Managing without a Stick or a Carrot
| Published date | 01 July 1981 |
| Date | 01 July 1981 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb057202 |
| Pages | 26-27 |
| Author | John Garnett |
| Subject Matter | Economics,Information & knowledge management,Management science & operations |
Managing without a
Stick or a Carrot
by John Garnett
Director, The Industrial Society
The key to the future of this nation is about creation -
about creating the worth - about creating the wealth. It
is not about marching and protesting, it is about creating
more. It is highly moral for a Christian democracy to
redistribute wealth but I suspect it is highly immoral to
distribute what we have not even created. The greatest
challenge in creating the wherewithal in the last 20 years
of the 20th century in this country is the ability to get
people going. It is about service, delivery, flexibility, it
is about lowering absence, it is about setting people
alight.
There are, of course some very real challenges in all
this.
When you have achieved "unto each according to
his need" how do you get "from each according to his
ability"? When you have given people their rights, how
do you call forth their duties? And we have given people
their rights ahead of any other country in the world.
How, in a situation where we can earn as much money
lying in bed as coming to work, do you persuade people
to come to work?
The real fact is that until we create more there cannot
be the incentive. Now we can either bemoan the situa-
tion or we can take the line of Sir Alex Jarrett, the
chairman of Reeds's who says "It really is very exciting
to be managing in a country which has abolished both
the stick and the carrot by law within five years". After
all,
anybody can get work out of fellows if you can pay
them and anybody can get work out of fellows if you
can sack them - but how do you get work out of fellows
when you cannot pay them or sack them either? That is
a real man's challenge and whether we like it or not that
is the point at which we find ourselves. How do you, in
this situation, set people alight?
How do you get work out of
fellows when you cannot pay
them or sack them either?
Part of the problem, I believe, is size. Dr Schumacher
said small is beautiful, but, although you can make fertil-
iser in a bucket at the bottom of the garden, you won't
make enough fertiliser to feed two-thirds of the starving
world that way. For that you have got to have
thousands of people and, in this situation, it is not easy
to make every single person realise that their particular
contribution at ten minutes to two o'clock on the night
shift is quite crucial to the quality of the product and the
sales of that product, and the jobs that will flow from it.
And then, of course, a whole lot of work is repetitive
and mundane. There were many people in the last
decade who thought by enriching jobs you could make
all jobs fascinating. But life is not like that and where
you used to have a girl copying out invoices into a
ledger they now have a girl punching the information
into a computer at 22,000 impressions an hour. The new
job is worse to motivate, not better. And, at the same
time,
people's expectations get higher and higher.
In a police state
.
.
.
you can thump
them if they do not do things, but
not in
a
free situation
Where do the answers lie? We in The Industrial Soci-
ety have 16,000 member companies. We are a
self-
financing body and as we go round industry and speak
to some 45,000 people on courses and conferences each
year, we notice that certain things seem to work better
than others. Moreover, all these things are blinding
glimpses of common sense, although like so much com-
mon sense, it is not common until somebody points it
out. The key word, we think, is involvement, and the
most important single thing about involvement is who is
the involver? We must, therefore, structure the business
for leaders. Who is in charge? Not who is in charge at
the top but who is in charge at the bottom? Who is the
corporal? Who is the team leader? Does everybody
know who that is? You may very well say "Yes, it is
the departmental head" but - how many people can one
person be in charge of when there are no sticks and no
carrots. In a police state you can just oversee and you
can thump them if they do not do things, but not in a
free situation. You see, we talk a lot about team spirit
and then we forget the size of the team. So it is neces-
sary to break the workforce down into teams of not
more than 14, and having broken them down make sure
that there is a clear accountability chart so that people
know who they are accountable to.
Do we make it clear what the leadership respon-
sibilities are? Has the leader had some instruction?
Leadership instruction in what leaders need to do - not
in what leaders need to be. In the Society some 15 years
ago we searched about for some means of training lead-
ers and we found a man called John Adair at Sandhurst
who had evolved a wonderfully simple concept that it
was the job of the leader to achieve the task, to build the
26 INDUSTRIAL MANAGEMENT + DATA SYSTEMS
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