The Organization Man Page 18
So they believe, and because they believe this they see the organization life of the future as one in which tensions will be lessening. Again, it figures. The people who will be moving into the key slots then will be people like themselves, and as the last, unreconstructed drivers disappear there will be less trouble for everyone. Out of necessity, then, as well as natural desire, the wise young man is going to enjoy himself—plenty of time with the kids, some good hobbies, and later on he’ll certainly go in for more reading and music and stuff like that. He will, in sum, be the apotheosis of the well-rounded man: obtrusive in no particular, excessive in no zeal. He will be the man in the middle.
A young man’s idle dream? It is a playback only mildly exaggerated of a vision of the future that is becoming stronger and stronger among personnel executives and the business-school people who intellectualize for business. And their influence should not be underrated. The personnel men are of the staff, rather than the line, but it is they who choose the trainees and administer the schools that affect trainees in their formative years with the corporations.*
What personnel men have in mind as the manager of the future is more of a departure than is generally recognized. Personnel executives don’t care to insult the company’s brass and, except in the privacy of the conferences and workshops endemic to the field, they manage to muffle the criticism of the top executives their new model implies. For another thing, most definitions of executive traits are so encompassing that no matter how radical or conservative one’s views of the future executive, there will be comfort in almost any of the usual all-purpose definitions. The executive, everyone agrees, must be forceful, patient, able to get along with other people, foresighted, imaginative, decisive, and of sound views.
But what, among these contradictions, is to be emphasized? To draw personnel people and executives out on the matter I tried an experiment. Out of the usual inventory of executive qualities I drew out two antithetical definitions. One description of the ideal executive hewed fairly close to the Protestant Ethic; the other to the Social Ethic. I then wrote to 150 personnel directors and asked them to say which one they inclined toward. At the same time, I sent an identical letter to 150 corporation presidents.
If they had to choose, I asked them, which of the following schools of thought would they favor:
a. “Because the rough-and-tumble days of corporation growth are over, what the corporation needs most is the adaptable administrator, schooled in managerial skills and concerned primarily with human relations and the techniques of making the corporation a smooth-working team.”
b. “Because the challenge of change demands new ideas to keep the corporation from rigidifying, what the corporation needs most is the man with strong personal convictions who is not shy about making unorthodox decisions that will unsettle tested procedures—and his colleagues.”
The response was spirited. Many of the hundred who answered jumped on me for asking such a question, but most of them did choose one way or the other and, more importantly, they went into their reasons at length.* The vote: presidents voted 50 per cent in favor of the administrator, 50 per cent in favor of the other type; personnel men: 70 per cent for the administrator.
In the wording of their letters the personnel men showed an inclination to the administrator even stronger than the vote indicated. Presidents who favored the administrator generally noted that the individualist had his place too; personnel men quite often not only failed to make such a qualification but went on to infer that the individualist should be carefully segregated out of harm’s way if he should be tolerated at all. They were, furthermore, strikingly unanimous in their explanations: among the 70 per cent voting for the administrators the explanations offered so complemented one another as to produce a quite cohesive philosophy. Here, in paraphrase, is the gist of it:
The rough-and-tumble days are over. Since the job is to keep things going, more than pioneering, the leader must be the professional manager, “the man who knows how to elicit participative consultation, how to motivate groups and individuals, how to enhance job satisfactions … how to conduct problem-solving meetings.” He will be a generalist who will not think in terms of specific work but in the science of making other people work.
In the old sense of work, he does not work; he encourages others to work. He does not create; he moderates and adjusts those who do create. “Primarily he is the balance wheel on the tendency of the professional-type individual to wander into new, unexplored, and perhaps dangerous territory.”
Unorthodoxy can be dangerous to The Organization. The pro-administrators sometimes conceded that the administrator could have unconventional ideas himself at times. But, they were in haste to add, he ought to be rather sober about it, and it was on the dangers rather than on the advantages of such unorthodox thinking that they dwelled.*
Unorthodoxy is dangerous to The Organization. Some personnel men didn’t simply omit mention of inner qualities such as “drive” and “imagination”; they went out of their way to warn against them. “Any progressive employer,” said one personnel director, “would look askance at the individualist and would be reluctant to instill such thinking in the minds of trainees.” Another personnel man put it in more direct terms: “Men of strong personal convictions, willing to make unorthodox decisions, are more frequently given to the characteristics of ‘drive’ rather than ‘leadership.’” (Italics mine.) This invidious pairing of qualities once thought congenial with each other was not restricted entirely to personnel men. “We used to look primarily for brilliance,” said one president. “Now that much-abused word ‘character’ has become very important. We don’t care if you’re a Phi Beta Kappa or a Tau Beta Phi. We want a well-rounded person who can handle well-rounded people.”
Ideas come from the group, not from the individual. The well-rounded man is one who does not think up ideas himself but mediates other people’s ideas, and so democratically that he never lets his own judgment override the decisions of the group. “The decisions should be made by the group,” says a personnel director, “and agreement reached after discussion and consultation prior to action.” “The leaders must be attentive and receptive to the ideas of his followers,” says another personnel man, “and he must adjust his ideas accordingly.”
If the corporation concentrates on getting people who will process other people’s ideas, where will it get the other people—that is, the people with ideas? Some of the pro-administrators did concede that a question was left begging. Where would the spark come from? How could a corporation ever change to new ways if the top man was so concerned with equilibrium? They submitted a solution:
Creative leadership is a staff function. Organizations need new ideas from time to time. But the leader is not the man for this; he hires staff people to think up the ideas. While the captive screwball thinks about the major problems of the corporation, the leader—a sort of nonpartisan mediator—will be able to attend to the techniques of solving the problem rather than the problem itself. “He will be able to accomplish change without upsetting relationships,” explains one, “because he has been trained to think about how the change should be accomplished quite as much as to think about what the change should be.” His job is not to look ahead himself but to check the excesses of the kind of people who do look ahead. He does not unbalance himself by enthusiasm for a particular plan by getting involved with the basic engine. He is the governor.
In part, this vision of the new management can be explained away as rationalization. For the trainee it masks the conflicts ahead; for the personnel man it affords a function and status for what is still a highly ambiguous field of work. “From where we sit in the company,” says one of the best personnel men in the country, “we have to look at only the aspects of work that cut across all sorts of jobs—administration and human relations. Now these are aspects of work, abstractions, but it’s easy for personnel people to get so hipped on their importance that they look on the specific tasks of makin
g things and selling them as secondary. It’s heresy, but I swear I am not so sure human relations are really any better than they were twenty years ago. We just talk about them more, and the muddy-headed way so many of us do gives young men a very bum steer.”
But even if the “well-rounded” ideal were no more than rationalization, the concept would still be powerful. It is self-proving. As an example of one very practical consequence we have only to note that in many large corporations the junior executives help out on the interviewing and selecting necessary to restock the cadres. As the trainees go back to the campus to search for their own image, they go back strengthened more than ever in their anti-intellectualism, and in a great Mendelian selection process well-rounded men who were chosen by well-rounded men in turn chose more well-rounded men.
It is possible that a genius, supposing he wanted to join the company in the first place, could so feign the role of the well-adjusted extrovert as to hoodwink a trainee into giving him a job. But he’d have to be skillful about it. A group of GE trainees were asked what they would do if a brilliant person like Steinmetz were to apply to them for a job. After some thought, a few trainees said they thought maybe he could work out; because of the fraternitylike life of the training program, they “could iron out his rough spots.” Others disagreed; the man would be too hopelessly antisocial to remold. “I don’t think we would put up with a fellow like that now,” one said. (Fortunately for GE’s research division, as we will see later, it does not use trainees as recruiters.)
From company to company, trainees express the same impatience. All the great ideas, they explain, have already been discovered and not only in physics and chemistry but in practical fields like engineering. The basic creative work is done, so the man you need —for every kind of job—is a practical, team-player fellow who will do a good shirt-sleeves job. “I would sacrifice brilliance,” one trainee said, “for human understanding every time.”
And they do, too.
* Tom Rath, incidentally, found he wasn’t making any sacrifice at all. After his speech he asked the boss if he still wanted him to work for him. “Of course,” the boss says. “There are plenty of good positions where it’s not necessary for a man to put in an unusual amount of work. Now it’s just a matter of finding the right spot for you.”
*The number of personnel people, compared to other employees, has been rising at a rapid rate. A study made by Dale Yoder and Mona L. Walz of the University of Minnesota’s Industrial Relations Center indicates that by 1955 there were 8 personnel people per 1,000 employees—a jump of 15 per cent over the 7 per 1,000 in 1954.
* We had expected that the type of industry the executive was in and the size of the company would have a great deal to do with the way he answered. This did not turn out to be the case. No matter how we tried to correlate the answers, by type of company, age, etc., no pattern manifested itself; the choice, evidently, was primarily a reflection of the executive’s own personal outlook.
* When we checked the words which recurred most often in letters, we found that among presidents the most frequent were “imagination,” “vigor,” “judgment,” “dynamic,” and “aggressive.” Except for those personnel men who voted for the individualist (and in fairness it should be noted that some were as strong as presidents on this score), personnel men tended to use words like “harmonious,” “co-operative,” etc.
PART III
The Neuroses of Organization Man
CHAPTER 11 The Executive: Non-Well-Rounded Man
Listening too long to trainees and personnel men describe the future is likely to unnerve one into assuming that the complete bureaucrat is just about ready to take over. Now whether or not these people are riding the waves of the future or wallowing in some kind of trough is a matter of pure prophecy, and later I will take a crack at it. Before we can do it, however, it is necessary to have a look at another kind of corporation man—the man who is running the corporation.
If the criteria set up by many personnel men were to be applied across the board, the majority of U.S. corporation executives would be out of a job tomorrow. As a matter of fact, one gets the feeling that some corporation men don’t think it would be an entirely bad idea. (“Because of their philosophy that the way of handling a corporation is based on the past,” one personnel man wrote me, “they should not be in a position to influence the younger men being trained today.”)
Top executives, of course, can seem just as balanced as the next man, and by the example they set—from the modulation of their voice in the conference room to the ease with which they handle afterhours affairs—they can sometimes appear almost as given to the Social Ethic as the newcomers. Certainly they are more given to it than the executives, say, of thirty years ago—it is, after all, these men who have been in great part responsible for the changes in corporations during the last decade.
Fundamentally, however, they are motivated by the Protestant Ethic. In the sense that younger men conceive the quality, they are not well rounded for the simple reason that if they had been well rounded, they wouldn’t have gotten to be executives in the first place. Officially, the organizations they run deify co-operation; in actuality, they remain places where success still comes to those motivated essentially by the old individualistic, competitive drives. This may alter, as the personnel men and the trainees hope; certainly the vigor with which they seek the goal of well-roundedness cannot help but influence the climate of the organization as the new generation replaces the old.
But there is a flaw in their dream which all the wishing in the world will not eliminate. In this chapter, by looking at the older executive’s attitude toward his work, I am going to submit that the goal of well-roundedness is an illusion—and in many ways, a cruel illusion. As long as our organizations remain dynamic—which is, of course, only a hopeful premise—The Organization will still be a place in which there is a conflict between the individual as he is and wishes to be, and the role he is called upon to play. This is a perennial conflict, and the sheer effort to exorcise it through adjustment may well intensify it. The new executives will probably mold themselves much closer to the bureaucratic type and thus seem to mitigate the difference, but they will not find the surcease they are looking for. Unfortunately, the drives that produce the executive neurosis so feared are entwined with the drives that make him productive. In denying this harsh reality the well-rounded ideal makes morally illegitimate the tensions now accepted as part of the game, and if the old flexing of the ego was a mixed blessing, so would be the new suppression of it.
There is a widespread assumption that executives don’t work as hard as they used to, for which apparent fact many people voice thanks. We are hearing more and more now about the trend to more hobbies and outside interests, a more rational appreciation of the therapy of leisure, the desirability of being fully involved in community life, and it has now become virtually a cliché that today’s effective executive is not the single-minded hard driver of old, but the man who is so well organized himself as to strike a sane balance between work and the rest of his life.
My colleagues and I, half persuaded that executives were in fact working more moderately, tried to test the proposition. We checked such things as country club attendance, commuter peak hours and travel schedules, and, more to the point, talked at length to several hundred organization men.* We came to the conclusion that: (1) executives are working as hard as they ever did—possibly even harder; (2) grumbling notwithstanding, high income taxes have had little effect on executive drive; (3) executives are prey to more tension and conflict than ever before, for while the swing to committee management has eliminated many old work pressures it has substituted new ones just as frustrating.
By “executive” I do not mean management men in general; in many respects the two are rather different. I am arbitrarily defining “executive” as corporation men who are presidents or vice-presidents plus those men in middle management who have so demonstrably gone ahead of their conte
mporaries as to indicate that they are likely to keep on going.
Common to these men is an average work week that runs between fifty and sixty hours. Typically, it would break down something like this: each weekday the executive will put in about 9J2 hours in the office. Four out of five weekdays he will work nights. One night he will be booked for business entertaining, another night he will probably spend at the office or in a protracted conference somewhere else.
On two of the other nights he goes home. But it’s no sanctuary he retreats to; it’s a branch office. While only a few go so far as to have a room equipped with dictating machines, calculators, and other appurtenances of their real life, most executives make a regular practice of doing the bulk of their business reading at home and some find it the best time to do their most serious business phone work. (“I do a lot of spot-checking by phone from home,” one executive explained. “I have more time then, and besides most people have their guard down when you phone them at home.”)
While corporations warn against such a work load as debilitating, in practice most of them seem to do everything they can to encourage the load. Executives we talked to were unanimous that their superiors approved highly of their putting in a fifty-hour week and liked the sixty- and sixty-five-hour week even better. In one company, the top executives have set up a pool of dictaphones to service executives who want to take them home, the better to do more night and week-end work.
In almost all companies the five-day week is pure fiction. Executives are quick to learn that if they drop around the office on Saturday to tidy things up a bit it wont be held against them in the slightest. Similarly, while the organization encourages executives to do extensive reading of business periodicals and trade journals—often by free subscriptions—few executives would dream of being caught reading them in the office. Such solitary contemplation during the office day, for some reason, is regarded by even the executive himself as a form of hooky.