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INVOLVEMENT: WHY PEOPLE RESIST IT

Of course, you've got to fight to get this message across. There are plenty of obstacles to getting workers at all levels more deeply involved in the running of businesses. And there are plenty of great sounding justifications for setting up and maintaining these obstacles. They break down, I've found, into three basic attitudinal blocks: ignorance, inertia, and fear.

The three are obviously related, since ignorance of something novel is often joined to a fear of what would happen if that something were adopted - and the result, in many cases, is the personal and institutional inertia that makes it impossible for any change at all to take place. Anybody who has spent any time in an organization that has been run along traditional lines since Methuselah was in knee pants has come across the kind of resistance I'm talking about. "It just won't work," you hear a manager say, and you know that what he means is "I don't want to find out if it will work because if it does I'll have to scrap 80 percent of what I know and that scares the crap out of me."

It's easy for managers to get away with this know-nothing approach because, let's face it, in most companies "participatory management" is still just an abstraction. It's by definition "untried," and when something is untried there's always the chance it won't work. So why try? In addition, in places where this revolutionary approach to management has been tried and hasn't resulted in instant productivity bonanzas, it's easy for people who were suspicious of it in the first place to say "I told you so" and revert to traditional structures. One of the built-in limitations of participative management is that it takes a while to get off the ground. You don't get quick fixes or immediate, visible bottom-line gains, so managers who are looking for those things are naturally wary of the new style.

But asking for instant results from something as innovative and far-reaching as participative management is like asking a quarterback to learn how to block in one weekend. For a quarterback, blocking is just not in the job description. Sure, a quarterback can learn to block, but you can't expect him to be good at it right off because there's about as much call for blocking quarterbacks as there is for Wimbledon finalists to juggle their tennis balls between sets. So you can't expect him to make it all come together right away. The same for participative management. This is unmapped terrain for most firms. Nobody should be incredibly surprised when, after a month or two of the new style, profits aren't up by 12 percent. Managers who expect that to happen have been grossly oversold on the technique.

But resistance to the Involvement style of management rests only tangentially on the suspicion that "it won't work." The real reason that it's such rough going when a company starts up with participative management is that a lot of the vested interests in the company are deathly afraid it will work. I mean, you start letting one guy on the line tell you what he thinks about his job, and pretty soon everybody is going to want to do the same thing, and you're going to end up with management by committee, or no management at all.

By "vested interests" I don't mean just the stereotypical hard-nosed supervisor who can't stand the idea of sharing power. A lot of the resistance you get to participative management comes, ironically, from the workers themselves - or, to be more precise, from shop foremen and other union leaders who see in such a "reformist" system the erosion of their own power bases. One of the weirdest aspects of the current American business system is that the "adversary relationships" William Hewlett spoke about are actually satisfying to a lot of folks who ought to be angry about them.

The collective bargaining apparatus that has been set up to provide "exchange" between workers and management, after all, is basically a way to maintain the adversary relationship that made unions necessary in the first place. So, whether you're talking about the boardroom or the union hall, Involvement can be viewed as a threat: it threatens the conventional hierarchies on both sides of the worker-management "fence," because its ultimate purpose is to tear that fence down. If your job function is intimately tied in to keeping a watch on that fence, naturally you're going to be suspicious of the misty-eyed "revolutionary" who says the fence needs scrapping, not repair. Naturally you're going to say "this new-fangled junk just won't work."

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