It gets worse. Treat people like things and they behave like things. They do only what they have to do to keep their side of the contract. As part of a holiday job my son took on a part-time job moving furniture at the local hospital. Applying his teenage brain to the task he and his co-workers had been given, he pointed to some logical changes that would allow the job to be done in half the time. His fellow workers were outraged. Why do the work quicker, they said, when they were paid by the hour? Why should they work more than they had to for the benefit of others? A trivial example but one that is all too common in organisations of all types and sizes. Observing this tendency to adapt the work to suit the convenience of the workers, the management builds in incentives to promote faster working, only to find then that quality suffers. They therefore balance the incentives for faster work with quality controls that highlight inferior work. So it goes on, a mixture of carrots and sticks as if they were training dogs or manipulating rats in a cage. Of course, say the management theorists, good managers recognise this, they lead by persuasion and encouragement. Excellent, but why not then call it leadership or some other word – but not management, lest you risk being seen as a self-interested manipulator.
Because organisations do need to be organised. The flow of work needs to be compartmentalised and people need to know what they are required to do, by when and to what standard; but that is managing the work, not the individuals. The difference is crucial. If I know what I am meant to be doing and I believe it to be either useful or necessary, I will do it without someone looking over my shoulder. I remember Mel, a colleague of mine at the London Business School. He specialised in the management of groups and teams. Then one day he left to start his own restaurant. A year later I bumped into him. ‘It must be nice,’ I said, ‘to be able to practise all that you were preaching back at the School.’ ‘It’s funny,’ he replied, ‘but I found that if you choose the right people to start with, and if they know what they are meant to do, they just get on with it without any checking or fuss.’ I call that leadership: creating the conditions for good work, choosing the right people and setting them standards of achievement that they can understand, and rewarding them when they meet them. You may say that I am just playing with words but words describe the world, even the local world of the organisation. I now believe that WORK needs to be ORGANISED, that THINGS should be MANAGED, but that PEOPLE can only be encouraged, inspired and LED. By ‘things’, I mean the buildings, information systems or anything physical.
There are those, however, who prefer to elevate the idea of management to include the organising and the leading. Management, said the great Peter Drucker, is a human and social art. Much though I admire the thinking and writings of Drucker, I do wish that he had avoided that word because it has been so misinterpreted and abused by people who see it as an excuse to exercise their power over their fellow humans. Words do matter. They change behaviour. They shape our thinking because of the implicit messages they send; then our thoughts shape our actions. Call someone a human resource and it is only one step further to assume that he or she can be treated like other things, be oiled and fuelled, perhaps, but also controlled and even dispensed with when surplus to requirements. Good managers know this, you may say, but language can trick you into behaving in ways you would normally avoid. Words are devious, dangerous things. Always watch your language lest you send messages that you never intended.
One day you in your turn may find yourself responsible for organising the work of other people. You may be head of some department in an organisation, or it may be your own business or project, because, as I said in another letter, you can’t achieve much by yourself alone. If you are like me you may well feel inadequately equipped for the task you have been given. After a short two years getting to know my first organisation, the Shell Company of Singapore, I was put in charge of the marketing company in Sarawak, Borneo, a country the size of Wales with rivers instead of roads. There was no telephone line to the office in Singapore, no one visited, mail took four days at least. I was on my own with three airfields and two depots to look after with a local staff of thirty-five people without even a handbook. I later discovered that this was the Shell way of grooming its future leaders – throw them in at the deep end of a small outfit where they could not do much harm but might make a difference and would certainly learn a lot.
It worked. I did learn a lot, mostly by making mistakes that I was able to correct before anyone found out. But at first I felt naked and longed for the handbook of so-called management. I now know that there isn’t one. Any that you may come across, including one that I wrote myself, will turn out to be practical common sense dressed up with long words to make it seem professional. I would only urge you to remember the three different activities of Organising, Leading and Managing, and to apply them appropriately, because I truly believe that managing people, instead of leading them, is wrong and has resulted in too many dysfunctional and unhappy workplaces. You are more than a human resource.
LETTER 12
YOU AND SOCIETY
When the Israelites in the Bible were getting out of control on their journey from Egypt, Moses, their leader, went up Mount Sinai and came down with two tablets on which were written ten commandments, given to him, he said, by God. These were to be the rules for their community. It was important that they had God’s imprimatur because otherwise no one might have felt obliged to obey them. All rules, in short, need a higher and accepted authority. The first batch of commandments are there to reinforce the authority of the one and only God: no other gods are allowed, no graven images or idolatry. Next comes an injunction to honour your father and mother. Make no mistake, this is a hierarchical society, one in which everyone knows who calls the shots, who lays down the rules. Moses well understood that a society cannot function without rules. It is the same today. We need rules to guide our behaviour, to know what is acceptable and what is not. When those rules are officially approved by an assembly of the people, they become laws of the society and can be legally enforced.
Even smaller groups like businesses and families need rules to establish what behaviour is allowed or not. Institutions also set their own set of procedures and authorities and if you want to join them or buy from them, you are asked to conform to their processes. These don’t have the force of law, but rely on an assumed contract, that by joining you are accepting their rules. The rules, be they of a business or a school or a family, are often created more for the convenience of the organisation than their customers or users. The new digital world is making it easier for the organisation to impose its discipline on all its users and employees. The digital dimension carries another advantage for the organisation, if not for the user; you cannot process and order anything digital without giving away a bunch of your personal data – your name, email and even your date of birth – none of which were necessary if you just wanted to buy their product. The technology carries its own authority; if you don’t go along with their rules you cannot complete your purchase.
My wife took the view that most rules were unnecessary and could be ignored. When asked for her name and address she might fill in bogus names and details as a small way of protesting against what she saw as a form of theft, the organisation getting our data without our realising what we were giving away. Rules, she felt, had to be challenged: so many were unnecessary or weighted too much in favour of the organisation. Most regulations, to her, were not fixed tracks like railways but more like road maps – guides not rails. Driving in Italy I once remarked to an Italian friend that drivers took little notice of the speed limits. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘they regard them as advisory only, but if you have an accident your speed will be taken into account.’ Laws as advisory not compulsory. I suspect that is the way many regard the ever-increasing list of bureaucratic rules that have encrusted modern society.
You can, of course, go to the other extreme, lie back and do what you are told. I call that submission to the rule of the invisible ‘they�
�� who are the authority. Who are they? That is the problem. We once employed a cleaning lady who was married to a soldier in the British army. One day she told me, with some pride, that the army would be giving them a new house to live in because he had been promoted to corporal. ‘Where is it?’ I asked. ‘And when do you move?’ ‘They haven’t told me yet,’ she said. ‘Who are “they”?’ I asked. She looked at me as if I was stupid. ‘They haven’t told me yet who “they” are, have they?’ Then there was the taxi when we were caught in a horrendous traffic jam: ‘They ought to do something about this,’ the taxi driver said angrily. Again I asked, ‘Who are “they”?’ ‘Haven’t a clue,’ he said.
The invisible ‘they’ is usually a higher authority, often a branch of government. If we can delegate our problem upwards, to let some authority decide, we are, we like to think, free of responsibility. It seems the easy way to live, just to do what ‘they’ arrange or decide for you. But be careful. You can’t guarantee that they will have your best interests at heart. They will want what is simplest, cheapest and most efficient for them, not for you. They will create rules and regulations that allow few exceptions, building an organised society that treats its citizens as pawns on a chessboard. This is the downside of the welfare state, a managed society with little room for individual difference. It is all done with the best intentions, no doubt, in an attempt to create a safer and more secure world for the citizens. A risk-free society, however, means a society where experiments are thought foolhardy so are never attempted. ‘Is it allowed?’ my children used to say when my wife suggested some new adventure. ‘I have no idea,’ she would reply. ‘Let’s see if they stop us, shall we?’ I hope that you will bear these words in mind because without experiment nothing will ever change.
I used to assume that those in authority were wiser and knew better. It would be sensible therefore to let them decide many things for us. The time came, however, when I realised that some of those people had once been my students. I knew them. They were ordinary folk, doing their best for their masters and for us. They were not all-wise; like most of us they often found it easier to go along with policies that they had doubts about because they did not feel sufficient unease to blow a whistle and ruin their career. We should not rubbish the experts but should recognise that they are working within a system which they are bound by their contracts to respect. I am constantly surprised and appalled at how few of those who govern us are prepared to stand up and be counted for what they believe to be right if it puts their careers at risk. How sad it must be to live a lie just because it is easier that way. I hope that you will always follow the advice of Polonius to his son Laertes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: ‘To thine own self be true … Thou canst not then be false to any man.’
The upward delegation of responsibility to some invisible ‘they’ has another unforeseen consequence. In a regulated society anything that is not expressly regulated or forbidden is often assumed to be permitted. As one example, global businesses routinely direct their profits to those countries where taxes are lower. When anyone protests that they should pay their taxes where they make their money, the businesses reply that if that’s what they want they should change their laws. Morality then is effectively defined as keeping within the law. That is a very low definition of morality, one that ends up with a cynical and calculating society. It also leads to an ever-increasing flow of new laws if we cannot rely on people to behave decently to one another. If people suffer from our actions, but we have broken no law, then it is assumed that it is up to others, often the government, to pick up the pieces or to pass new laws to prevent it happening again. No need for us to repair the damage or take responsibility. The result is a deluge of new laws and regulations, all intended to keep us safe. These rules, however, inevitably stifle initiative and creativity, unless you count as creativity the fevered search for new ways round the rules.
I would like you to remember that you have some responsibility for whoever ‘they’ are and what their authority is. You are not a pawn, you are a citizen, even if the British muddy the waters by calling you a subject. There is such a thing as society and it is made up of people like you. You live in a democracy, which means, literally, that power belongs to the demos, the people. We get the rulers we choose. The ‘they’ we complain about were ultimately chosen by us and people like us. We have a representative democracy, one in which we elect representatives to take decisions on our behalf, although occasionally this gets confused when our representatives decide to ask the whole population to decide something. (In my view referendums should be banned, as they are in Germany, except in specific circumstances, because they override the decisions of the people whom we elected to take those decisions. You can have one form of democracy or the other, but not both.)
Whichever form democracy takes it requires you to do your bit. You must vote, to begin with, otherwise you have no right to complain about the ‘they’. In Australia voting is compulsory by law. In Britain it is voluntary. If it is raining or snowing on polling day you may decide it is too much bother to go out to vote. That is wrong. Why should the weather influence the choice of our rulers? More than voting, however, you can even be one of those elected decision-makers yourself. Democracy has many layers, starting with your own community. It is an interesting and useful thing to stand for election to your own parish council as my wife did. And why stop there? There are ever-higher levels where you can serve your country. Perhaps you could start by standing for your school or college council, becoming in a small way one of the ‘they’. You might become more sympathetic to their problems.
Citizenship, however, is about more than elections. If you care about any of the big issues in society you must do more than mutter and complain to your friends. Do something about it. One friend took it upon herself to round up over 200 large organisations, who all agreed to support her campaign not only to make domestic abuse illegal but to encourage all to view it as immoral and damaging to everyone involved. The organisations all agreed to take the matter to their workforces and persuade them to take it seriously. No one asked her to do this. She was doing her duty as a citizen. Even the old gentleman I see on the common picking up litter is being a good citizen. If only more people took their citizenship seriously we would have less need of those irritating regulations. If you worry about climate change you cannot leave it all to governments. You must do your bit too: use public transport wherever possible; only eat meat once a week, if that; persuade others to follow your example; above all, vote.
I would go further. We need to apply the idea of subsidiarity in our daily lives. This ugly word has long been a part of Catholic ethical teaching and was the cornerstone of the European Union, even if it was observed more in theory than in practice. The principle of subsidiarity is that responsibility should always reside at the lowest practical point. It favours maximum delegation or, more correctly, it favours reverse delegation, upwards. In other words, the state should not tell families how to bring up their children, although it may offer advice, but nor can families decide where the state should spend its money, even though they may well have ideas. Anything that families cannot decide on their own should be referred up to a higher authority, but that upward delegation is at the discretion of the lower body. The real power in society should lie with the citizens who delegate upwards what they cannot do for themselves. Sadly that power has been stolen from us. We need to pull it back. Subsidiarity means that you should not wait for someone to tell you what to do – just get on with it.
LETTER 13
LIFE’S CHANGING CURVES
I have bored too many audiences with my story of the road to Davy’s Bar, but it meant so much to me at the time that I have to share it with you as well. It is a true story. I was driving to Avoca, a small town in Ireland. The road went through the Wicklow Mountains, a beautiful but empty area of hills and woods and lakes. I wasn’t too sure of the road so when I saw someone walking his dog by the roadside I pulled up and asked him if
I was on the right road to Avoca.
‘Indeed you are. Keep right up this long hill, then, when you get to the top, look down into the little dip beyond. You will see a small stream, a bridge across it and Davy’s Bar on the other side. You can’t miss that; it’s painted bright red. Have you got that?’ he asked me.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Up this long hill, down the dip to the small stream and Davy’s Bar.’
‘Great,’ he said. ‘Well, one kilometre before you get there turn right up the hill and you’re on your way.’
It sounded so sensible, the way he said it, that I had driven off before I realised it was one of those legendary Irish directions, like ‘I wouldn’t start from here’. But I drove off and, sure enough, when I got to the top of the hill I could see Davy’s Bar down below. I drove on keeping a lookout for that road to the right. I never saw it. I got to Davy’s without passing any road. Damn that fellow, I thought as I turned round to go back up the hill. I found the road then, the other side of the hill. My helpful guide had failed to tell me that the road to the right that I needed came before I got to the top and before I could see Davy’s Bar.
What, you may ask, has that got to do with anything? Well, it set me thinking and I realised that it was a parable about life and change.
21 Letters on Life and Its Challenges Page 7