Reflections on management/leadership in a hierarchical culture
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police has come under fire
this week from both a panel investigating sexual harassment and bullying in the
workplace, and from the Auditor General whose report documents the glaring
omission that the force neglected to implement fully the mental health program
it “adopted” three years ago. This
“omission” is not based on forgetfulness, but rather a conscious and willful
refusal to fund and to staff the program, moving those trained and experienced
in “policing” into management/leadership of the “health” programs, resulting in
a serious mis-match of skills, training, experience and the responsibilities of
the position.
This incongruency of promoting an individual with one
kind of experience and training to fill a position that requires, even demands,
completely different skills, training and experience pervades much of our
culture. Doctors are put in charge of hospital departments without an hour of
formal training in either leadership or management, both of which subjects in
the academe have been under clouds of derision for decades, as unworthy of the
designation of an academic discipline in comparison with physics, chemistry,
trigonometry, philosophy, biology and engineering. If you think snobbery is
confined to ‘gated communities’ and does not operate in academia, you haven’t
been awake for a couple of centuries.
Even “leadership” in one military university is
maligned and replaced with “the psychology of leadership” in such a
mis-directed and inappropriate decision that cripples both the institution and
the people needed to fill ranks in leadership following graduation. It would be
a mere assumption (very dangerous) that whoever is responsible for such a
decision considers empirical analysis on which most doctoral programs depend
would be more likely to be funded and conducted on “psychology” than on
“leadership/management”. These are too often considered “soft skills” and not
worthy of the kind of attention and respect that engineers and scientists,
mathematicians and philosophers are afforded.
Ignorance ( in the “ignosco”, “I do not know” sense)
is no longer tolerable in a complex and increasingly challenging economic,
political and cultural ethos. Nor is the “religion” that only a doctor can
manage a department in a hospital, nor a police office lead a health department
in the RCMP, nor an accountant by definition, provide appropriate leadership in
a complex corporation. Roles, as defined by formal training, on the premise
that only those people would be “acceptable” to “order” and to “direct”
personnel working in that segment of the organization. Similarly, history,
mathematics and physical education graduates do not necessarily offer the most optimum background
for leadership in high schools.
We have made idols of “specialists” and denigrated
“generalists” for too long. We have also made “liberal arts” the slums of the
academic community and under this umbrella we have put management and
leadership and the so-called soft skills. For a long time, psychology itself
operated under a similar cloud, resulting, according to some, like James
Hillman, in overcompensation by the professional community in both research and
practice. Even the out-sourcing of Employee Assistance Programs by most large
corporations, to another corporation, rather than hiring trained professionals
in social sciences, liberal arts, counselling and “soft skills” is just another
sell-out of the “human” side of the enterprises, too often based on a
rationalization that confidentiality will more likely be maintained.
The occasional exception to this general development,
like the CEO who hired a former priest as his right-hand-assistant, only
demonstrates the irregularity of the practice and the social deviance it
connotes. With the rise of acknowledged human discombobulation, discomfort and
anxiety, people with general experience, including some serious tectonic shifts
that disturbed their ‘comfort zone’ (people who have been around the block and
taken major blows to their integrity, and to their stability and survived)
would be far more ready and able to discern the competing and often malignant
energies that underpin too many of our organizations, corporations, schools and
universities and colleges.
And that brings us to another meme: the search of and
pursuit of leadership positions by many whose need for power and control
motivate them to perform in ways that they know will attract the attention of
their superiors, either because they are “dependable” or “reliable” or because
they are “predictable” and “boring”….at least according to all appearances.
Often such behaviours also demonstrate a degree of obsequiousness and
sycophancy that trophies the supervisor while masking the ambition of the
sycophant.
Of course, there are exceptions to this pattern, but those currently
in “power” in positions of leadership are under no mandate to avoid falling
into such traps in their appointments. Ambition, as a single or primary factor
for promotion, is not necessarily the most appropriate qualification,
especially when linked to the academic background prominent in the
organization.
So in addition to the academic hierarchy of
disciplines, and the hierarchy of ambition and a potential veneer of loyalty,
we dig a little deeper into the most venal aspect of most of our organizations,
a word that is now being used to describe the RCMP as a “para-military”
organization.
This model is so ubiquitous and so nefarious, when we
all know that top-down decisions are both self-serving to the decision-maker
and counter-intuitive to the higher needs and aspiration of the organization,
that it needs to be disbanded, both formally, as in a death liturgy, and
informally, in a celebration of a new spirit of organizational evolution. Based
on the need for instant and for clarity on the battle-field, and perhaps in the
operating room of the hospitals, the model is totally inadequate for most
organizational decision-making. Humans do not need a life-or-death exigency to
raise their level of motivation; and organizations that depend on crisis
management as the primary modus operandi will lurch from crisis (designed and
imposed) to crisis. Such a methodology may strike the superiors as laudable,
because the decision-makers can operate under pressure, and everyone seems to
buy the theology that pressure reduces costs and increases profits. This is
also a myth that needs exploding.
Running our organizations on an operating premise of
crisis, immediacy and the conscious or unconscious rejection of long and
medium-term planning and execution is a guarantee of self-sabotage. We cannot
afford to build organizational decisions on the career-advancement plans of
those in positions of leadership and responsibility. Personal career
enhancement has to be relegated to a secondary purpose and goal of
organizational decision-making, lest we sacrifice everything in the
organization to opportunism, self-promotion, and tribalism or the most horrific
kind. People in positions of leadership and responsibility have to be
demonstrably willing and able to accept and absorb “truth-to-power” reporting
from their supervisees, and they also have to be able to demonstrate they are
able and willing to challenge their most loyal workers if and when necessary.
Personal “cabals” no matter how small (even 2 is too large) need to be
challenged as a matter of course, not as the exception to the general evidence.
Bringing our organizations out of the closet of
political secrecy and the chicanery that too often accompanies the secrecy,
infusing a strong dose of general, common sense leaven, replacing the pyramid
structures of authority with circles of consensus (in which everyone in each
department buys into the decision thereby demonstrating a shared responsibility
for execution as well as a sharing of the rewards from enhanced performance)
and levelling the hierarchy of academic and professional values with which we
imbue individuals (scientists and doctors simply should not and cannot meet the
inordinate expectations of rectitude, or prophecy or intelligence weighing them
down) and providing authentic open doors to all employees to go at least two or
three levels above their immediate supervisors for both counsel and
complaint….these are just some of the ultra-utopian, yet eminently pragmatic
changes too many organizations would benefit from.
And the benefit to the millions of individuals working
under current conditions that are less than respectful, supportive and mature
would be immeasureable. And, all the empirical evidence we have gathered
demonstrates unequivocally, that respected and supported and trusted workers
all do better and more work than any one us would do in circumstances in which
we are merely cogs in another’s machine.
In general, the workplace culture in North America is
based on two fundamental and incorrect principles:
· first
that workers want to do only the bare minimum at their workplace and
take unwarranted advantage of their
employer and
· second,
that workers are basically a “cost” rather than an investment or a potential profit
centre.
These are part of the bogey-man mind-set that besets
too many corporations and public agencies. Of course, budget managers can see
the obvious potential in reducing costs by deploying technology where once
humans did the same work. And while that is true, the extension of the
tech-no-promise to the remaining humans, cutting their health benefits, and
their support mechanism, in a new world in which human relationships are under
assault from so many quarters. (No this is not a bleeding-heart liberal crying
foul for every dissident worker in North America!)
At the same time, employers report that the sign too
many “work employment records” for those who choose to dip their toes in the
new job only to leave after a very short time. So both workers and employers
are getting, and in too many cases, deserving a bad name.
To say there are numerous signs of workplace
dysfunction is to state the obvious. However, there is a convergence of many
forces, all of them measured by their cost or their cost-saving, without giving
due attention to some very different principles:
Workers, at least those worth keeping and training,
sincerely want to do a good job, to establish earned reputations for quality
work, for dependability, for professional conduct and for a demonstrated desire
to learn and to grow into new responsibilities as they continue to work. Even
that premise is far more healthy for an organization than its inverse, given
that all workers want a healthy environment in which to make a living and their
performance will inevitably and invariably reflect the working conditions.
Workers also are not either stupid or uninterested in
the fortunes of their company. They can see ways to do things that might cost
less, or that might reduce risk, or that might integrate two sections enhancing
collaboration and perhaps productivity, as well as team-building (although that
will never measure up to productivity and profit will it?)
Workers are also seriously interested in a workplace
culture in which they can fully participate, meaning, where their voice can and
will be heard, trusted, believed and honoured. The paramilitary environment
clearly, has not been, and is unlikely ever to be able to foster such working
communications and the challenges for leaders such an environment brings.
Leaders can and will only grow when they are challenged, and not when they rule
with the proverbial iron fist. And for leaders to be willing to operate in a
culture in which their decisions can and will be challenged, both formally and
informally, in a process that goes far beyond to traditional “suggestion box” a
relic of the 1980’s. Such a process must be open to an receptive to the
worker’s right and opportunity to
dispute even section leader decisions, with an appeal process that does not and
can not seek punishment, revenge or retaliation for such “impudence”….as it was
once termed.
Enlightened leaders do not fear criticism, challenges
and even a process that brings their important decisions into the light of an
objective panel of both workers and leaders. Motivated workers, interested in
their own careers as well as the future viability and success of their
organization will respond, providing the open processes are designed and
administered by honourable professionals without prejudice, without paranoia
and without cynicism and suspicion.
It is the “hierarchy thing” that we have to start to
dismantle: in our organizational design, in our hiring policies and practices,
in our academic institutions, and in the kind of organizational models on which
we build our enterprises.
And those changes will only follow a few generations
of enlightened education, cultural transformation, and confronted prejudice and
bigotry. It is not only in racism and sexism, ageism and ethnicity where
prejudice and bigotry operate.
They are also intimate components in every
organization on the continent.
posted by acorncentreblog.com @ 5:14 PM
0 Comments
