*The organization, CFIER (California Foundation for Improvement of Employer-Employee Relations), is perhaps responsible for introducing a non-adversarial means of negotiating and communicating to more labor-management relationships than any other program of its kind (CFIER has a client list of at least 300 relationships as I write this, and it is growing). |
About a year ago I wrote that sentence in an article for this Journal which chronicled the birth and development of a non-profit organization that is introducing real, live, peaceful collective bargaining to unions and management in the public schools.*
I considered it to be the central point of my story telling in that article. Yet, because I've had to point it out to so many who've read that article (my wife says that no one understands my sense of humor either) I thought that I would focus upon this observation a bit more pointedly this time. And it's not just my ego telling me to write some more about process failure and the importance of legitimacy. My incoming mail from those of us organizational development and quality professionals who read the Journal, present the concepts of participation and quality to the world, and otherwise assert its utility as a viable means of managing organizations bears witness to the need for thinking more about this problem. If the content of the mail is any indicator at all, I'd say that this problem deserves a good deal of focus and discussion within this community. Accordingly, let me, please, invite you to write to the Journal or to me directly with your own thoughts on this subject. Now I'll tell you what my mail has been telling me: it's (quality and participation) not happening! It's [quality and participation] not happening! Somewhere between 60 to 80 percent of all the quality initiatives in the private sector have either failed or stalled. Exclamation point!!! Sixty to eighty percent. Is this just hyperbole and advertising from firms looking for more work or really a reflection of a trend7 I don't know about its trendworthyness, but I can say from my own experience and from that among my colleagues' clients there is some fire creating this smoke. If this is even partially correct, I think that I know why those that have stalled or failed have done so, and I think that I said it in my Journal article about CFIER last year. Again, here's what I said: "I fear that unless the elements of the ends sought are integral to e means used to initiate and embrace the quality and participation paradigm, it will eventually fail."Let me say this in plainer words and not buried in some other context this time: The reason that quality initiatives are either stared or failed is that they were probably not legitimate in the first place! So what is this thing, legitimacy? And why does it matter7 To answer this and to address the issue one must think in very basic social and political terms. With apologies to my professors and colleagues in political science for failing to adequately attribute and reference their work in this field, I see legitimacy from the perspective of decision making, as would the political scientist. Now, please don't turn me off yet; because you aren't interested in politics or you want to keep politics out of the office. As Joel Barker warns us all, the solution to the knots in your own paradigm may come from outside it. So, lest you disregard the idea because of its source, read on. To understand legitimacy, start with authority—Allow for purposes of our discussion the observation that most, if not all, decision(s) in and about the workplace: the strategy of the organization, the program or product, and support for doing of that program or product must carry some authority with them before anything happens—authoritative decisions make things happen. The HOW of how authoritative decision(s) get made goes to the heart of the matter. If an authoritative decision is not legitimate or perceived as legitimate, there is little chance of it being carried out effectively or to the benefit of the enterprise and those who derive their living from that enterprise. In businesses or any organization that provides goods or services such as government, the most commonplace focus for authoritative decision making is between employer and employee. This relationship may be as simple as the one between supervisor and subordinate or as complicated as between union and management or governing body and executive or executive and middle management, et cetera. [1] Because of the nature of this relationship and its location within any enterprise I have taken to calling it the seminal* relationship. If decisions made in this relationship or which affect it are not legitimate, the desired consequences will not last, if they appear at all. The authoritative decisions taken in and about the terms and conditions of employment are those which cause things to happen (or not happen) in production and support. Authoritative decisions about the application of human resources to information, knowledge, or capital investment are what we are talking about. Enterprises make products or provide services through and as a result of the decision making that goes on in the employer-employee relationship. [2] |
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Locating the authoritative decision making employer-employee relationship.... Because of the nature of this relationship and its location within any enterprise I have taken to calling it the seminal* relationship. If decisions made in this relationship or which affect it are not legitimate, the desired consequences will not last, if they appear at all. The authoritative decisions taken in and about the terms and conditions of employment are those which cause things to happen (or not happen) in production and support. |
Area where terms and conditions of employment, employer/employee interests overlap and often conflict. | |  [1] |
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Allocating resources from the source of legitimacy.... Authoritative decisions about the application of human resources to information, knowledge, or capital investment are what we are talking about. Enterprises make products or provide services through and as a result of the decision making that goes on in the employer-employee relationship. |
to product and service production from decisions and relationships via the terms and conditions of employment.  [2] |
| *Seminal: a seed. Like seed: in being a source or a first stage in development |
There's a reason why we don't have empires anymore- And there's a reason quality initiatives get treated like a fad by too many managers, executives, and participants. History has shown us, in both business and politics, that authority without legitimacy may get things done very efficiently for awhile but in the
long run nearly all such organizations fall because they lack the seminal resource—legitimacy. The fall of the British and French colonial empires, and the Soviet Union are examples of what happens to authority that had no legitimacy to begin with, loses the legitimacy it once had by violating the contract between rulers and the ruled or employers and employees (the fall of Eastern Airlines may in part be attributed to this type of lost legitimacy), or doesn't respond when new values associated with legitimacy emerge. [3]
A closer look at legitimacy- The concept of legitimacy is composed of two significant and inseparable parts, which are that: 1. Decisions, to be legitimate in the eyes of those responsible for carrying them out, must be based upon a reason or reasons, other than power, coercion, or leverage... 2. Decisions, to be legitimate in the eyes of those responsible for carrying them out must be the consequence of some participatory process. |
The parts of effective decisions are inseparable from the process of decision making. . .
| Effective decisions, those that are impactful, lasting and empowering, need both authority and legitimacy. The fall of the British and French colonial empires, and the Soviet Union are examples of what happens to authority that had no legitimacy to begin with, loses the legitimacy it once had by violating the contract between rulers and the ruled or employers and employees, or doesn't respond when new values associated with legitimacy emerge. |  [3] |
| Legitimacy is composed of two significant and inseparable parts. Absent either of these or experience an imbalance between them, and you will have something other than legitimacy. |  [4] |
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Absent either of these or experience an imbalance between them, and you will have something other than legitimacy. Without these two key ingredients, you will not have a legitimate decision. I would suggest to you that an examination of most failed or stalled quality initiatives will reveal a significant lack of one or the other of these ingredients of legitimacy at a very critical decision point: This is what I have found virtually without exception when I am asked to diagnose organizational problems and prescribe solutions. The heart of the knowledge age Just as Tom Peters is announcing the end of the industrial age because a company with only the human imagination as its primary asset (Microsoft) has exceeded the stockmarket value of the penultimate American industrial giant, General Motors, along comes Professor Peter Drucker to announce the end of the age of productivity and the dawning of the age of knowledge in his new book, Post Capitalist Society. Drucker and Peters both exhort and imply that this dawning age of knowledge with a collection of variables alien to business as usual in the employment relationship will require serious dismemberment of familiar and inherited organizational structures. Here's a mere taste of Drucker's new message: the new definition of manager/management is related to the only true resource, knowledge, labor and capital being but constraints rather than resources!... the knowledge worker cannot be supervised! Yikes! Much of the private sector is still trying to get the first two ages/revolutions right! And the public sector is barely aware of the productivity revolution let alone introduced to it. The importance of the employer/employee relationship is at the heart of the knowledge age... A recent publication written by the father and son team of Barry and Irving Bluestone put the importance of this seminal relationship in perspective. The Bluestones assert "The bottom line: in the modern era with capital and technology so mobile, global competitiveness depends increasingly on the structure and quality of employer-employee relations. Getting this right in America will likely play a greater role in raising productivity than any other single factor. Essentially the engine fior efficiency growth begins with retooling the relationship between labor and corporate leadership. (emphasis added)." Downsizing is an illusionary potion... Two recent studies, now being cited by Secretary of Labor Robert Reich as he urges management and labor to embrace a more cooperative approach to the challenges of a giabal economy, are even further evidence that the Bluestones are spot on about the importance of the employer-employee relationship and the survival of the enterprise. Reich has been quoting one study by the Wyatt Company and another by Prof. Kenneth DeMeuse of the University of Wisconsin which indicate that downsizing through layoff neither improves nor stems declining financial performance. So, now what? These noted researchers, thinkers, and gurus of the changing world are, I believe, very correct in their assessment of things. Absent a change in the seminal relationship—the relationship between employer and employee—there will be no change at all. What happens if we don't change? Well, you become part of the road instead of being one of the bulldozer drivers creating the new road to success according to futurist, Frank Ogden (Dr. Tomorrow of Vancouver, BC).[5] |
Three fuels of change in the public sector. . .
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What happens if we don't change? Well, you become part of the road instead of being one of the bulldozer drivers creating the new road to success according to Frank Ogden (Dr. Tomorrow, Vancouver, BC). There is a way to embrace change and not become part of the road. The way we do this is to practice principles which result in legitimate decisions. These principles are operationalized via process |  [5] |
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Which gets me back to another point that I made in my article last year. There is a way to embrace change and not become part of the road. The way to do this is to practice principles (such as those highlighted in the writings of Stephen Covey and Peter Senge) which result in legitimate decisions. Such principles are—must be—operationalized via process. Success is not about boxes, top-down or bottoms-up, how flat your organization is becoming— It's process, not structure that is the most important variable in reorganizing, reinventing or reforming for success. This is bad news for those of us who were taught and believed that structure was THE independent variable for success in managing organizations. [5] The changes needed to survive into and thrive in the 21st century or the age of knowledge won't be found in structure. The independent variable is process. Structure must be thought of as the dependent variable. I think this is the message of the anecdotes and vignettes of Peters, Drucker, Deming, Bluestone(s), and Osborne and Gaebler and futurists like Joel Barker. So, what is the message to be seen in the success stories among myself and my colleagues; clients: To reinvent reorganize, restructure you must first look at the principles, operationalized by process, embodied in the seminal relationship of the organization. Start from there or ready yourself for more disappointments and failures. Resources and references: Barber, Steve, "Letting Genies Out of Bottles" Journal for Quality and Participation, (Jan/Feb 1993). Barker, Joel, The Power of Paradigms, Harper-Business, 1993. Bluestone, Barry, Negotiating the Future, Harper-Collins 1992 . Drucker, Peter F., Post Capitalist Society, Harper Business, 1993. Fisher, Roger & Ury, William, Getting to Yes, Penguin Books, 1981. Fisher, Roger & Brown, Scott Getting Together, Penguin Books, 1988. Kay, William, "A Third Way for Public Sector Labor Relations", California Employment Law Reporter, Nov. 1993. Osborne, David & Gaebler, Ted A., Reinventing Government, Penguin Books, 1992. Peters, Tom, Liberation Management. Necessary Disorganization for the Nanosecond Nineties, Knopf, 1992. Pinchot, Gifford, The End of Bureaucracy and the Rise of the Intelligent Organization, Burrett-Koehler 1994. |