Managers are seen at 1. fare-well parties, 2. strike negotiations, 3. airport club lounges. Some are never seen by staff at all and are said to be shy. This is the strange world David Williamson has written about in plays such as Operator and Charitable Intent. Psychopathic bosses are encouraged by a top-down, ruthlessly competitive system because they are manipulators par excellence and can combine charm with lots of cod jargon and pseudo MBA guff. Their path to power is made easier in a world of short-term goals and high turnover. It seems unlikely, but it’s true, and worrying. On one occasion, following a Catalyst report on psychopathic bosses, a startled Geraldine Doogue, who has wide contact with executive Australia, asked whether we were really referring to all the chaps from the Forbes 500 List as megalomaniacs, and we replied, ‘Not at all.’ The villain in the piece could just as well run a mail room or a shoe shop as run the company.
Dr John Clarke (no, not Fred Dagg, I’m being serious for a change) who has written about all this in Working With Monsters, estimates that 0.5 per cent of women and 2 per cent of men qualify as corporate psychopaths according to his definition-and they’ve never had a better time. Despite the current obsession with compliance, it is they who slide around systems by knowing their inner workings and by playing colleagues off against each other.
The answer? Well, Dr Clarke doesn’t recommend therapy for the offenders. They’d just learn new tricks. I am convinced that old-fashioned devolution is the way forward. It is surprising, but shouldn’t be, how much workers know about the breadth of their job and how both efficiency and creativity can be nurtured. It is also interesting to see how little the checks and rechecks fail to spot the fraudsters. In this age of bureaucracy sans frontières, companies still miss rorters hiring yachts on expenses for New Year’s parties and managers creaming hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions.
Compliance can also be counterproductive. An example from outside the workplace: fear of paedophiles has generated an obscene list of regulations in the UK covering clowns at kids’ parties, Santa Claus and Scouts. The result is that parents are no longer content to allow their children to walk or bike to school. Predatory men might be hiding behind pillar boxes. As a result, children are driven to and fro. Apart from the green implications of this extra chauffeuring and the children’s lack of exercise, and even an undue fear of strangers, it now turns out that, for every child saved from a predator, three hundred are killed in car crashes. The price of vigilance can be greater than the gain.
What of the future of work? Must it be a discontinuous patchwork of jobs, a gypsy-like lifetime of discontinuity? The answer is, yes, for the time being. And it is a terrible waste.
The management model I like, being fond of animals, is the goose-flight-in-formation theory of the workplace. The goose flying in front is not the leader who sets the course. They all take turns in front and they all know where they are going. Those honks coming from the back of the V shape are simply to assure the lead bird that the gang are still there. Keep going, they say.
After a while another goose takes over. Should one goose get exhausted and need to land, two other geese will accompany her, to oblige and protect.
The reason they fly in a V formation is that the slight overlap with the next bird’s flight path saves energy by cancelling some of the air turbulence. The ‘energetic advantage’ could be as much as 50 per cent. A corporate equivalent of this goose theory of management is long overdue. The future depends on it.
The values a society places on something like work are reflected in the wages it offers and how it treats the next generation of employees. The remuneration packages of Australian executives are now so obscene I wonder how those receiving all those millions can face the mirror. A seventh Toorak Tank, an eighth mansion, another vineyard-how do they keep track? How do some of them stay out of jail? Many don’t.
If, on the other hand, you work for ABC-TV as a very highly qualified reporter, you may find yourself hired on contracts that start in mid-January and end in November. This saves the organisation from having to pay for holidays or other add-ons. It also means it can give staff the shove when it’s finished with them. The reporter, meanwhile, earns less than our mega-executive’s third assistant trainee PA (about $75,000). (American CEOs in 2006 earned 320 times average earnings-or only 120 times if you use kinder figures. Their mean annual pay was $US8.5 million and the median $US4.1 million. Don’t fret about the calculations, just feel the rage.)
The skill and health implications are dire. Without security it is very hard to grow professionally and gain confidence. Health is also undermined in fascinating ways. Sir Michael Marmot has gained worldwide fame for his Whitehall study showing that the guys at the top fare best and that there is a direct relationship between power and wellbeing. The lowlier you are, the worse your health and longevity. This research has now been followed up by Dr Cary Cooper.
Cooper, Professor of Organisational Psychology and Health at the University of Lancaster, and an American, has examined all those dire characteristics of the modern corporation-the uncertainty, shift work, overload. In a word: the stress. It is stress, he finds, that is the key to sickness that comes from trying to do your job:
Research in the past has shown that it’s now changing. There’s been this issue a long time in the field that if you have control over your job, that is the higher up you go, the safer you are from stress, is no longer the case. The recent research is showing that people from the shop floor to the top floor are in trouble and the reason is when you get to the top you’re just as vulnerable to the axe as you are at the bottom or the middle now. So everybody is now vulnerable because of the changing nature of work. Work is intrinsically insecure now.
Professor Cooper was talking in 2006 to Dr Norman Swan of the Health Report on ABC Radio National. The audience response to this interview was enormous.
What we’re finding now is that most of these countries have been totally, and I guess I shouldn’t say this with my funny accent, Americanised. Totally Americanised- long hours culture, intrinsic job insecurity. Bottom line-much more autocratic management style, short-term performance, the outsourcing of activities and therefore the breaking of the psychological contract between the employer and the employee. Times have changed now, the people at the top are not safe.
Is it not time we realised the overall costs to society of this neglect? Cooper finds it amounts to 5-10 per cent of GDP forgone or an equivalent of 30 million lost working days in the UK alone.
As for young people, who are surely the key to the future, I find this even more distressing. It is our responsibility to keep at least some small doors open for the young talent who should form the next generation of staff. They should feel special when they are hired, secure as they serve probationary months and going somewhere as they experiment and dare to fail. But my impression is that the young are instead made to take up a mosaic of jobs, scattered in time and place, inherently without any career structure-unless they are lucky. Obviously in changing times no organisation wants to be locked into maintaining jobs that may not be needed in a decade or into employees who have long passed their usefulness. But there is, surely, a middle way that treats people like human beings instead of ciphers or liabilities.