Heinz Siebenbrock - Fair Management

This book is not primarily about calling into question the foundations of economic theory and the theory of business, which is closely related to it. Rather, it aims to draw attention to the hazardous yet mostly unheeded side effects of the theory of business. The extremely questionable conceptions of value which the theory of business is implicitly founded on are the starting point of these considerations.

In my opinion, alongside the proper amount of theory, business studies also conveys values which must have a considerable influence on current and future managers, even if (or maybe because) this occurs subliminally. Conveying these dubious yet rarely questioned values encourages the conditions within the economy that the public quite rightly lament. The results are exploited resources, greedy executives, avaricious consumers, demotivated workers, burnout and even death!

The questionable values of business studies contribute to reducing the people within a company to a factor of production to be controlled just like the machines. From this derives the widespread paradigm of the manager who has to have everything under control and keep it that way. This book contrasts this approach of ruling with a model of management that puts the focus on the initiative of the employees. In this sense, leading means creating a framework in which employees have the desire to be successful by themselves and will do whatever it takes to remain successful. This ‘Guide to fair management’ serves as a basis for this, which I present to you as an alternative framework for management.

***

Why should you read this book?

1 This book discusses serious weak points in the traditional teaching of business studies. In particular, its implicit basic assumptions are systematically exposed and taken as an opportunity to counter the subliminal brutalisation of business and society.

2 This book is conceived as a structured guide for current and future managers. In this book you will find a theoretical structure that you can use to develop your own ethically based style of management.

3 The advice and case studies in the book show you how to strengthen your managing on an ethical basis.

4 The book will help you to reclassify common management concepts such as quality management, knowledge management and agility according to an ethical basis.

Drensteinfurt, October 2020 Heinz Siebenbrock

1 Dedicated employees?

‘A book must be the axe

for the frozen sea within us.’

Franz Kafka2

For more than 20 years now, the legendary Gallup report has been indicating that almost 90% of all employees worldwide (in Germany, more than 80%) display an alarmingly low level of dedication to their jobs. Dissatisfaction with supervisors is cited as the main cause.3 This finding has been confirmed time and again, such as in the noteworthy study by Diana Krause and Juliane Simon of the University of Klagenfurt.4 kununu.com, a portal which allows employees to rate their workplace, also found in a large-scale study of 300,000 employees: ‘In general, behaviour of supervisors is one of the factors that employees rate the lowest.’5

A vicious circle

The vicious cycle is easy to describe: suppressing employees leads them to have a low level of dedication to their job; this low level of dedication then leads to more suppression from managers. Why is it that only a few managers manage to break out of this vicious cycle? Apparently economic success (still) justifies this fundamentally inhumane system.

But it’s beginning to crumble: the corona crisis has shown that the rapidly expanding model of working from home only works once this vicious circle has been broken. When the workplace is moved from the office to the home, managers have to trust their employees, whether they like it or not. In this scenario, traditional supervising has had its day! Especially younger employees, the ‘digital natives’, are increasingly demanding more contemporary management. Youth-based movements such as Fridays for Future are a breeding ground for further demands: companies and managers are increasingly expected to ensure that their actions are in harmony with the environment and meet the requirement of sustainability. Moreover, for young people, money and status are not the focus as they typically were for previous generations. Rather, ‘It’s companies with meaning and appreciation that score points with Generation Z’ says 25-year-old management consultant Philipp Riederle, who helps companies better understand employees from generations Y and Z.6

In fact, the prevailing doctrine of business administration, which most managers take as a guideline, implicitly calls for suppressing employees, exploitation and ripping off customers, and even for practising avarice and greed! It is time to expose the negative values that traditionally underlie this subject.7

Against this background, it is not surprising that a large proportion of employees in Germany ‘work to rule’, as the Internet portal personalwirtschaft.deputs it: ‘Currently, only 15 percent of employees in Germany have any emotional bond to their employer… 16 percent, that is, almost six million employees have no emotional ties to their company at all and have already resigned in their heads’8.

The majority of those involved in researching or teaching business administration wrongly claim that the subject is not based on any system of values; it is supposedly a value-free discipline. Without wishing to adopt Alfred Nobel’s fundamental critique of the scientific nature of this subject, its supposed freedom from values can at least be questioned. The politically influential Czech economist Tomáš Sedláček comments in this regard, ‘It is paradoxical that a subject that is predominantly concerned with values wants to be free from values.’9

The implicit demands of business administration for profit maximisation, focusing on competition and growth are anything but free of value! As will be shown below, it is precisely these guiding principles that have an extremely unfavourable effect on the relationship between managers and employees.

The traditional picture is one of suppressing employees.

Instead of holding a serious discussion about values, the advocates of business management theory continue to sing the praises of profit maximisation, focusing on competition and growth. This has practical consequences since many companies follow these erroneous guiding principles and thus end up relying on confrontation, conflict and suppressing employees.

Fortunately, there is hope in the form of a counter-movement, which is also beginning to be taken seriously in economics circles too: I am referring to New Work. The term comes from the Austro-American social philosopher Frithjof Bergmann.10 It refers to a world of work in which people can realise and develop their potential. ‘The core values of the concept of New Work are autonomy, freedom and participation in the community.’11 New Work consists of five building blocks:

1 Employees are involved in company development (strategy).

2 Employees set their own performance and learning targets; this includes setting their own working hours in both the operational and creative phases.

3 Changing work locations, working hours and assignments (flexibility).

4 Making use of modern office concepts with creative workspaces and retreat rooms.

5 The aim is to create a low-hierarchy, democratic management culture with rapid decision-making processes.12

The management model presented in this book also aims at creating a working environment in which employees can realise themselves and develop their potential. While New Work describes the visible, technical and organisational side of this new working environment, the fair management model helps current and future managers make a decisive contribution to good, successful relationships. If this results in your company having an appearance that feels like New Work, then you have certainly done a lot of things correctly. But it is also conceivable that the outwardly visible results of working on your personal leadership may take on a completely different form. In his book Reinventing Organizations, Frederic Laloux has developed a model for the development stages of organisations. He calls the highest level of development an ‘integral, evolutionary organisation’. In his empirical study, Laloux found 12 companies that may not have fully reached this stage but are or were on the way to doing so. We can surmise from these examples that New Work is only one of several possible forms that this highest evolutionary stage (from today’s point of view) can take. According to Laloux, integral, evolutionary organisations are characterised by self-management, wholeness and evolutionary purpose.13