Today's lesson is a case study: A true piece of email responding
to a true piece of email in a real work organization.
I have removed the names. A and B are managers'
personal names (e.g., Buzz Case, for one). A is a relatively new-hire
first-line manager. B is A's manager,
in a production division of the company. A's group
has just had several additional employees reassigned into it, thus
making B a more responsible 2-nd level manager. (A's "honeymoon"
may have just ended.) C is a low-level member
of "the team" of persons working for A/B. D is
a sales executive (different department, but
at the same "level" as B).
C writes in response to an email D sent to
everybody in the company, congratulating
A and B on the growth of their
headcount (not an idiom D uses!). As Bertolt
Brecht would point out to us, such
emails are so common as to excape
any notice and therefore we should examine
them carefully to find out what they are unnoticing:
C's response to D (note that D's email was
addressed to "everybody" and a computer program
figured out that "everybody" includes
C; D's email did not address C by name!):
>
> My[C's] father was a salesman and a sales manager and
> a Vice President of Sales for 40 years.
>
> One thing I [C] learned from him is that it is important for
> persons in high positions to be sensitive to the feelings
> of the persons "beneath" them.
[snip]
>
> Perhaps you [D] did not think of it when you wrote
> [your congratulatory email], but it struck me to
> read the managers' personal *names* but myself
> being referred to as just an unnnamed item in an aggregate.
>
> I [C] believe that customers have data processing managers
> and they also have tech support "people" and "operators"
> et al., and I hope that we refer to these little people
> by name when dealing with them, for sometimes they do
> have influence on how well a product succeeds in
> their company....
>
> Respectfully,
>
> C
>
>
> D wrote:
> >
> >
Congratulations [A] and [B] and the rest of the team!
******************** <-- emphasis added
>
> >
> > -[D]
[snip]
Analysis:
The more people there are, the more levels
of hierarchy there will be. According to
the economic law of relative masses, the total weight
of the managers will equal the total weight of the
employees, thus the more employees there
are, the heavier the weight of management
weighing them down becomes and the further
removed from the common center of
gravity both the managers and the
employees both must move, but in
opposite directions lest organizational
balance be lost. Above some very
small number, only the managers retain their
personal names except as labels to assign
blame to, while the rest become "part of the
team".
This applies to the growth from a
small chamber music ensemble to a large
orchestra just as much as to the growth from
a very small start-up company to a large
corporation. (It is well kmown that the
human mind can simultaneously
keep in mind only about 8 particular
items of information, so above that
number, individuals must subsumed as
abstract members of higher idealities,
AKA "groups")
"On the shop floor", there is always the
possibility that "the team", if it feels
insufficiently appreciated, may help a product fail to
perform well as their gift of appreciation
to the vendor's sales rep. To
avert this and other undesirable situations, Managment and
all the larger society's organs of
information need to instill in the
workers a feeling that "being part
of the team" is an ennobling good and desirable thing not
a sleighted thing to be.
Today's homework assignment: Bring in
an example of a work situation where
this principle of organizaional
calculus (personnel integration and differentiation)
*fails* to predict organizational behavior (In
physics class, you were given the complementary
assignment of finding bodies with specific gravity
heavier than air that rise instead of falling
"of their own weight").
"Class dismissed."
+\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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