The Control Theory Manager

William Glasser, M.D.

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780062031075
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Finance

Combining the control theory of William Glasser with the wisdom of W. Edwards Deming, this indispensable management resource explains both what quality is and what lead-managers need to do to achieve it.

PART ONE

Managing for Quality

CHAPTER ONE
The Reason for This Book

Based on their common sense, almost all American managers are so convinced that they “know” why the people they manage behave the way they do that it never occurs to them that they could be wrong. This is why so many of them are puzzled. Managing workers with what they have“known” all their lives is not leading to the quality work they know their companies need to achieve to be competitive. That many companies are tailing to achieve quality is painfully apparent. Their previous customers are buying what they believe are better foreign products, most of them made in Japan. More than any other reason, these products are better because foreign workers, especially Japanese workers, are managed much more effectively than we manage ours.

Led by Deming,¹ the Japanese have broken with common sense to embrace a management system, lead-management, that consistently produces quality. Americans continue to use boss-management, a traditional system that has always produced a lot of work and was quite competitive as long as everyone used it and no one’s products were significantly better than anyone else’s. In the next three chapters, I will describe both systems in detail.

But managers need more than a description: they need a clear understanding of why lead-management produces quality and boss-management does not. Control theory, a new explanation of how we behave, supplies that understanding, and in this book I will strongly recommend that all managers learn to use this theory. Workers who are managed by people who use control theory will consistently do quality work at a competitive cost. Part Two of this book will be devoted to a detailed explanation of this new theory.

It is only fair to warn readers that control theory is neither easy to accept nor to learn because we have to give up the common sense, stimulus-response (S-R), carrot-and-stick psychology that most of us have been using all our lives. We cling to this ancient psychology²-even though some of its flaws are fairly obvious because, until the very recent introduction of control theory, there was nothing to replace it.

Control theory, in a form that is understandable and usable, has only been around since the early 1980s. Still. its acceptance is growing rapidly and my experience, as one of the leaders in teaching this theory, is that people who read what I write with an open mind find it to be so sensible and usable that many of them are already trying to give up bossing and start leading.

I also believe that the present stubborn, economic recession is a result of the significant improvement in the quality of the products that the Japanese, and others who have learned from Deming, have made available to consumers. After using these products for more than twenty years, almost everyone now wants—and even demands—quality; huge numbers of people have decided that it is not available in many domestic proucts.

This is new. Prior to what Japan has accomplished in the past quarter century, only the wealthy had access to quality products. The middle class, who make up the bulk of the world’s consumers, could only see them in movies or glimpse them when the wealthy drove by. Now they can own them and the desire to accept nothing less has become contagious. In search of quality, billions of our dollars go overseas. Quality has now escaped from Pandora’s box; shoddy is disappearing all over the world.

To achieve quality, lead-managers, using the concepts of control theory, embrace the following two procedures that rarely ever occur to boss-managers:

1. Learn what quality actually is, teach it to all who work in the organization, and then listen carefully to any worker who has an idea of how it may be further improved.

2. Manage everyone in the organization so that it is obvious to all workers that it is to their benefit to settle for nothing less than quality work.

This book focuses on managing people. It does not deal with nonhuman issues such as statistics, flow charts. finances or high technology. While these procedures are obviously essential to managing a successful business, companies are not failing because they lack this technical knowledge: their failure is with people. We seem unable to learn that workers will not do high-quality work much more because of the way boss-managers treat them than because they do not understand the technical or statistical aspects of what they are asked to do.

While this book is addressed to all managers, it is primarily directed to commercial managers who need to learn to manage workers so that what they produce can be sold for a profit. The amount of profit, however, will also depend on the company’s ability to convince customers to buy. The surest way to do this is to produce quality products and to render quality service. Advertising is important, but no matter how convincing it may be, if it promises more quality than the product delivers, disappointed customers will stop buying and may never buy again. It is quality at a fair price far more than advertising that determines long-term profitability.

I. along with many others, accept that W. Edwards Deming is a pioneer in the field of managing workers so that they produce quality work at a competitive cost. I assume that readers are familiar with his basic ideas, so I restate them here only to support my thesis: a working knowledge of control theory is necessary if we are to significantly increase our practice of what Deming teaches. It is well known that his success has been mostly in Japan, and that success has occurred because the Japanese have accepted his psychology even though he fails to explain it to the extent it is explained by control theory.

Deming talks extensively about the need to understand psychology and points out clearly that he believes human beings are intrinsically, rather than extrinsically, motivated. In doing so, he shows that he understands the basic premise of control theory. In my experience, we will not convince American managers to embrace Deming’s ideas until we expose them to the complete theory of intrinsic motivation: control theory.

That American managers, even those who use Deming as a consultant, have been largely unable to duplicate the Japanese success is well documented in Andrea Gabor’s 1990 book, The Man Who Brought Quality to America.³ From Ms. Gabor’s book, it is apparent that Deming’s argument for intrinsic motivation is not strong enough to convince most American managers to stop bossing and to start leading.

Control theory supplies the convincing argument for lead-management that Deming does not provide. For example, in point eight of his fourteen points for management, Deming tells managers that in their dealings with workers they should“drive out fear.” But as Ms. Gabor tells her story, it is clear that none of the three companies she writes about (Xerox, Ford, and General Motors) are willing to do this to the extent that Deming claims, and control theory explains, it must be done.

This is because the people at the top of these companies, much as those at the top of most American companies. believe that fear is an important motivator. They have believed this all their lives and they are not about to stop because an expert, even as successful an expert as Deming, tells them it is wrong. Control theory explains clearly why workers who are not fearful do quality work. And, the more they are treated in need-satisfying ways, the more willingly and joyfully they apply themselves, further increasing the quality of their work. More than most management consultants, Deming talks a lot about joy in work, but few bosses seem to hear this part of what he has to say.

What the Japanese did when they moved to lead-managing without knowing the underlying theory was unusual. It may have been because of their desperate effort to get their economy going after the destruction of World War II opened their minds to new ideas, but more likely it was because of their culture. They are much more willing than Americans to listen to people who they are told are experts, and Deming is one of the experts they were told to listen to.

I am not saying that this is always good or that our culture’s lack of faith in experts is bad. All I am saying is that, in the case of Deming, this acceptance worked very well for them. He was introduced to them as an expert by officials in the MacArthur government and, because they revered MacArthur, they were willing to listen and to try what he suggested. What he advised them to do worked so well that they have continued to listen even if they still may not understand exactly why his advice works.

Unrealistic as it is, American business leaders, even when their companies are losing money or making much less than before, still tend to see themselves as“successful” managers. When their businesses fail to perform up to expectation, they blame unfair competition, poorly educated workers, the high cost of capital, excessive government regulation, overblown legal expenses, or demanding unions much more than their own inability to manage workers so that they do quality work at a competitive cost. They are confident that their“success” is related to their experience and common sense and have little faith in anyone who does not believe as they do.

As Ms. Gabor documents in her book, we pay lip service to people such as Deming much more than we pay attention to what they say, especially if they advise us to abandon common sense. It is unlikely we will embrace control theory until we have a clear idea of why we should take this step. In this book I will explain this new psychology in great detail. American managers who are willing to learn this theory—it helps a great deal if they also put it to work in their personal lives—will be able to lead-manage their workers so that they produce quality products and services at a competitive cost. When they do,“Buy American” will move from slogan to reality and our economy will get the real boost it needs. As long as we fail to achieve quality and continue to send billions of dollars overseas in search of it, our economy will limp along indefinitely.

CHAPTER TWO
Lead-Management Is the Basic Reform We Need

No management tradition is more firmly fixed in the United States than that of the boss. Bosses are in charge of the workers: they tell them what, when, and how to do their job. They have the power to reward them for doing a good job and to punish them for not doing what they are told to do. If workers have no union or civil service protection, not only their economic future but their happiness is in the boss’s hands. Unfortunately, it is the unwise use of this power that effectively prevents us from achieving the quality work that is needed if we are to regain our competitive place in the market.

Workers don’t trust bosses. If they are to expend both the mental and the physical effort necessary to achieve quality work, managers need to stop bossing and to do all they can to establish a trusting relationship with the workers. In this situation, trust means that the workers, based on experience, have come to believe that the manager has their best interests in mind. To establish this trust, the manager must learn to be warm, friendly, and supportive and to give up the traditional boss prerogatives of criticizing and coercing the workers. It is obvious that the kind of support recommended here does not come naturally or easily to bosses.

Therefore, what managers must do for quality is give up bossing or boss-management and start leading or using lead-management. Let me begin by explaining boss-management. It is not complicated. Reduced to its essentials it contains four elements:

1. The boss sets the task and the standards for what the workers are to do, usually without consulting the workers. Bosses do not compromise; the worker has to adjust to the job as the boss defines it or suffer any consequences the boss determines.

2. The boss usually tells, rather than shows, the workers how the work is to be done and rarely asks for their input as to how it might possibly be done better.

3. The boss, or someone the boss designates, inspects the work. Because the boss does not involve the workers in this evaluation, they do only enough to get by; they rarely even think of doing what is required for quality.

4. When workers resist, as they almost always do in a variety of ways, all of which compromise quality, the boss uses coercion (usually punishment) almost exclusively to try to make them do as they are told. In so doing, the boss creates a workplace in which the workers and the managers are adversaries. Bosses think that this adversarial situation is the way it should be.

It is obvious that boss-management is much more concerned with the agenda of the boss than the agenda of the workers. Because this is so obvious, many bosses have been able to see that boss-management is so adversarial that it is counterproductive. Because in industry we now have extensive research¹ to prove that boss-management is much less effective than lead-management, there is some softening of this hard-line approach in some high-tech and service industries where the educational and persuasive skills of the workers are paramount to the success of the company. Still, much more has to be done beyond softening the above description. We have to get rid of bossing altogether and replace it with lead-managing or we will not succeed in producing the quality we need.

Taken as a whole, the worst feature of boss-management is that it always results in the workers and the manager becoming adversaries. If this only occurred at the lowest level, it would be bad but not disastrous, since good design and engineering could make up for some of what the workers do not do. But, unfortunately, it occurs at every level, and when it does, there is little chance for quality. What happens is that, from bottom to top, each boss-manager is more concerned with his own point of view than anyone else’s and this concern prevents the cooperation that quality work requires.

This does not mean that all boss-management is ineffective, but it is least effective where workers do not see the job as satisfying. It is most effective where workers and boss have similar agendas and where the boss uses rewards more than punishment. But because it is not always ineffective does not in any way make it effective enough to consistently produce the quality we need.

As Deming says,“The goal is clear. The productivity of our systems must be increased. The key to change is the understanding of our managers and the people to whom they report about what it means to be a good manager.” Deming goes on to say two more things that are always on the minds of lead-managers:

1. “A manager is responsible for consistency of purpose and continuity in the organization. The manager is solely responsible to see that there is a future for the workers.” (No matter what a boss says, it is what he does that convinces or fails to convince the workers that he is concerned about their future.)

2. “The workers work in a system. The manager should wor...