Author’s Note: Why Americans Can’t Get their Work Done!
Asking right questions!
In 2001, I performed an intervention at the Children’s Board of Hillsborough County in Tampa, Florida, an agency that delivers important services to indigent children in the county. I asked the director, “What do you want me to do?”
The director answered, “Find out why we can’t get our work done.” Subsequently, I used that title to my report: Why the Children’s Board of Hillsborough County Can’t Get Its Work Done.
It was the right question. The report was a forensic study of what went wrong and why, and how to correct these deficiencies. When it was finished, however, the director was so incensed with my report she short-changed me $3,600 as retribution for answering a politically incorrect question.
In 2012, she was removed from her office and a high-octane local politician and former mayor, Pam Iorio, took over in an interim capacity, implementing many of the recommendations I made in my report. She also reduced administrative staff and field operatives by nearly one-third. Iorio has organizational skills and an instinct for doing the right thing, along with the political clout.
Powering Out
The question of why Americans can’t get their work done has been a concern of mine since 1980. Prior to that time, I operated either in the field or as a top executive, never having worked professionally in the bowels of the corporation.
After earning my Ph.D. in 1977, I consulted for many Fortune 500 companies, finally joining one in 1980, Honeywell, Inc. in Clearwater, Florida as a management and organizational development psychologist. We conducted several studies between 1980-1986 dealing with work efficiency. As a result, I identified six passive individual behaviors and three dominant corporate cultures. In the process, I discovered many functional groups were performing at levels of organizational efficiency about 50% of what was expected.
Later, in 1986, as the director of organizational development for Honeywell Europe Ltd., the efficiency of Honeywell workers in Europe proved to be about the same as in the U.S. with clear signs of the same passive behaviors and cultures.
By 1990, it was clear to me why the United States and Europe were failing to get their work done. These observations were followed up with a series of articles and books, Six Silent Killers (1998) being the most comprehensive.
Now, in the 21st century, with the advent of powerful personal IT devices, distracting from as much as contributing to work, worker efficiency continues to plummet. The irony is, with the power of these electronic devices soaring, individual worker efficiency is becoming increasingly irrelevant, leading to the conclusion that humans may be factoring themselves out of existence, somewhat as drone technology is in the process of revolutionizing boots on the ground warfare. Asking the right question doesn’t seem natural to us.
Right Question Overruled
In 2003, the United States in a heightened state of fear and paranoia following the New York City Twin Towers terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, the wrong question was asked of Iraq: where are the weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), when the right question should have been are there WMDs in Iraq?
Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson wrote a series of articles in The New York Times debunking the Niger intelligence claims that uranium sales were made to Iraq, which President George W. Bush misrepresented in his State of the Union address leading up to the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq.
General Colin Powell, with CIA Director George Tenet sitting behind him as he addressed the United Nations, laid out a case of Iraq having these phantom WMDs. It became a burlesque comedy of tragic proportions. Wilson was maligned, and his wife, the covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, was exposed and compromised, all this from asking the wrong question.
No Contest
Six Silent Killers doesn’t ask: “Where are these passive behaviors?” Rather, it asks the more audacious question: what sponsors these collective behaviors and what are we doing about it?
These killing behaviors exist undetected negating productive effort in two of these three dominant workplace cultures:
· The Culture of Comfort is management dependent with the manager acting as surrogate parent to reactive and taciturn workers;
· The Culture of Complacency finds workers counterdependent on the organization for their total well being suspended in the terminal adolescence of the dependent child; and
· The Culture of Contribution departs from this dependence with workers and managers cooperating and collaborating as partners in enterprise in mature adult relationships.
While the Culture of Complacency may thrive in some quarters in 2013, surely the “six silent killers” operate even more so in work cultures and industries plagued by constant restructuring, mergers & acquisitions, downsizing, and/or divisive and incompetent leadership.
Basically, the managerial class has been waging a losing war against workers for nearly three decades, and it continues, now aided by state and federal governments. Despite apparent gridlock and dysfunction, corporate society persists in business as usual practices and in the exercise of infallible institutional authority while ignoring the mounting evidence of corporate decline in forward inertia.
The right question to ask is how much longer can the United States afford this?
Some 24 states in the United States have now passed union busting legislation, calling it “Right to Work” legislation. This has been in part driven by the impossibility of states being able to maintain the funding of their benefit and retirement plans. It is not uncommon in the State of California, for example, to retire with a yearly income (including benefits) in the range of $100,000 to $200,000. The mean average is in the range of $40,000 per year for 60 percent of state retirees, which is well above the national average of industrial retirees. Who pays for these exorbitant compensation packages? Taxpayers do! Keep this in mind.
Delay of the Game
Symptoms of the problem are evident everywhere. Currently, our attention is drawn to the National Hockey League’s owners’ contract impasse with the players association (NHLPA). It has been finally resolved but after canceling half of the current 2012-2013 NHL season. The long-term contract should keep peace in this sport for the next eight or ten years, that is, with players and owners, but what about fans? It is yet to be learned what are the long-term consequences of this most contentious struggle between labor and management. Neither complacency nor the six silent killers are easily detected as they represent a mindset that feels it is being taken advantage of, which translates into justifying negative behavior. Little or no concern is paid to the unintended consequences. What might they be?
The wrong question for NHL players was why did they refuse to settle, when the right question is how much longer will NHL fans be able to afford continuing to pay the high price for supporting the sport?
Owners know there is a limit to how long they can continue to sign high priced player contracts without exceeding the ability of ticket buyers to pay. Obviously, players want more revenue, and many fans are on their side, without those fans or players knowing the price of doing business other than the sport’s entertainment value. The business risks are outside their purview. Typically, professionals of all stripes, when asked about such factors as business risks, they reply without hesitation, “That’s not our problem,” when clearly it is everyone’s in the long run.
The other right question is why is there so much distrust between players and owners, workers and managers? Inappropriate questions are asked because of false assumptions.
When Greed Became Good…
During the golden era of business in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, that is, before the rest of the world caught up with the United States competitively, the differential in compensation between workers and managers was modest. The differential climbed in the 1980s, soared in the 1990s, and has spiraled beyond comprehension in the 21st century. It is no accident that the Six Silent Killers became prevalent in the 1990s when “greed became good.”
It is the reason the “Occupy Wall Street” (OCW) movement was launched without an apparent agenda, but with pervasive frustration and confusion as 1% of the population was said to earn or control wealth equivalent to what the bottom 90 percent generated with which to live. OCW didn’t know what question to ask so they simply acted as squatters, expressing their indignation.
Another wrong question to ask is what can management do about this waste, when the right question is when will workers tire of being disenfranchised from the workplace, from the money changers, and from the marketplace? When will they realize they stir the drink?
An ancillary right question would be: what prevents workers from growing up and accepting responsibility and accountability consistent with their interests? It is futile to look for demons.
There are no demons here, no good guys and bad guys, only workers and managers moving away from good sense and the pragmatics of the psychology of William James, where self-interest once trumped everything as it mutually served workers and managers alike.
Ultimate Questions
To put things in perspective, more than 90% of what workers demanded at the beginning of the last century – a safe and healthy working environment, pay for performance, social benefits, adequate vacations and opportunities for promotion – has essentially been given to them.
Six Silent Killers is not about powerless workers under siege using passive behaviors to justify their frustration in the workplace. Nor is it about anachronistic management, which clearly is outdated, but which, paradoxically, is supported and sustained daily by passive workers and reactive managers. Neither workers nor managers want to face up to the struggle necessary to establish a new system, which would appease if not eliminate the litany of complaints about “the system,” as well as their angst with each other. Who is the system: everyone!
Countless attempts have been made over time to encourage workers to self-manage, including putting them on salary and giving them professional status. I don’t know of a single case where hourly workers voted to sacrifice the possibility of overtime pay to work beyond their shift or on a Saturday or Sunday without additional compensation, as is the case with most professional workers. Opportunity doesn’t seem to be enough.
The final question, which the reader might ask is not why workers are suspended in adolescence, but when will they escape this dependence, and decide to “grow up”? A secondary question: when will workers realize they can work without managers?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 14, 2013
Edited by George Edward Daly, Calgary Alberta, January 14, 2013
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