Time to Evolve Our Managers                 

While out for our river valley walk last week, my friends and I got around to the topic of merit pay, that material incentive that is so prevalent in those sectors of the economy that reward production.  Merit pay is not a new idea, but has been around for as long as people have dangled carrots in front of mules.  Rewarding animals for doing more of what we want and punishing them for falling short goes all the way back to the Bible and stories such as the parable of the talents and the parable of the mustard seed.  It seems, unfortunately, that today’s work place has taken a few steps back toward this sort of management to the detriment of employees and the entity that employs them.

As a teacher, the only merit I really sought was affirmation by my ‘superiors’ that I was doing a good job.  Unfortunately, this was hard to come by and – lest you think I might have been a lousy teacher – colleagues who I admired for their hard work and dedication have made the same observation.  Although there was sometimes praise for departments or beginning of the school year gifts, there were very rarely notes in the mailbox that said, “I appreciate what you’re doing.”  Praise often came for doing things outside the job such as coaching or staying late to clean up after a dance but as far as the day in day out performance of the central task of teaching was concerned – nada.  

People are not mules and the carrot and stick thing doesn’t work (and I presume it doesn’t work that well for mules either).  In time, people either get tired of the brass ring that is forever dangled just out of reach or come to realize they can never catch it.  All meaningful motivators for cooperative sustained effort work on a human emotional/social level rather than on material rewards or bullying.  

Hearkening back to the walk I started with, our management oriented fellow hiker put forth the idea that rewarding better teachers would lead to improvement in education: everyone would strive for the bonus of higher salary and the underachievers would leave the profession.  That dynamic is already in place under the current system: those who are driven by money and prestige claw their way into administration and its higher pay scale while the relatively small numbers of poor teachers cull themselves over classroom management issues.  Good teachers (and here I am speaking of the vast majority of teachers) are more concerned with students’ welfare than their own gain.

Perhaps if a company is selling furniture and profits from the intensity of competition among its sales personnel this sort of incentive might pay dividends for the company but most of us don’t work in that sort of predatory environment.  If the concrete jungle is just an evolution of the real jungle, why did we bother?  At least in the real jungle life was genuine and death was swift – as opposed to a corporate jungle where life is contrived and shallow and workers die slowly under the weight of exploitation and unrelenting stress.

All institutions, private and public, get the animal they feed or, in the case of differentiated rewards, the animal they feed most.  If society wants public servants – teachers, nurses, bus drivers, etc. – who are focused on self promotion and motivated by acquisitiveness, then merit pay and summative evaluation are the means to that end.  I doubt if that would fly as the environment that most citizens are aiming for, yet words like accountability, flexibility and excellence are becoming an increasing focus in the workplace.  When I look at guidelines and association memos I focus on these words because they signal, for me, the tendrils of corporate management.

Accountability feeds fear and anxiety.  Flexibility feeds the agenda of the employer and actually limits the flexibility and freedom of the employee.  Excellence is the ultimate unattainable and therefore uses hunger to feed feelings of powerlessness, dependency and enslavement.  If this is what you feed, then what you get is an anxious, broken, slave.  And we have so many of them now, working more hours for less and less in a paranoid environment where “I’m just glad to have a job” is the mantra of the oppressed.  And the nice thing is that, as his master, you don’t need to buy expensive chains (they are virtual) and the slave provides his own housing and food.

It is only if you have a view of people as stubborn animals, that incentives and disincentives are a central tool of motivation and promotion.  You feed bullies, you get bullies.  You feed fear, you get fear.  You feed predation, you get predation.  Like we told our walking companion in the course of our intense stroll, people are basically good and dedicated.  If you feed good and dedicated, you get good and dedicated.  Imagine the impact of an administrator who comes and puts his or her hand on your shoulder and says, “I’ve heard some positive comments about your classroom.” or “Judging from their eagerness, you’ve really got them engaged” or even “You seem to be having a few problems with classroom management.  Rena is really good at that so why don’t I arrange for someone to cover your class and you can observe her and develop some strategies.”

Productivity in the majority of workplaces is more a function of how and how well one’s immediate supervisor acts.  If he or she is a policy driven (or personality driven) bully, then the workplace will be hurt by people seeking to please or avoiding upsetting the boss rather than doing their job.  As well, workplace stability will be compromised by the exodus from the workplace of the potentially competent and the conscientious.  While many managers misinterpret fear as respect, the really good ones realize that almost all industries are people industries and appreciation of a fellow human being is more powerful as motivation than threat and reward.