FROM BUREAUCRATIC TO INTERACTIVE SOCIAL CHARACTER
By caricaturing the bureaucrat, looking with disdain at the conformity and self-importance of the organization man, the critics were distancing themselves from this social character, perhaps even projecting away aspects of themselves that clashed with the ideal of a free, independent people (table 4-1 displays the values associated with the bureaucratic and interactive characters). Who of us in modern industrial society has escaped a socialization process in schools and workplaces where we’ve had to play a role in bureaucracy, to think and act as bureaucrats?15 To some extent, the bureaucratic social character fit all middle-class Americans growing up in the age of the manufacturing mode of production, and especially those who were raised in traditional families. Yet, unlike some of the Asians I’ve interviewed who are fully satisfied to submit to paternal leaders, many of the Americans I’ve talked to feel conflicted about their submission to bureaucratic bosses, even though this conflict may not be fully conscious.
TABLE 4-1
From bureaucratic to interactive social character
Bureaucratic Interactive
Ideals • Stability • Continual improvement
• Hierarchy/autonomy • Networks/independence
• Organizational loyalty • Free agency
• Producing excellence • Creating value
Social character • Inner-directed • Interactive
• Identification with paternal authority • Identification with peers, siblings
• Precise, methodical, obsessive • Experimental, innovative, marketing
Socioeconomic base • Market-controlling bureaucracies • Entrepreneurial companies
• Internet
• Slow-changing technology • New technologies
• National markets • Global markets
• Employment security • Employment uncertainty
• Traditional family • Diverse family structures
I learned about this attitude when studying managers in high-tech companies. In 1969, I was given the opportunity to get a grant from the Harvard Program on Technology and Society to study the people creating new technology—how their personalities influenced their effectiveness and the products they built and in turn how their work shaped the further development of their personalities, especially their values. However, to get the grant, I had to gain entry into companies and permission to interview managers, scientists, and engineers. At that time, I was spending the year as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. While there, I met a first-level manager of a large high-tech company who liked the idea of the study, but he said he was too low in the hierarchy to invite me in. He then introduced me to his manager, who also liked the idea of the study, and who also said he was too low in the hierarchy to invite me in. But he connected me with the human resources vice president, who said that while my project was interesting, only a group vice president could invite me in. He introduced me to one whom he thought might be open to the idea.
The group vice president listened as I described how I’d do the study and offered to share the results with him. Then he said, “I’ve never met a psychoanalyst before. Tell me something about myself that I don’t know and I’ll let you come in and do your study.” I said, “I’m not a mind reader, but I can tell you something about yourself you may not know if you’re willing to take a Rorschach test, to describe what you see in a set of ten inkblots.” He agreed and took the test.
Let me note that I had spent many years learning to use the Rorschach both as a diagnostic tool and a research instrument for interpreting emotional attitudes and cognitive style. What I saw in the vice president’s responses was deep anger at having to submit to higher-ups and a passionate drive to be free—in other words inner rebellion against his bureaucratic situation. Although this was our first meeting and he had said nothing about himself, I told him what I saw. “OK,” he said, “you’re in.” Obviously, I didn’t tell him something that he didn’t “know” or else he would not have been so quick to accept my interpretation. Rather, I was affirming feelings that he had never talked about, maybe never even admitted to himself. He decided to let me in because he felt known and thought that he could learn from me about the people he managed and maybe his bosses as well.
The Gamesman, the book that resulted from my study of 250 managers in ten technology companies, was based on interviews lasting from three hours to, in a few cases, more than twenty hours. In it, I described a variation of the bureaucratic personality then rising to leadership positions in these innovative and fast-paced companies.16 I wrote that the new type—unlike the security-seeking bureaucratic type described by William H. Whyte Jr. in his book The Organization Man—was excited by the chance to cut deals and gamble.17 While the gamesman wasn’t a visionary who created new industries, he was skilled at organizing teams and found his greatest satisfaction at work in winning. As the executive who invited me in put it, “Our main ability is that we know how to win at this game of business.”18
The gamesman became a model for managers in fast-paced competitive companies. Like Jack Welch, who explicitly described business as a game and compared his role to a manager of a professional baseball team, executives in large bureaucratic companies tried to put a new face on their bureaucratic image.19 After the breakup of the Bell System in 1984, AT&T’s motto of universal service was replaced by the goal of winning. However, the attempt by AT&T executives to look different, aided by legions of PR advisers, didn’t make them any less bureaucratic in their behavior. The real gamesmen in the Silicon Valley companies that tried to partner with AT&T gave up in frustration with the bureaucrats who overanalyzed everything and then made some disastrous decisions that eventually brought the company close to ruin.20
In the 1980s, I first interviewed men and women at work who fit neither the classic bureaucratic type nor the gamesman variation.21 These people had an instinctual dislike for bureaucracy and bureaucratic bosses. They saw themselves as businessmen and -women, not bureaucrats. They were attracted to work where they were clearly adding value for customers and also developing their own business competence. Unlike the bureaucratic types who sought autonomy within the organization, these interactive types strove to maintain independence from the company by constantly sharpening their marketable skills.
Unlike the bureaucratic social characters who want a good father–like boss who gives them objectives, leaves them alone to achieve these objectives, and then evaluates them, Interactives typically work in teams where everyone is expected to push each other to get results.
People with the interactive social character fit naturally into projects and teams, but only if they are treated as equals and have a say in how things are done. Unlike bureaucrats who focus on meeting objectives set by the boss, Interactives think business: who are my customers and how can I add measurable value for them? Bosses who don’t help to get the job done are just roadblocks or worse.
Like any social character, Interactives have both strengths and weaknesses that make them hard to lead. In Got Game? How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever, John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade report on attitudes to work and leadership of business professionals who’ve grown up with video games. That included over 80 percent of people age thirty-five and under in 2004, presumably in 2007 a larger percentage of that age group is working in the businesses surveyed by the authors.22 The gamer attitudes they report fit closely with my own observations of the interactive social character:
They find meaning at work in adding value for customers.
They want their rewards based on measurable results, not position or evaluations by bosses.
They’re so confident of their skills that they believe they don’t have to work as hard as other people. They think highly of themselves and are quick to label themselves as “experts.”
They see business like a video game in which they can always find a way to win, and they’re opti
mistic they’ll succeed. Failure is just a learning experience.23
They see leaders as useless, even evil. Even in MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games), everyone can take a turn at leading. It’s a matter of coordinating the roles: “The game generation believes in skill, they don’t believe in following orders.”24
They shift roles and identities easily, depending on what’s required in the game. And they agree with the statement “the best way to handle people is to tell them what they want to hear.” State the authors, “It’s almost as if they see life as a game, and themselves as skillful players . . . A strong majority of the game generation agrees with the statement, ‘I can control the way I come across to people, depending on the impression I wish to make.’ ”25 This is a good description of the marketing personality.
For Interactives, parents served as enablers and cheerleaders. At work, Interactives want continual feedback from bosses; they want to know how they’re doing. But since they don’t identify with father figures and distrust parental-type relationships at work, seeing them as stifling independence, they resist the kind of mentoring enjoyed by the bureaucrats. An interactive banking executive told me she didn’t want her boss as a mentor or coach, because she didn’t want him to know any more than he already did about her doubts or weaknesses. She wanted to be able to hire a coach she could fire if she didn’t get the help she wanted. Interactives only accept help from people who don’t lay on them a “heavy emotional trip.”26 Also, let’s not forget that many Interactives can mentor their elders, particularly when it comes to technology.
Interactive attitudes are spreading throughout the industrialized world. In the 1970s, when I met with a group of bureaucratic Volvo managers, they defined themselves in terms of the company. The company determined their roles and goals, and they didn’t question the company’s values. They served the company loyally; they were proud to be Volvo men. In contrast, I recently spoke with young Swedish entrepreneurs, both men and women, who demand that companies implement their own values. Otherwise, they’re not interested in working for that company. The identity or sense of self of interactive individuals remains separate from the company unless that company becomes an expression of themselves, of their values.
The interactive social character has been formed in a world in which we must adapt to constant change, and we can’t count on stable institutions to take care of us. Corporate promises have evaporated with corporate bankruptcy. People succeed and prosper by staying in competitive condition, physically as well as mentally, and by building their own support networks at work and in personal relationships, like the women in the popular HBO program Sex and the City.
Despite insecurity at home and at work, the interactive social character has grown up in a richer and more abundant society than has ever existed. Interactive individuals want to enjoy life wherever they are. They want excitement, fun, and adventure even when they’re competing, as in TV shows like The Apprentice and Survivor. But as mentioned in chapter 1, the psychopathology of the interactive social character is the obverse of its strengths; the interactive person can be emotionally detached, unwilling to commit, superficial, disloyal, and centerless. And the question remains of how Interactives will perform in leadership roles when they need to take charge.
In the appendix, I describe what I’ve learned about the different development patterns of the bureaucratic and interactive social characters from infancy to old age. Clearly, understanding these social character differences is essential for gaining followers and collaborators in the knowledge workplace. But it’s not enough. To lead in the global enterprise you’ll have to know even more about people. In the next chapter, I’ll build on what we’ve learned about social character and transference to focus in on the most important competence for leaders in the knowledge workplace—understanding people.
CHAPTER 5
Understanding People in the Knowledge Workplace
WHY HAS IT BECOME SO IMPORTANT for leaders to understand the people they lead? Why has it become essential for leaders to develop their Personality Intelligence? I believe the answer has to do with the new context of the leader-follower relationship.
THE LEADER-FOLLOWER RELATIONSHIP
As a framework, I’ve found it useful to think about this relationship in terms of four categories, which are based on the interaction between essential motivations of the leader and the led (see figure 5-1). A leader may be motivated by a desire for the common good or by a drive for personal power. To be sure, motives may be mixed, and leaders who hunger for personal power over others generally cloak their motives in promises and visions of the common good. But events usually reveal which motive is dominant, especially when they conflict. In turn, followers follow either because they want to follow or because they have to follow the leader. These dichotomies give us four possibilities: One, people want to follow a power-driven leader; two, they feel they have to follow a dictator; three, a leader who is working for the common good has resistant followers; and four, people want to follow a leader who is trying to achieve a common good.
FIGURE 5-1
Why and how do people follow the leader?
Let’s focus on each of the four alternatives. Where people want to follow a leader who’s out for personal power, they get a seductive demagogue like Napoleon, who appeared at first to be a liberator but ultimately ruined France in his compulsive drive for conquest. Hitler is another example. He gained power with a promise of German glory, but when faced with defeat, he ordered Albert Speer to destroy the country to punish the German people for failing him. In a less drastic way, people can be taken in by political or organizational leaders who promise to protect them, who trigger transferential idealization, but who prove to be just out for themselves. Contrast these power-driven leaders with George Washington, who, like the Roman leader Cincinnatus, could have stayed in power, but gave it up to return to his farm.
Where people have to follow a power driven leader, they are oppressed by a dictator whom they follow out of fear. He could be a Machiavellian prince, a Saddam Hussein, or a Stalin. On a smaller scale, these dictators might be bureaucratic or even psychopathic bosses. Who among us hasn’t had to suffer a dictator at school or work?
Where a leader who wants the common good has unwilling or lukewarm followers, we find an interesting variety of leadership possibilities. Consider a company that needs to change—to adapt to new markets, face competition, improve results, innovate—but has employees who resist change. One way to deal with this is by engineering change without ever relating directly to followers. Well-meaning managers avoid the challenge of leadership by designing new structures, a slimmed-down workforce, and new processes as well as incentives that force change, as Mark Hurd did at NCR and then at HP. Or they may act more like diplomats who arrange mergers or sell off parts of the company, like Richard Parsons at Time Warner or Howard Stringer at Sony.
A hands-on leader of resistant followers could be a benevolent despot who forces change with both positive and negative incentives, rewarding those who change and threatening to fire those who won’t budge. The despot may even trigger a positive infantile transference in bureaucratic followers, and if he produces great results, the resisters may even become willing followers. In some contexts, like traditional Chinese culture, this type of leader may be welcomed.
But in the new context of knowledge work and Interactives, the leader of a resistant workforce is better advised to be more like a kind of doctor who educates and persuades patients to change behavior in their own self-interest; who makes it clear that unless patients follow a new diet and start to exercise, the doctor will stop treating them; and who explains fully the reasons for change, answers all questions, and responds to all doubts. The goal of the doctor is to make patients into collaborators who manage their own conditions. Likewise, the goal of the organizational doctor is to become a more interactive leader, the “democrat” who collaborates with the people who share the same view o
f the common good. To do that, the doctor-leader both teaches and institutes learning processes. This may be the only way to engage wholeheartedly the new generation of professionals in a common purpose. We’ll find this to be the case in many examples presented in this book.
Ideally, the leaders we need will be democratic, in the sense that they’ll have the full support of their follower-collaborators. But to create a positive future, we’ll also need many skillful doctors without illusions about what it takes to become a true interactive leader. And in the context of the global economy and knowledge workplace, they’ll have to understand potential collaborators, by developing their Personality Intelligence.
This kind of understanding was not so important in the early 1970s, when I was hired by B. O. Evans, the innovative president of IBM’s Systems Development Division, to teach six of IBM’s highest-potential managers to understand themselves and others. Evans, known for his unique skill in getting difficult people to work together, hoped I could teach these managers to do what he did intuitively. I tried to teach the group in a seminar, but instead they asked me to meet with them individually. That was because they didn’t want to expose themselves to people they saw as rivals. Possibly, they might at some future time either manage or report to one of the others, meaning they would either be giving or receiving commands. But they foresaw no need to collaborate with each other.
Evans and a few other executives interested in understanding people were ahead of their time. In the age of industrial bureaucracies and national companies, understanding people wasn’t essential. To lead the bureaucratic social character, managers were trained to present themselves as paternal and reassuring, to communicate clearly and to recognize and reward good behavior. And they didn’t need training to understand people they thought were just like themselves. To choose successors, executives typically tapped clones. They were all men. At AT&T they wore suits size 42 long; at Ford, they were shorter, just like the Fords.
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