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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.de puts 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

1.1 Management: a question of attitude

So much has already been written and said about successful management in books and at events that the reader rightly expects a justification for this book. Leadership has long been a subject of study in economics, sociology, psychology, anthropology and philosophy, without ever being exhausted. Each year, a wide range of disciplines bring forth fresh insights and new literature. What is the purpose of yet another contribution?

This book does not address a professional audience or specialists. Rather, this is a popular science book that aims to use simple language and does not require any prior knowledge. But I also do not promise the reader any recipes that lead to certain success.

The reason for this book

This book should inspire you to reflect. It calls you to do your own work and reconsider yourself, to change and develop your management style, and it shows the aspects that must be considered in doing so.

I fundamentally believe that management is a question of personal attitude. You need to reflect on yourself and establish your own positions so that you can develop an individual, effective management style.

What matters to me most is to support and encourage current and future managers in their positive basic attitude towards their employees. If they build on this, they will be able to lead their employees in a way that is situation-appropriate, successful and enjoyable.

Good or bad? In between!

As has been shown, management in practice looks bleak. Only one in ten managers is approved as demonstrating ‘good leadership’ in the sense of ethically unobjectionable, humane management. On the other hand, if we follow the notion of the ‘continuum of leadership’14, we come to the conclusion that only one in ten managers really deserves to be called unethical or even malicious. Between these two poles, we find a variety of positions, which, however, as the Gallup report confirms, seem to tend towards the inhumane pole. When asked about inhumane practices, managers such as these from the ‘middle of the field’ like to make out that they are natural and necessary. Examples include the commonly heard excuses:

• You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.

• A little pressure never hurt anyone, or:

• It takes pressure to make diamonds.

• You can’t always be considerate.

• It’s a dog-eat-dog world.

• Nice guys finish last.

• The others are no better.

• The end justifies the means.

I realise this book will hardly reach the true believers in ‘bad’ management. Worse still, we are always going to have to live with a bad element in management. Nonetheless, it should still be possible for proper recruiting that includes ‘ethical qualifications’ to make an important contribution to fair management.

Who do managers identify with?

The main question that remains to be asked, however, is why managers in the middle of the field, who would not describe themselves as either good or bad, tend to identify more strongly with those who are examples of inhumane leadership. Revealing the questionable implicit values of business administration gives a key answer to this. In this regard I hope that a significant majority of managers in the middle of the field will follow the good examples which certainly exist and, with the help of this guide to fair management, will develop a management style that is based on a humane attitude and that meets ethical standards.

1.2 Structure of the book

A management model based on decency

This book invites the reader to recognise and rethink the implicit values of business administration. I would like to set this orientation against a vision based on a people-orientated framework of values. At the centre are the concepts of appreciation, sustainability, fulfilment and trust. Not every reader will want to adopt this exact set of values; rather, it acts as a suggestion to develop one’s own positive, and above all, humane attitude towards doing business and the people involved in it (employees, customers, suppliers).

A framework of values

On the basis of this framework of values, a management model is then drawn up that can be used to successfully implement what Hans Küng calls ‘doing business with a sense of decency’15. In this management model, generally applicable guidelines, tasks and instruments of management are presented and discussed based on Fredmund Malik’s book Managing, Performing, Living against the background of the alternative framework of values.

The guidelines that will be presented are, like guardrails, designed to keep us within the boundaries of our own humane attitude. Over and over again, we find ourselves in situations in which our inner laziness counsels us to act contrary to humane leadership. The management guidelines make an important contribution to not falling back into conventional attitudes that rely on suppression.

Management tasks describe the actual responsibility of a manager. It is not a matter of taking on as many tasks as possible, but rather of recognising the small number of tasks that a manager should perform at a minimum. Finally, a detailed description of suitable management instruments shows how the management tasks can be implemented in terms of humane management in practice.

The presentation of the management model is followed by a chapter on the ‘cornerstones’ of good management: the ‘rules of decency’ given there not only round off the picture of fair management, but also provide information on how fair management can be measured.

Against the mainstream?

One objection stands out right from the beginning. If most managers today (most likely subconsciously) follow an inhumane, dubious guiding principle, is it particularly wise or likely to yield any success to swim against the mainstream by choosing an alternative approach and to practise business and management with a sense of decency? This question, which comes up repeatedly in conversation, will be addressed in the last two chapters.

Common management concepts and humane leadership

The classifying of well-known management concepts clearly demonstrates that models addressing important components of humane management already exist in practice. These include, for example, the concepts of ‘knowledge management’, ‘change management’ as well as the pursuit of ‘agility’ and a ‘positive error management culture’. On the other hand, it should also be pointed out that well-known and widely practised concepts such as ‘lean management’ and ‘quality management’ are more likely to hamper humane management.

In conclusion, case studies will be used to show how this alternative approach is at least equal, if not superior to the conventional management practice based on suppressing employees, even when it comes to economic success. In any case, this approach makes the lives of all involved more enjoyable.