Help Wanted-Managers Need Not Apply
By Nancy Muldoon
In my mind there is no one more blue collar than me. There was a time not so long ago in this country where people who worked for a living were proud to be part of the working class. Its working people not the elite who made this country great in spite of being exploited, abused and denied access to the luxuries of those in the upper echelons of our culture. Nowadays everyday Americans seem to deny or minimize their working class background. The mentality is not to work but to continue to buy things without having the “burden” of “paying” for things. To me this concept is actually un-American.
As much as it pains me to admit I’ve had to work a lot of jobs that I haven’t thought much of to supplement my writing career. I actually like to work and take pride in the work that I do however; there is an epidemic in this country that is contributing to the degradation of America as a whole. I call it Managerial-itis. It afflicts many and it is rather contagious. It seems to afflict those who don’t have any work ethic and for those of us who are subjected to working along side of them it is a serious issue of contention.
Most of us have worked for managers who couldn’t manage anything even if their lives depended on it and then there are those workers (the ones with no work ethic) who seem to be hell bent on becoming managers. I guess they figure if they are not going to do any work (like most managers) they should at least get paid a salary for it just like the managers they seem to emulate.
The irony of this epidemic is that the people who become managers aren’t the ones who exhibit any leadership qualities (god forbid) or put in the hours and paid their dues in the American workplace, but it’s rather those who demonstrate time and time again that they have no leadership skills, avoid confrontation, and are afraid to fire incompetent employees which inevitably creates resentment amongst the employees who have to pick up the slack.
My point is this: We do not need any more MANAGERS in this country but we are in desperate need of good old fashioned workers, you know, the foundation of what makes America great in the first place. Workers are wanted and needed, managers need not apply.
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Side Note to this Post:
The demise of the American worker is directly linked to the infiltration of “Managers” in the American workplace.
The majority of managers are quite successful of making sure that a job well done is never encouraged and offers no incentive to go above and beyond your job description and will unbelievably reward slackers( a ploy managers use to pit worker against worker) to gain even more leverage and power since actual leadership in most companies doesn’t exist.
A link to an article in this month’s Atlantic Monthly titled “Do CEOs matter?” that contains an interesting counter argument to your post (here’s the URL in case the hyperlink doesn’t work: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200906/steve-jobs):
“J. Richard Hackman, a psychologist at Harvard, has done extensive work on leadership within small teams, and he has found that leaders do exert measurable influence on their team’s success or failure. In his 2002 book, Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances, he argues that small groups perform best when they operate collaboratively, and not merely as drones subordinated to a leader. The team leader’s job is to establish the conditions that enable team members to collaborate competently; the leader needs to spell out exactly where teams should end up, but not dictate the step-by-step process of getting there. Leaders who act boldly and intelligently can make significant differences in teams’ effectivenessâbut no matter how the leaders act, teams become less effective as they grow in size. Ideal team size, Hackman says, is about six people; performance problems increase exponentially as team size increases beyond that, and the impact of leadership becomes quickly diffused.
“The highly localized nature of loyalty, some scholars argue, means that the real power to influence corporate performance resides not with the CEO but with middle management. In the recently published The Truth About Middle Managers, Paul Osterman, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, contends that middle managers are neither ‘victims,’ robbed of the ability to act independently by some faceless bureaucracy, nor ‘villains’ like Dilbert’s Bozo-haired boss, too clueless to do anything but gum up the works. In Osterman’s view, the middle manager is the secret hero in the large corporation’s rise to social and economic dominance. That rise ‘depended on middle managers,’ he says, ‘because you just couldn’t achieve the scale that we have without people doing the kind of planning work that they do.’ As ‘craft workers,’ middle managers value their task, sense its importance to the larger cause, and feel great loyalty to the people they work with. But their loyalty to the corporation is fraying, largely because they see top management hogging all the rewards and glory. ‘There’s more cynicism’ in the middle-management ranks now, Osterman says. ‘There’s less willingness to go the extra mile.'”