Dominant Management Philosophy: Shirk Responsibility!

I think that anyone who has been working in corporate America generally gets truly surprised when a manager takes responsibility. As engineers, we have a tendency to get noticed by and have more contact with corporate management. Then you truly see the mental contortions that managers go through to blame things on someone else.

One of the biggest and best methods of shifting the blame is called 'employee empowerment'. This is trumpeted as the savior of corporations by shifting much of the responsibility of improvements to the people doing the work. If you look at it superficially, it sounds great. We finally get a say in the company! But if you think about it, if we're researching how to improve our products and organization, what the hell are the managers doing? Simply sitting there and taking the credit.

Here's a few examples form my experience.

In my first job (another medical manufacturer), they instituted a program to reward those who come up with cost saving ideas. I don't remember what the amount of the reward was, but it was peanuts as compared to what the company could save. At the outset, their suggestion box was filled with ideas. As policy put it, they would examine each idea and get back to the employee within two weeks. One employee (not me, but a poor smuck on the production line) came up with the idea that the backplane for this system should be translated to a PCB motherboard instead of hand-wiring it as they had been doing for years. Two weeks went by and he heard nothing. He went to Personnel (back then they hadn't made the dehumanizing change to Human Resources) to inquire. He was told that they were going to do that anyways, so he didn't qualify for an award. The information got around very quickly. Soon no ideas were coming in and the program died of neglect. Classic case of a stupid management trick. Even if they were 'already' going to do that, would it have hurt them to reward him anyways? Just think, though, they SAVED a couple of hundred dollars.

The company I am currently with, had purchased a rival company just before I was hired. This rival was functioning, making a profit and my company was envious of the contracts they were getting from the Government. So they bought them. Management invaded that company in force, instituted all the functions, processes and software that they HAD to have. Since that point, 4 years now, that small company has not only ceased to make a profit, but has been a money-sink. Do you think that one manager might have gotten the idea that maybe they did something wrong?

Finally, from a incident that occurred while I was in college, I realized that the art of shirking responsibility is not new to management, but is a carry-over from the art of confidence men and swindlers.

During the end of my college years, I would bring my car to school, find a place to park it and basically let it sit until I used it to go back and forth to home. Once in this big city, I bought gas at a station just down the road from the school. I had a gas credit card then and gas was only about 30 cents a gallon (well, I did tell you I have been working a LONG time ;-). This was the old days when they had the rollers to frank the receipt which you signed. They would frank the receipt with the cost, then write it in. Being slightly inattentive, I didn't look at the franking and just signed based on the written-in number which was $4.00. When I got my monthly statement (back in the days when you actually got the receipts with your statement), the receipt showed a $14.00 franking and the copy had a nice one written in. Obviously I complained as my car couldn't possibly hold $14.00 worth of gas back then. I received a nice letter rolling the charge back to $4.00 and mentioning how the gas station owner had fired the employee responsible. What? Think about it! If the employee boosts up a charge, how is he going to profit from that? Not a bit! He must have been told to do that by the owner and, when the feces hit the rotating blades, took the fall for the owner.

Now you know where managers get that philosophy.