Management in the Time of Utility

I was struck yesterday at the tone-deaf nature of so many of our human relationships in the workplace.
My belief in management and leadership is informed by a philosophy I heard attributed to the 19th Century British Army many years ago:  An officer does not eat before his men eat, drink before his men drink, sleep before his men sleep.  While I am certainly not an officer (and never have been) I try to adhere to this philosophy as much as I can.  If you are a leader or manager (true of families or other organizations as well as work), it is your job to put the people you lead ahead of you as much as you possibly can because you are asking them to do a great deal of things for you.

This is not always convenient.  It require, interestingly enough, the same thing that raising children effectively requires:  time.  Time to respond to their questions.  Time to walk through not just a resolution but the reasons for the resolution.  Time to just listen to their lives.  Times to build bonds, be they food or song or  general silliness.

It also means you have to listen.  A lot.  Not just to what they are saying but, as Peter Drucker said, to the things that they are not saying.  You have to answer the question they may not be answering but they actually want the answer to to respond to the concern they are not voicing but want to have answered.

Perhaps I make this sound like a chore.  I do not mean to - I find that leading the small teams I have lead (that sounds a lot more noble and romantic than my life actually is) is (usually) one of the great joys of my life - not from the "power" that I get from having control over the lives of others but from the relationships that accrue from it.

The thing that surprises me is not all leaders are like this.

Too many seem regard the people that work under them as servants or tools to be used.  It may not be intentional on their part - they may just have problems relating to people or feel that they themselves are too busy to "visit" with others.  The problem - the thing that they do not often understand - is that the impression that it gives to those underneath them is exactly that:  you are a tool to accomplish a tasks, a servant to execute my will, a cog to turn in the machine.  Whether you are happy or unhappy, satisfied or unsatisfied, engaged or not, you are here to serve.

They often miss the subtle undercurrents of what is actually going on in an organization because they are so focused on execution that they miss the reactions of their personnel.  Certainly most people will go along with what they are asked - after all, it is their job - but a grudging acceptance of direction is not the sort of thing that builds world class organizations of any stature or lasting value that accomplishes anything worthwhile, nor is it that sort of thing that individuals stay to invest their lives into.  They will eventually turn away and seek other opportunities - opportunities of advancement, opportunities of their heart - leaving gaps in the institutional knowledge which, if not remedied, will eventually consume any organization.

I worry.  It seems we have come so far in our pursuit and realization of productivity and efficiency that we have lost the art of relationship that makes not only productivity and efficiency possible but things  like helping others to be the best they can be (which may not always be what they are doing for us) or simply being their at a critical point in their lives when they need assistance.  We miss all of this - this subtle melange of relationship and emotions, of helping and being helped, of listening and laughing and doing and growing - when we seek to reduce others to merely tools on a rack, to be used at our discretion and then replaced on the wall.

We will go back one day, I fear, and find that all our tools have left our industrial workshop for the loving hands of craftsmen.