaining organizational synergism. Nothing is impossible when there is a foundation of trust in the group. It can overcome adversity, failure, disappointment and even natural disaster. Trust involves risk. Risk involves struggle and the possibility of pain.

Someone has to take the first step, and mean it with his whole heart and soul, appreciating the vulnerability. Yet trust has little to do with organizational size. Once trust has been established, even a very large organization can literally erase competition.

Sam Walton did this by entering a saturated market with his Walmart store. He convinced workers and customers alike that he had their best interests at heart, then went on to prove it.  

K-Mart, a company in a similar business, broke its trust. It secretly devised a 20/40/60 rule: review all twenty year employees for possible separation; review the status of all employees over forty for possible downgrading or separation; and review all employees making $60,000 or more for possible downgrading or separation. The plan was exposed. That was only a few years ago. Recently, this chain announced the closing of more than one hundred stores and the furloughing of several thousand workers and managers.

As striking as this example, distrust proves the rule rather than the exception (e.g., General Motor’s ignition switch cover-up in 2014). This is because many organizations continue to have a cavalier attitude toward the trust issue. Alas, little learning seems to have taken place.

The chapter on “A Question of Control” generated this comment from Stanley: “I wish we could think of the controller as the leader. It is my belief that the majority of people will respond to good leadership. They resent being managed. . . controlled. 

You suggest a changed society may take a century. Are we sure enough of the right course? Can we remain firm of resolve for that long? Not trying doesn’t present a very pretty picture. It seems a given that to succeed managers and workers must share each step of the process. As to consultants, shouldn’t they be part of the process instead of outside it?”

With control, as with everything else, it starts with the individual. The individual is the controller, or the leader of himself, if you prefer, or of that which he controls. The two cannot be separated. The individual cannot depend on a “leader” to rescue him from chaos and disorder. It is his individual responsibility. A leader can only symbolize what is already established. There are no miracles. Should this be construed as demeaning the power of leadership, so be it. The quest for freedom, control and order rests with the worker, alone.

Looking at control in the macro sense, I recall an advertisement for a brand of brown sauce popular in England several years ago. The advertisement showed Daddy bringing a bottle of sauce to the table. On the label of the bottle was a picture of Daddy bringing a bottle of sauce to the table, and within that label was a label that showed daddy bringing a bottle of sauce to the table.

Control is a sequential product of order, and order comes from within, one person at a time. The multiple of this process leads to communal order.

Everything is connected. The macro is precisely the same as the micro, only many times more. A true leader knows this in his bones. The structure of the human cell mirrors the universe. We explore the micro to understand the macro.

A “changed society” is an evolutionary process, which starts with an idea. There is no ideal plan or strategy to the growth of an idea. It is a factor of climate, opportunity and time. An idea may undergo several mutations before maturity is reached and bear little resemblance to the initial idea. There is no “right or true” course, only movement from moment to moment.

Ideas have a growth period the same as every other living thing. It is a slow and tortuous growth with no clear path to the future. Ideas grow like cracks in the cement as weeds, wild flowers and grass. One day an idea experiences a transmutation from a puzzling perturbation into a clarifying insight that resonates with meaning to the times, which is not unlike a shoot bursting into bloom as a beautiful flower. Ideas are not separate but part of nature.

As for consultants, they are bystanders. Like multifaceted sensors, they derive their function from listening and observing. The answers are not with them, but are the filtered product of the organization’s collective mind, a mind that is often ignored until a consultant repeats its intrinsic wisdom. Consultants provide connection between organizational knowers and learners.

Consultants are symptomatic of a culture that doesn’t trust itself, a culture willing to pay for “a second opinion.” Companies insist on seeing the controller and the controlled as separate entities. Consultants are often the arbitrary intermediary between the controller and the controlled, which is artificial and therefore inauthentic. Were society not so ambiguous consultants might just fade away.

Stanley writes with regard to the chapter, “A Life Without A Cause”: Can’t change be a combination of outside forces as well as inside forces? Does it always have to be either… or? Wouldn’t it be desirable for some things to come true that workers expect to come true, not because they expect it, but because they are desirable?

Change is always a combination of inside and outside forces.  That is not the problem. The problem is what initiates the change process, stimulus from outside or motivation from inside? Chaos and order are part of the same whole. This dynamic created our universe.

Order starts with the individual deciding to change, to put his house in order, and therefore the change process is an internal commitment. Change is a reply to the demands of reality or outside forces.

What precipitates change is usually some disturbance, something that makes the individual or the company more alert.

Attentiveness is the precursor to change. The decision to act is a response to that stimulus — take a death in the family. That was the case with me.

My father died three days past his fiftieth birthday. His whole life was one of repeated labor to push the stone of Sisyphus up the hill, only to have it roll back downhill and crush him again and again. He never had his own agenda. He was afraid to. He had great physical courage, but little moral backbone. It was impossible for him to take a stand if his rights clashed with the rights of his “betters.” 

With his death, my insides changed almost immediately. A cautious, conservative, sensitive person launched an immediate pilgrimage to gamble on himself, to do what his lights would have him do, and to let the chips fall where they may.

Thus was born my motivation to plant seeds which others were too timid to plant, or who feared it might lose them friends and jeopardize their careers. I am not constrained by such considerations.

Nor am I concerned with whether these seeds reach fruition within my lifetime. I am a planter, not a harvester. My father’s death convinced me of that fact.

Each worker has to decide who and what he is. If he doesn’t, it will be decided for him. Desirable things come out of purposeful behavior. The purpose of life is to live it. How each of us might choose to live it is an expression of that purpose. The rest is academic.

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