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BENEFITS OF PARTICIPATIVE MANAGEMENT

Participative management does work.  I found this out in my Viking days when - against the conventional wisdom that said the quarterback was supposed to be a combination of a mainframe computer and The Flash - I practiced what came to be known as the "participative huddle" approach to play-calling.

In the mythology of professional football, the quarterback is supposed to be only one step down from the almighty Coach in terms of field generalship and overall savvy.  Everybody else on the team is supposed to be inanimate matter.  The only reason you need linemen at all, so the theory goes, is to protect genius scramblers like yours truly.

Now, I've never been real upset at being called a genius, so in my Viking days I didn't take out any ads announcing that the theory was a crock.  Take this as a belated confession.  All those sportswriters who said I was a fair to middling runner and passer but a topnotch caller of plays, take note:  I called about 25 percent of our plays myself.  The rest were called by "lunks" like guard Ed White and end Ahmad Rashad, and my good buddy and roommate, center Mick Tinglehoff.

When you stop to think about it, this is just common sense.  Nobody can solve every problem, every time, on his own, so if you're already working with a group, doesn't it sound pretty reasonable to find out what that group thinks?

I always figured that if you didn't need the team's input, then you ought to be able to make it to the Super Bowl on your own.  I needed the team, and I knew it.  After any number of plays, when I was trying to get an offensive drive going and getting nowhere, I would go back to the huddle and say, "what do you have out there, Ahmad?"  And Ahmad would let us know what he saw, and because I knew he was out there, we would often go with Ahmad's suggestions, and we would get the drive moving.  And we would keep it moving with the added input of Ed and Mick and everybody else in the huddle.  

At the Vikings, we developed that "participative huddle" approach to play-calling gradually over the years, and I'll be the first to tell you that the play sequences we developed together were an awful lot more effective than any I could have come up with on my own.

That's why I kept using the participative approach.  Like most competitors, I'm results-oriented.  I don't care how brilliant your idea sounds.  If it doesn't get me yardage, I'm not interested.  On the Vikings, the linemen's input got us yardage.

Our unusual style of play-calling worked for the same two reasons that all participative management programs work, when they're actively encouraged and endorsed by managers at every level.  One, it's a simple fact that two heads are better than one - a cliché with a lot of truth to it.  Other things being equal, you're going to get more creative solutions to your problems by involving as many different viewpoints as you can - especially when those viewpoints come from directions you don't have access to.

Second, when you involve somebody in a participative management decision, you reinforce everything about him that makes him a smarter, more willing team member.  You draw on the resources of his mind, not just his body.  And everybody wants to feel that his mind - his unique understanding of a situation - is valuable, and valued.  When somebody feels that, you can bank on his self-esteem improving.  You can bank on his motivation going up.  You can bank on the fact that he's going to be quicker to draw the connection between the overall objectives of the team and whatever his personal objectives may be.

You have to do it, not just talk about it.  Speeches about how "people are our most important asset" won't cut it, unless you act on that belief.  To do that, you've got to get beyond the old "brawn versus brain" hangup and start to manage on the conviction that everybody in your organization - whatever his position and no matter how much money he makes - has got something to give to the team effort.

At participative management companies, the top people have been practicing that belief for years.  Fred Allen was chairman of the Connecticut-based company Pitney Bowes.  In an article in Leaders magazine a few years ago, Allen talked about the connection between his own company's productivity and its commitment to Involvement of all its employees, and he made it very clear that the basic reason you want to reach toward Involvement is not because it's "nicer" to do that, but because it gets you results:

It is probably not love that makes the world go around, but rather those mutually supportive alliances through which partners recognize their dependence on each other for the achievement of shared and private goals. ... Treat employees like partners, and they act like partners.

At Pitney Bowes the "partnership" aspect of employee Involvement had a very pragmatic, institutionalized side, because the company used a well-publicized Suggestion Plan that gave workers financial rewards for contributing in ways that saved the company money: in other words, the company linked Involvement with positive Consequences on a "We'll pay you for your ideas" basis, so the commitment to shared goals and mutual support couldn't possibly be seen as a gimmick:  you get involved at Pitney Bowes, and you can take the results to the bank.

But to stress one of the most important points about the entire P.R.I.C.E. system of motivation, you don't have to link Involvement to financial rewards in order to make the principle work.  When I asked for Ahmad Rashad and Ed White's input in my "participative huddle" days, I wasn't holding out the hope of an after-game bonus if their play suggestions got us yardage.  I was just saying, "Look, your ideas are valuable to this team; I need your contributions; let's get your brains as well as your brawn involved here."  That plea was, on one level, its own reward.  It let every member of the Vikings team know that we were a "mutually supportive alliance" working toward the same shared goals.

A Business Week article from several years ago demonstrates perfectly what I'm saying.  The article profiles a Ford Motor Company foreman named Donald R. Hennion who, before the introduction of "participative management" techniques at his Edison, New Jersey, plant, was a typical "hard-nosed, loudmouthed disciplinarian."  (Those are his own words.)  You could hardly think of a less likely candidate for learning Involvement principles than an auto company foreman, but listen to what happened to Hennion.

He started to change his management style, the article points out, when he was assigned to a supervisory position, where he didn't really understand the line operation, and so, for the first time in his career "had to rely on the workers' knowledge."  That's a critical first step in any motion toward an Involvement style - the recognition that the people doing the work know more about that work than you do.  That's the step I took as the Vikings quarterback when I asked Ahmad what was going on "out there."  When Hennion took that step, he was amazed.  "It's surprising," he told Business Week, "how much an employee can see that's wrong with a job."

A second step was for Hennion to redefine the nature of his own job, away from the idea that he had to crack the whip to get results and toward the notion that he was really not so much a taskmaster as a "facilitator."  The implications for what a manager or supervisor actually does are startling.  If you see yourself as a "facilitator," it means that when something breaks down, your job is not to find the bozo who caused the breakdown and kick his butt into next Sunday.  It's to do something much easier than that.  Something that, when you think about it, ought to be every manager's obvious first choice:  it's to find out what went wrong, and then to get it fixed.

This focus on "what went wrong" rather than on "who screwed up" is not a semantic distinction.  And it's definitely not a trivial one.  Because when you focus on getting better results rather than kicking more butt, a remarkable thing happens to your team members.  Instead of covering up defects and shifting blame - which are the usual responses in a "galley" style production team - they actually start to look for defects before they happen, and to call them to the foreman's attention.  So, instead of one supervisor, you really end up with a whole team of supervisors, all motivated to pull together to create a better product, better quality control, and so on.

They put this "multiple supervisor" feature into place at Hennion's plant by allowing assembly line workers to do something that a lot of traditional "top down" managers would consider akin to Bolshevism:  they let them stop the line.  "The thought of an hourly worker stopping the line," the Business Week article says wryly, "would have made old Henry Ford apoplectic"; but the "stop concept" is one aspect of a worker participation program that invariably improves quality, reduces absenteeism, and lessens hostility between bosses and workers.  We have found this to be true consistently in the plants where we introduce our Self-Managed Work Teams - teams of workers at every level who themselves are responsible for work schedules, quality, and general performance.  It turns out the robber barons were wrong: you give the worker an inch, and he gives you back a mile.

It isn't really surprising.  When you let the guy on the line have this kind of basic control over his own pace of work, you're demonstrating that you trust not only his judgment but his loyalty.  You're saying, "I know you care about what we're doing here, and I know that if you push that button, you'll have a good reason for doing so."  It's letting the lineman call the play again - because he's the one on the line, and he knows better than you do exactly what's going on "out there."

The same principles apply when you're trying to motivate white-collar people.  Take sales, for example.  Traditionally, control over how much work, and what kind of work, a sales representative does is established at the top - by a branch or division sales manager, and not by the "field troops" themselves.  Sales management sets the quota and then tells the people who have to meet it what it's going to be.  Sales directors may seek the input of marketing managers, and production managers, and the overall company brass, but they will not ask the opinion of the field representatives themselves - even though they are in the best position possible to say whether a quota is reasonable or not.

It's a pretty ridiculous system, and it survives only because managers are afraid that, if they are left to their own devices, sales representatives will never come in anywhere near quota.  In every company I've seen where field people have a say in setting sales quotas, exactly the opposite takes place.  If, instead of telling a salesman what he has to sell, you ask him what he thinks he can sell, a remarkable thing happens:  he sets a figure for himself that is higher than the one you had in mind.  Every time.  Because people like to stretch.  They just don't like to be stretched.

This means that, if you're a division sales manager or a factory line manager and, following tradition, you refuse to solicit your people's input into their own jobs, eventually you're going to be cutting your own throat, not just theirs.  That's one of the ironies of ignoring Involvement.  Refusing to practice Involvement in today's increasingly democratized environment can be just as fatal to the manager who likes to think he's on top of things as it can be to the "underlings" who make him feel superior.  If you've got the whip and you're barking out orders in a galley, it means you never find out about the leak near the bow, and you drown right along with your slaves.  If you're a quarterback and you don't find out what the linemen know, it means you have Astroturf for lunch.  There's an old expression about the slaveholder being just as much in chains as the slaves he thinks he's controlling, and that's true when you're talking about workers and "controllers" as well.

And the opposite is also true.  Free a slave, get freed yourself.  Another irony of participative management is that - contrary to what its critics fear - it actually gives managers more scope than they have under traditional methods of control.  Under a real workplace democracy, the guys "in charge" gain just as much freedom as the people they used to boss around.

Donald Hennion calls attention to this curious phenomenon in talking about his changing job at the Edison Ford plant.  He points out that, once line workers began to take responsibility for spotting defects and for stopping the line when it was necessary, he was freed of a whole level of managerial responsibility that wasn't really getting anybody anywhere anyway:  for the first time in his management career, he didn't have to spend half his day looking over people's shoulders - and looking over his own shoulder as well.  Because he now trusts people to do their jobs without being constantly monitored like mischievous children, he "has considerably more time to work with maintenance people, draw up better plans for the flow of material, and make minor engineering changes without calling the plan engineers."  In other words he can become a real manager, because he no longer has to be a guard.

What's the bottom line?  Hennion has no doubt that Involvement has boosted the overall profits of the plant as well as the morale and motivation of his people.  "You're more productive in the long run," he says.  "People on the line seem happier. You still have ... boredom, but the attitude is changing. We're working as a team."

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