I’m Surprised That They are Surprised

Lately I’ve been seeing quite a few stories about reducing violence in the work place. Companies are rushing to pass out violence prevention pamphlets and provide checklists with 800 numbers so coworkers can report those meeting 3 or more requirements from the checklist. They call it prevention. They call it Intervention. They say they only want to get the person the help they need. Oddly enough they get away with this, not because it has any relevance to truth what-so-ever, but because those who do finally snap tend to take out more than management when they go. If those that snapped didn’t have that flaw, this ploy wouldn’t work.

When you finally trace all the way down to the bottom for many of these incidents you will find roughly 8 out of 10 are the direct result of piss poor management. In order to address the root of the problem, management would have to hold itself accountable, and that never happens.

You have to spin the dial on the Way-Back machine to the early 80s to understand this one. I was transitioning from High School to Junior College back then. The first wave of job off-shoring was in full swing. Factories were closing all over and Bruce Springsteen albums of beaten down desolation (Born in the U.S.A.) were selling like ice water in Hell. Anyone remember the catch phrase upper management types and marketing plants used to say when they knew they would be quoted in the media?

“You should be thankful you have a job!”

They got a lot of mileage out of that phrase, but it isn’t working so well for them now. What is different? Back in this time, management types were viewed as a class apart. Those who had lifestyle and privilege those of us from the blue collar background were never to obtain. They would always be the “haves” and we would always be the “have nots”. This is no longer the case.

To understand what happened to the mysticism surrounding the management class, you have to look at the rise of the Individual Retirement Account and the fall of the traditional pension system. When just about everyone learned that Social Security was in trouble for the first time, and inflation gripped the land, and banks had to turn down qualified mortgage applicants because the banks themselves didn’t have money to loan, Congress came up with the idea of the IRA. Force people to save money in banking institutions rather than their sock drawer by letting them take a small amount of that money off of their taxes. It in no way solved the Social Security crisis, but it made people feel better, and banks were suddenly able to issue mortgages again.

Given the success of the IRA at helping heal the economy, investment firms started lobbying congress with newer and better retirement account options. These options would all involve mutual funds that would invest a large portion of the money in the stock market which (in theory) brought much higher over all returns. Since Congress wanted to grow the economy, and the average blue collar worker only bought stock through their company’s stock purchase plan, if they bought it at all, Congress yielded. After all, the only way to really fix Social Security was to create a much higher percentage of retirees that would be ineligible to receive Social Security, they could get around to declaring who would not receive it later.

Stock markets boomed for a while. Once the limits were raised high enough to make not having a retirement account simply stupid to even someone with a fourth grade education, cash poured in. There was one unexpected consequence though. For the first time, blue collar workers started listening to the business news for more than word about plant closings and openings. They started paying attention to what management was doing and making. The management class was demystified.

Not all that much later, we had the advent of individual investors and low priced brokerage services. The stock market boom made it easy for anyone to toss a dart at a stock list and make money. People started putting more and more of their money into stocks. More than they should have because it was always returning more than they lost. Then we faced the DOT BOMB flame out, MCI, Enron, and a rash of other nasty stories caused a huge drain from the blue collar pool of wealth. The demystified management was now not a class above, but a class below. Common, ordinary criminals, all intent upon running some kind of scam. Didn’t matter who they were, they were all painted with the same brush. The cucumber theory was put to good use by many. “If you stay in the brine long enough, you become a pickle.”

How did this lead to the rash of workers snapping and offing those around them? Back in the 80s there were a lot of management books out there expounding the virtues of “winning through intimidation”. Usually they invoked a name like Atilla the Hun or some other unsavory character from history who rose to greatness via the rape-pillage-plunder method of management. Those practices were put into wide use, quite simply because they worked as long as management had this “mystic shroud” around it. Now, management doesn’t have that shroud, but it is still using the old tools. Pushing someone who isn’t mentally stable at the time (for whatever reason) is playing a game of roulette with your life when you don’t have the protection of the “mystic shroud”.

What prompted me to write this wasn’t some pent up anger, but the most recent of these stories to hit the news. I’ve had the theory for a long time, but the most recent story fit it absolutely perfectly. This event seemed to stem from some employee not wishing to wear safety glasses. Rather than simply write him up N times and fire him, management chose the intimidation route. According to news reports the employee and immediate supervisor had multiple heated discussions about it. The final discussion was more of a screaming match in the parking lot. (Warning! Danger Will Robinson!) After some heated phone call to his girl friend he stormed back into the plant/factory/whatever with a gun and shot his supervisor along with several coworkers, then himself.

There is no way you cannot chalk this event up to piss poor management, yet management around the world seems more focused on identifying who they might have pushed too far than fixing the problem. The management culture at the company in question obviously allowed for, if not made direct use of, management through intimidation. They did not realize management no longer possesses the “mystic shroud” which strikes fear into the hearts of mere mortals. They chose to push an individual who, for whatever reason, was not completely stable at the time, and in a down economy, probably didn’t have the option of getting a higher paying job at a different company in the area.

To anyone who looks at the big picture, this was a predetermined outcome. A class, now perceived to be from inferior and corrupt stock, chose to harshly exert itself over an entity which viewed them as inferior. Once the entity bearing the intimidation started to view the intimidating entity as a criminal outside of prison, it was a short put to the violent response.

Gone is the day where people view a company as this shining empire to which they make a life long commitment. Many now believe they will hold no less than 15 jobs at 15 different companies before they retire. Individual Retirement Accounts have made that a much more plausible reality. Once the workforce gets some form of portable health care, it will be closer to 20 jobs before they retire. Many will never actually retire, they will simply go independent and work at what interests them this month.

You cannot manage this type of workforce by intimidation. It won’t even work now when thousands are being laid off each week by major employers. Instead of this “mystic shroud” of kingly or god-like infallibility, successful management is going to have to wear the clothes of a beggar.

This entry was posted on July 1, 2008 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Information Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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