I think this was my favorite article of this anthology, but that may just be because it is the last one. Beer, Elsenstat, and Spector argue against the top-down institution of "change programs" in favor of fostering a grass roots change. Some key elements of their idea include being task and production oriented (focusing on the question: what is the most effective way to accomplish objectives?) and leaning on the expertise of front-line people to answer that question. They say that upper management should examine their organization to see what departments are performing very well and then try to spread the change happening in that department to others in the organization.
I think these authors do the best job of any of the HBR authors in explaining the concept of utilizing the resources that are there in the company. It seems such a common approach to assume all that the lower levels can do is complain and all of the good ideas will come from consulting groups who have had about two months to learn about one's organization. In the change efforts that I have been a part of, I have found this attitude to be highly annoying. Even when upper management does ask for input in change initiatives, it's usually a matter of a meeting or a forum where the people who yell the loudest get heard and the management pick and choose what they want to actually listen to.
In the case of the conference center that I worked at during a change effort, they didn't ask the employees what they wanted. Strike that. They did ask us, and then they used our opinions as reasons to get rid of us. It was not a safe place to try to contribute. In the change effort at FHSU, the president asked all of us to share our concerns and then she ignored everything that my department had to say because she had decided that the business department had the only real potential for expansion. The business department, by the way, loved her and were very upset to see her go, but my department was made cynical and reluctant to participate in any other change effort.
There is a difference between asking employees for input and giving them ownership of a change effort. I think the giving of ownership is the greatest and least utilized kind of leadership out there. Managers don't know how to do it. They talk about it, sure. It's kind of a buzzword. But management generally doesn't really believe that their employees are as smart as they are, and in some instances probably even smarter. Again, that is a point of annoyance for me in this program here in China. Our top level of administration in the U.S. has no idea the kind of challenges we face, and those challenges are not easy to explain. They are not patient enough to listen to long, drawn-out explanations or (even better) expose themselves to the actual experience. Instead, they listen to whoever they know the best and talk with the most and make stupid wasteful choices for the program. I have mentioned this before, so I'll leave it at that.
Here's an interesting question: what if FHSU administration recognized the fact that the China program and their virtual college are actually the more successful models in their organization and used that fact as impetus to change their on-campus programs instead of just pouring money gained from the fiscally healthy programs into that financial sinkhole? As long as they continue to favor the Kansas campus, they are creating a push for our program to become modeled after that program, a model which is demonstrably unsustainable because it must be sustained through the exploitation of less privileged students. I know, I know. The collegiate ideal is at stake. Would FHSU even be a real college without its Student Union and state-of-the-art laboratories? We make do without them over here in China, but the would probably never survive in the U.S.
Social Justice
I think this article does the best job of any at presenting a really egalitarian approach to change that still maintains some structure. Sadly it just scrapes the surface and apparently it isn't that popular of a model because the article was first published in 1990 and none of the newer articles build off of it. Is is possible that giving away power is just not that popular of a thing to do?
People argue about "rights" and "equality" but the real bottom layer of any organization still tends to get crushed, even sometimes by the social justice advocates in defense of their liberal arts education ideals. Everyone must have certain privileges, and if it turns out that the system can't afford to deliver those privileges to everyone, we'll just find a way to get them for "our people," and screw the rest of them. Yeah, that's a little out of left field, I guess, but it is a thought I have about this faculty union in Kansas that insists on a "fair working wage" and all the rest the rest of it, which just means my students don't get the full benefit of their tuition because the money is needed to feed already wealthy programs and faculty in Kansas.
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