Do Upper Managers Earn Their
Keep?
The Surprising Answer and What You Can Do About
it
The way Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., president of
The Delta Group Florida in Temple Terrace, Fla., and
author of Corporate Sin (1stBooks.com, 2000) sees it,
not only do today’s managers not earn their
keep, but they can actually get in the way of work
and cripple the productive effort of their employees.
How did Dr. Fisher arrive at this conclusion?
Let’s start at the beginning.
The Industrial Revolution generated an agenda
of punctuality, conformity and obedience to authority
in the workplace. According to Fisher, these
attitudes stuck and are apparent in the learned
helplessness employees exhibit in the workplace
today. Because both managers and workers have been
unable to transcend these habits, they have become
“knowers rather than learners, tellers rather
than listeners—and neither leaders nor
followers.”
What is management’s true role?
Management’s purpose is to lead, and
leadership requires an evaluation of employees’
competence. In other words, a manager must be able to
match a worker’s skills to appropriate
assignments and projects, ensuring that that worker
realizes his or her place in the organization’s
big picture.
“While management is mechanistic,
particular and specific,” says Fisher,
“leadership is organic, holistic and
comprehensive.” As servant to an organization,
a successful leader encompasses all these qualities
and fills the role of enabler, nurturer, facilitator
and partner with workers.
What Has Management Become?
Do today’s leaders possess these
qualities?
Unfortunately, most do not. “Management
has never been programmed to lead,” says
Fisher. “Most managers are culturally
programmed to please their superiors at the expense
of being immersed in servant leadership.” These
managers lack a passion to serve.
Generally, managers have done a good job of
managing people only when people behave as things.
And this has been the case throughout most of the
20th century. As long as employees arrived at work on
time and were conforming, punctual and submissive,
Fisher explains, managers could get away with this
type of “leadership.” However,
today’s fast, knowledge-intensive work climate
demands more.
Part of the problem is that managers have
little real knowledge of how work is done in an
organization. They don’t spend very much time
down in the trenches with their own employees.
“It’s like the liberal who feels guilty
for having so much when others have so little, and
thinks to himself, ‘I know what they
need’—when he has no idea,”
explains Fisher.
Ultimately, managers have become surrogate
parents to the worker. “Put bluntly, the
manager is the caretaker and caregiver placed in the
equation to satisfy basic needs originally provided
by parents,” says Fisher. “I suggest that
in the typical organization of today, either high or
low tech, the majority of employees are either
management-dependent or counterdependent on the
company for their total well-being.”
With the help of management, workers must be
brought to a greater maturity. Most workers realize
that the employee/manager relationship is off kilter,
but lack the know-how to fix it.
“Management must give workers permission
to disagree and confront managers and
coworkers,” says Fisher. “And workers
must learn how to speak their boss’
language.” In other words, workers should learn
how to communicate with a boss who thinks
differently. Don’t approach him or her with a
“problem.” Instead, speak of the
“situation” as you know it and outline
solutions that will save money for the organization.
These are the ideas upper management wants to
hear.
Management as a Language
Empowerment. Total quality management. Employee
involvement. Self-directed work teams. These are all
words frequently used in the workplace meant to give
workers a louder voice and more meaningful
involvement in decision making. But, Fisher says,
they are merely that: words-with little meaning or
force behind them.
“‘Empowerment’ is not
self-actualizing, nor does it connote self-direction
or, indeed, a power shift,” Fisher explains.
“Verbal concepts are not the real thing. They
are abstractions, which is to say meaningless. We
should try to keep language as close to reality as
possible.”
Empowerment and other similar words are meant
to reduce management’s control, influence,
authority and power, but this hasn’t happened
in the workplace. The so-called changes, Fisher says,
are only cosmetic. In fact, he goes so far as to say
that most interventions of the past 30 years have
been attempts to maintain the status quo while
telling workers that they have more power.
“Cosmetic interventions, from touchy-feely
supervision to increased status and security, have
resulted in a workforce conditioned in learned
helplessness and irresponsibility when initiative and
accountability are critical components to
survival,” Fisher continues.
“Consequently, now, when management
pre-emptively reverses itself to give people their
power back, those workers don’t have the
slightest notion what to do with it. Management
without leadership is now paying for its corporate
sins.”
Furthermore, when management places emphasis on
winning quality awards without fully internalizing
the improvements, Fisher says, winning those awards
can do more harm than good. “Companies put all
their effort into winning awards while performance
actually goes down. The award is seen as an end
rather than the beginning of a commitment to quality.
It reminds me of the student who makes straight
“A’s” in high school and college,
but in real life is beat out by the “C”
student who works to please himself instead of
others.”
Do Managers Earn Their Keep?
Because most managers’ main focus is on the
next job, many are not top performers and do not earn
their keep. This is not their fault, Fisher says.
“It is the fault of the structure and function
of work. Consequently, it is imperative for them to
make an impression rather than a difference. These
behaviors destroy a company from within as if
managers and workers were social termites. Often the
problem is not recognized until it is too
late.”
With all this, Fisher doesn’t see
managers disappearing from the workplaces of the
future, although there will be fewer levels of
management in most organizations. If today’s
managers are any indication, their behavior will
change little. “Most managers believe their job
is to ‘manage,’ ‘supervise’
and make ‘decisions’ for workers.
However, workers have the knowledge and creative
skills to make timely decisions at the level of
consequences, but they lack the authority—or at
least perceive that they do—to execute those
decisions.” As a result, knowledgeable workers
comply with managers who may be ignorant of the
particulars of a problem or opportunity.
How Do We Make it Better?
Managers and professional workers could go a
long way toward bettering organizations by
incorporating creative thinking—both lateral
and vertical thinking—into the workplace.
According to Fisher, the dominant masculine vertical
hierarchy of thought is limited to logic, cause and
effect. Feminine lateral thinking is intuitive,
conceptual, subjective and embraces the unknown. As
Fisher puts it, “The divergent (lateral)
thinker has a fire in her belly. The convergent
(vertical) thinker needs a fire under his
behind.”
If men and women are to truly begin working
together, both thinking styles must be combined.
Evidence that we live in a one-dimensional society is
all around. More than 99 percent of CEOs in the
United States are men. “This is
one-dimensionalism to the extreme.” Fisher
says. “To have a two-dimensional society
requires equal participation of the masculine and
feminine aspect, first in each of us as individuals,
then by extension of the society collectively. We
should be using men and women in concert and
partnership. They bring different traits to the
equation.”
Organizations are not in need of a charismatic
leader, Fisher says. “It is not authority that
drives leadership. It is humility and a passion to
serve. By implication, then, charismatic leadership
is ‘leaderless leadership,’ or
manipulation.”
Fisher hopes to see young workers develop into
democratic managers; he hopes they will understand
that leadership and followership are part of the same
coin, just as masculine and feminine are two aspects
of the same brain. Unfortunately, he’s seen too
many young professionals sucked into the dominant
culture once they make it to the ranks of management;
the culture dictates their behavior.
“The role of leadership is the vision to
see present and future challenges clearly, and the
desire to serve in the interest of rallying people
and resources to those challenges,” Fisher
says. As leaders, managers have the responsibility of
“listening to workers and hearing their inner
voice—where their spirits reside.”
And what about those managers who wish to do
exactly that, but lack the knowledge needed to change
a culture? Fisher recommends a short course on the
nature of workplace culture. “Managers need to
know how to make a needs analysis of the appropriate
design for a specific operation, along with how to
rally people support, followed by a phasic agenda
with benchmarks for calibrating progress and staying
on course.”
May
2001Homepage