Martin Henry

In a generally low-performance, low-productivity, foot-dragging nation, I am extraordinarily fortunate to belong to a number of high-performance teams which extend from work to the home front. On the home front, my eldest, just entering the world of work, has adopted her father's habit of working hard and working smart. And, of course, her mother is one high-performance woman. Just ask those with whom she works!

All of this has come up because an organisation which I know very well, let's just call it Organisation X, has just concluded a 'Staff Development and Recognition Week', which included high-performance seminars. And this week, I will participate in a trade-union event.

membership declining

Trade-union membership is declining worldwide partly because of the shift from assembly-line-type mechanical work to knowledge work and to services. But trade unionism flourishes best precisely where Douglas McGregor's Theory X flourishes. Theory X assumes that workers are lazy, dislike and shun work, have to be driven and controlled, and need both carrot and stick, but more stick.

In contrast, McGregor's Theory Y assumes that people have a psychological need to work and want achievement and responsibility.

Peter Drucker, one of the world's leading management scholars, once fiestily noted that the unions have a stake in the coercive relationship between master and servant of Theory X. For, if there were no master, what, indeed, would the union's role be? Poor management is trade unionism's best friend. And when even the staff of academic institutions, institutions at the pinnacle of knowledge work, feel obliged to maintain aggressive trade-union organisations, that says more about the management than about the staff.

But how do we get people to perform? Organisation X, plagued by constant labour troubles, and the whole of Jamaica, should have a powerful vested interest in this question. As a 2003 IADB study, Productivity and Competitiveness in the Jamaican Economy underscores with hard data, Jamaica has the dubious distinction of registering declining, stagnant, or very low productivity increases over the last 30 years, when virtually everywhere else was getting more from human, physical and financial resources.

Executive Director of the Jamaica Productivity Centre, Dr Charles Douglas, told the JIS in 2006 that "Jamaica must reverse the decline in labour productivity to achieve sustained regional and international competitiveness".

worker-management relations

Carl Stone noted in his now classic 1982 Work Attitudes Survey commissioned by the Seaga government that "the human- relations dimension of worker-management relations emerges as the most frequently mentioned area of dissatisfaction with the overall work environment. This is a major problem at the workplace."

I was surprised after I dusted off my ancient, dog-eared copy of Peter Drucker's People and Performance to help with the question of how we get people to perform, to find online that that management gem is still in print, having been republished as recently as last year by no less than Harvard Business Publishing.

The high-performance, high-productivity formula is surprisingly simple: "The specific job of the manager," Drucker insists, "is to make the strengths of people productive and their weaknesses irrelevant." Organisation X has done a lot of the opposite. Management is all about "people and performance ... If there is one right way to define management, it is as the work and function that enables people to perform and achieve." And people want to perform and can be high performers with even quite ordinary talents.

Drucker observes that if organisations cannot be run and managed by people of normal or even fairly low endowment who only try hard, it cannot be done at all. There are just too many organisations for them to be staffed by superstars.

Organisation X has its fair share of quite ordinary people. Their goals and work must be organised so that they can perform and be validated in performance. "The test of organisation is not genius. It is the capacity to make common people achieve uncommon performance. A job should challenge people to bring out their strengths.

"Effective managers make strength productive. They know that they cannot build on weakness. To make strengths productive is the unique purpose of organisations. Weak executives see strength in others as a threat," Drucker notes. And I have suffered from that. "But no executive has ever suffered because of subordinates who were strong and effective." And effective workers have learned how to make the strengths of the boss productive. The focus on weaknesses is two-way and deadly in Organisation X.

organised around personalities

Organisation X is organised around personalities, not systems. Drucker warns: "Structuring jobs to fit personality is almost certain to lead to favouritism and conformity. No organisation can afford either. It needs equity and impersonal fairness in its personnel decisions or else it will either lose its good people or destroy their incentives."

And Organisation X, like so many other Jamaican organisations, overplays the fear factor. But as Drucker shouts, fear, including the fear of taking risks, is the worst inhibitor of performance.

Smart organisations know that time is quite literally the bottom line of productivity. Drucker delivered a potent example of how having a clerk take over the paperwork that nurses had been forced to do "almost doubled the time the nurses have available to do what they are trained for, are paid for, and want to do: patient care. Organisation X has yet to learn that wasting a $2,000-an-hour person on a task that a $500-an-hour person can do is just plain stupid.

High-performance, high-productivity organisations are clear about what their business is, have focused goals and objectives, set priorities, define and apply measures of performance, have feedback self-control systems, and are able to identify and get rid of obsolete and unattainable objectives - and low-performance people, especially managers.

Listen up for all who fall under Organisation X: Drucker says, the responsibility of superiors for the work of others makes making strengths productive and weaknesses irrelevant a moral imperative owed to subordinates as human beings who are designed to achieve.

Martin Henry is a communications consultant. Feedback may be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com.