EXCERPT -- The Worker, Alone!

Going Against the Grain!

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

© May 7, 2015

PART TWO

(Concluding segment of Career Changing Speech)

STUCK IN MACHINE AGE THINKING

– Erik Erikson’s Model of Human Development

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.  Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

George Bernard Shaw in Maxims for Revolution (1903)

Labor unions are in sharp decline, while management’s union, Human Resources (HR) is soaring with its cosmetic interventions. Workers feel betrayed by labor unions as management’s adversary, and exploited by HR as management’s advocate. The “best and brightest” have become cynical and turned to making money rather than making a difference. That legacy has contributed to the economic crisis.

The uncoupling of workers from managers has widened as managers no longer lead and workers no longer follow. Surprisingly, we have survived despite management’s insensitivity and workers’ immaturity during the Machine Age.

To understand this, let us walk through a cultural no man’s land guided by Erik Erikson’s six styles of human personality development: (1) autonomy; (2) trust; (3) initiative; (4) accomplishment; (5) identity; and (6) intimacy.

Erikson’s model supports the premise that management is dealing with a wrongly conditioned workforce for the times, a workforce that enjoys little autonomy, only contrived trust, little opportunity to take the initiative or to sense personal accomplishment, which leads to a crisis in identity and an inability to demonstrate intimacy.

The workforce experiences from the crib to the company a high need to please which marks its arrested development. When workers as adults are needed, they are nowhere to be found. It was surreal but nonetheless true when management thought it could construct arbitrary systems, such as Quality Circles and empowerment programs such as Participative Management and workers would respond with maturity and satisfaction. Obviously, this has not been the case.

Instead, the new wave of challenges and opportunities have been met with confusion if not shame, mistrust, guilt, a sense of insecurity, and isolation. This has perplexed management as it has failed to see how more than fifty years of co-dependency has resulted in a workforce essentially mired in terminal adolescence. What needs to be done, fortunately, is revealed in Erikson’s model. Management needs to maintain patience with the process.

It needs to cut back on its demands, and look for ways to cultivate workers for the long haul. This can be done by encouraging workers to do the right things rather than everything right. Workers know what makes the difference. Management needs only to solicit their views on common problems, which will gradually turn workers around from passive to active responders.

If this sounds like making workers full partners in the process, we are on the same page. Reality, when it is positive and reinforcing, finds workers at the ready, but when reality is negative and demanding it is another story. It will not be easy for workers to become more responsive and responsible. If they do, the dividends are considerable:

• A sense of autonomy will build self-control, which will lead to self-management demonstrating the willpower of disciplined behavior;

• A sense of trust will fuel the drive and motivation to have faith in the future;

• A sense of initiative will give self-direction and purpose to work;

• A sense of accomplishment will lead to competence;

• A sense of identity will lead to loyalty and fidelity;

• A sense of intimacy will promote affiliation and love

• Personality development involves the formation of trust. Obviously, the trust in the best of organizations is only slightly above the “dog eat dog” level.

• A sense of autonomy is constantly denied until most adults are products of learned helplessness with a high need to please others without any idea how to please themselves. The sense of accomplishment is also thwarted because expediency dictates there is a right way, which is translated the only way.

This leaves little room for initiative or for failure, which is the learning phase. In the absence of initiative and accomplishment, there is little room for personal satisfaction.

Identity is a stage that most would admit not handling too well. Role confusion and role demands lead to identity crises.

When so handicapped, we become other directed with little idea what makes us tick other than being dependent or counter dependent on what we do for a living.

The psychological shrinking of America has created an industry for mid-life identity crises. One in every three Americans seeks psychotherapy or counseling from a psychiatrist, psychologist, physician, psychotherapist, guidance counselor, teacher, preacher, guru or friend.

Yet perhaps the hardest is to attain a sense of intimacy. Sex is not intimacy. Love is. Sex and love can merge into intimacy but the problem is not only intimacy with others but with ourselves.

We are interested in having good friends, but the most important friendship must be with ourselves. If we cannot be intimate with ourselves, then intimacy with others in a sham.

THE SEARCH FOR A QUICK CURE

The modern worker is a new entity. He is more skilled, better educated and self-confident. He also has different values, beliefs and expectations as well as interests. He doesn’t respond well to blarney.

He has power in his knowledge and is self-motivated and the new kid on the block. When he comes into an organization, it is like hitting a wall when he is expected to be management dependent or counter dependent on the company for his total well-being.

He is not timid, insecure, unskilled, undereducated, and naïve, but it is soon clear to him that he is expected to take orders, be polite, obedient, punctual, and passive and appreciate being taken care of.

When he is unresponsive to charismatic leadership, and doesn’t see the company as “his family,” and fails to follow company policies and procedures to the letter he finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. The irony is that he may just be what the company needs.

This has been the dilemma. Professionally trained workers find themselves being treated as if blue-collar workers when they see themselves as decision-makers and not passive responders.

Rather than admit the workforce is dominated by this new worker with fully eight out of ten, and soon nine out of ten workers being of such a mindset and temperament, companies have attempted to make them fit. Many pundits and writers have been at the ready to oblige management.

Terrence Deal and Allan Kennedy in “Corporate Culture” (1982) see the problem in terms of knowing what the company stands for; Bob Waterman and Tom Peters in “Search for Excellence” (1982) claim the best bet is to copy successful companies; and John Naisbitt in “Megatrends” (1982) sees visions beyond the pale of the cockeyed optimist.

These prescriptions fail to deal with Erikson’s six stages which can flourish only in a culture that supports them.

ELEVEN CORPORATE HABITS IN THE WAY

The Problem with Top-Down Communications.

Operationally, strategic planning doesn’t necessarily translate into tactical communications. What is proposed in the Boardroom is compromised with too many filters to pass through to the operations level. Consequently, internal stress and accelerating external demands mount to the point that problems go unreported or are misconstrued and timely decisions are not made.

Management by Objectives (MBOs), in Practice, Has Proven Counterproductive, Time Consuming, Expensive and Ineffective.

Compartmentalizing objectives, and then rewarding each department for accomplishing its objectives has proven illusory. As systems analyst Russell Ackoff has shown, if you take a system apart to identify its components, and then operate those components as well as possible, the system as a whole will not behave as well as it could. It is counterintuitive to Machine Age thinking, but nonetheless true, if you have a system that is behaving as well as it could, then none of its parts will be.

The Problem with the Non-Confrontational Style of Management

Tension and conflict are normal fare in an organization. Asking questions, or disputing the problem solving strategy are necessary to have a vibrant, engaged and energetic work climate. Harmony is the antithesis of efficacy as managed conflict is the glue that holds an operation on task. Americans tend to protest infrequently but violently instead of frequently and politely. It is not necessary that everyone like each other for an operation to be successful, but it is important that everyone respect and esteem each other’s contribution.

Management Manages the Way it is Paid.

When lip service is given to quality, it is understood that compensation and promotion depend upon meeting schedule at any cost. Corners are cut, and ethical standards compromised to meet the bottom line. Workers see this and become cynical.

Management Has Outsourced Personnel Management to Human Resources with Dire Consequences.

Feeling international competition, decaying infrastructure of plants and equipment, and especially obsolescent manpower technical skills, and demotivated workers, management turned to human resources to solve its problems. The result has been a series of cosmetic interventions that have made the workplace like a playground at the expense of performance.

Management Is Preoccupied with Order, which, Paradoxically, Makes it the Victim of Chaos.

In the Machine Age, when everything was in its place and there was a place for everything, this made sense. Work, workers and the workplace were like a well-oiled machine with predictable outcomes and little variance, as it was essentially a robotic environment with workers behaving like interchangeable parts. That has all changed in the era of the professional worker, except in the workplace.

The Company attempting to be “All Things” to its People has ended in being a Disappointment to Everyone.

When things were going smoothly and profits were soaring, management flirted with lifetime employment, and entitlement programs that had little to do with performance. Now when markets are shrinking, and costs are soaring, management plays the heavy. US Steel and Alcoa learned this the hard way. A program was initiated in the 1960s in which every five years veteran employees would be given an additional 13-weeks paid furlough.

The objective was to leverage employees to greater productivity. Instead of traveling or honing their skills, most workers got second jobs. When back to work at US Steel and Alcoa, now enjoying the income from two jobs, many attempted to work both jobs, which diminished performance, and led instead to anger with management.

The John Wayne “Lone Ranger” Mindset.

Some company brass take pride in going it alone, taking big risks, cutting out new territory with a flamboyance that nothing untoward can touch them, until it does sending the company into an economic tailspin with workers in the end to pay. These no nonsense cowboys of reckless enterprise led to the Savings & Loan scandal where the books were cooked and people went to prison.

The Problem of Professionalism.

Professionalism has evolved as we have moved through the postindustrial to modernity and into postmodernity all within a generation or so. We have become an acquisitive society not only in materialism but also in terms of credentials. We measure capability by those who have degrees, and give little consideration to those who do not, as if a degree holder has a right to a job simply for being credentialed. Intelligence is what it does, not a BS or BA designation. Credentials are not a shorthand for competence.  Typically, when a professional runs into career stagnation, he goes back to school to get an MBA or Ph.D.

The Confusion between Tasks and Structures.

No one is likely to argue that the norms for one company would apply equally to another. There are discrete cultures to every company. When the lights are dimmed at 6 p.m., it tells workers it is time to go home. If there are staff meetings routinely every morning, it means work is secondary to your expected presence. If you want to stay after six, the dimming of the lights tells you it can wait until tomorrow. If you prefer to work alone but everything is done in teams, then it is in team meetings where you should be. If none of this appeals to you, then it is best that you move on, but most people don’t.

The structure of work determines the task of work; those tasks create the workplace culture; that culture dictates organizational behavior; and that behavior if it is consistent with your drives will be enhancing; if it is not you are in the wrong place.

What does it mean for the company? It means some companies will soar, some will vegetate, and others will flounder and expire. It depends on how much the structure supports the tasks at hand.

Human Resources Has Unwittingly Become Management’s Union.

Management is remarkably dependent on a buffer between it and its people. Be that buffer an adversary or advocate is immaterial, the function is basically the same. Moreover, just as the labor union movement grew out of an erosion of worker power in the industrial organization, the Human Resources movement has grown out of an erosion of management power in the complex organization. Labor unions and human resources have had a similar function: insuring organizational survival. The reason for drawing special attention to this “new unionism” is that it reveals, once again, how precariously the organization is in transition. Also, it indicates the void between the workforce and management is growing wider.

With the labor unions, you may recall, union leaders bought into management’s emphasis on productivity. Their attention was diverted from the erosion of worker power or control of what they did to sacrificing this for entitlements, compensation and job security. Now that has also eroded. Labor unions were willing to give management increasing control as long as management made pay and entitlement concessions. This has hurt workers and management alike. Management believed that paying workers more would motivate them to do more. One need look no further than the steel and automotive industries to see that this did not work.

Now, we have the “New Union,” Human Resources, orchestrating interventions that have turned the workplace into a playground. Just as management gave the labor unions the money they said they needed, management is now giving Human Resources the power to promote morale with cosmetic perks:

(1) From parking to work concessions;

(2) From touchy-feely supervision to extraordinary fringe benefits;

(3) From beautiful work areas to wonderful group programs.

Whereas the labor union got management and the worker to think in terms of money concessions, Human Resources has gotten management and the worker to think in terms of comfort and climatic luxury. The net result has been in both cases a demotivated workforce vacillating between comfort and complacency.

It is time management becomes less dependent on advocacy (Human Resources) or adversary (Labor Unions) relationships, and more on workers and management becoming partners in enterprise.

And So Where Do We Go From Here?

What I have attempted to do here is admittedly a risky analysis of a complex problem. There is no way such an analysis can be made without stepping on some toes including the hand that feeds me. Be that as it may, I have been waiting for someone to surface these realities:

(1) The modern complex organization is out of balance and has got to regain that balance;

(2) That balance cannot be discovered by ignoring history or by embracing untested new ideas;

(3) That workers work the way they have been programmed to work, and that conditioning cannot be summarily rejected by instituting prosthetics corrections (re: Quality Circles and Participative Management Programs);

(4) That management has had a haughty dependence on technology (or things), and a horrifying disregard and ignorance of workers (as persons);

(5) That workers have a fundamental need to contribute and own what they do because work provides identity;

(6) That workers need to experience growth in order to feel worthwhile;

(7) That workers will behave as children when treated like children;

(8) That the organization in the modern era has become increasingly immature in the home, church, school, and community as well as the workplace;

(9) That immaturity is a product of believing what is best for the individual without knowing what the individual needs, values, believes and expects.

(10) That Participative Management hasn’t a ghost of a chance until the gap is closed between an adolescent and an adult oriented organization;

(11) That Participative Management demonstrates we are basically ignorant in organizational terms of what motivates the individual worker.

Having said all this, I think a first step is to recognize that the “management of things” and the “management of people” are discretely different functions. That managers and consultants must realize that listening is more powerful than telling. That framing the problem is more important than generating solutions. That we are on the threshold of a wonderful tomorrow if we can “let go” of all our precous assumptions and let a little reality guide our way.