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PROLOGUE

Mythology: The foundation of the management profession, undermined by comparison with real professions, such as banking, gambling and witchcraft.

Twenty managers spend five days at a management training centre. They are there, at great expense, to acquire spiritual intelligence from their executive coach. The first two days are devoted to ‘energy transference’: the coach transfers her spiritual intelligence to the managers who spend the next two days transferring it to each other. The litmus test of their success in sharing this new-age intelligence with each other is fire-walking. At the end of an excruciating week of psychobabble, each manager is invited to defy the laws of physics by walking across hot coals. All managers meekly obey and suffer serious burns. Most are removed to the local hospital and one is found sitting in a toilet with his feet in a bucket of water.

At a management school, managers have ‘lunatic’ written on their foreheads. They are at the mercy of a ‘facilitator’ who lives in a new age world of natural energy and believes that managers should get in touch with nature. They are taken to a lake and told to bow and thank nature (and the lake) for its largesse. Later that night, amazed witnesses try to make sense of adult human beings howling at the moon. They conclude that the managers are seriously overpaid and possibly mad. They wonder why they are paid at all.

Another training centre specialises in assessing managers’ personalities. One brave manager resists and is immediately labelled a ‘difficult personality’. A colleague submits to the personality test and is ordered to wear his ‘personality’ on his shirt for five days. He objects but complies. One week later he initiates legal action against those who subjected him to psychological indignities.

What do these cases have to do with management or the training of managers? They are, I suggest, distractions from the traditional practice of management because the ultimate test of management is performance: the achievement of actual results.

Managers get their authority from their technical expertise and their rhetorical skills. When managers and colleagues interact, they attempt to influence each other to see or do things. The persuasive element in the relationship is what qualifies the actions of one or both parties as fundamentally rhetorical.

Today, rhetoric has a negative connotation, identified with the vacuous jargon of politicians and corporate executives. Yet it was not always so. The ancient Greeks valued noble over base rhetoric, a distinction which depends on whether rhetoricians are judged to influence others toward what is good or what is bad: a judgement that will differ according to the values of those who render it.

Managerial authority is grounded, in large part, on noble rhetoric: communications requesting obedience, which are supported by reasons why the action is the desirable one. As reasoning means the ability to argue effectively about relevant matters, authoritative managers are those who offer valid reasons for a proposed course of action. Consequently, competent employees earn the right to argue with their managers. This consequence is neither obvious nor acceptable to many managers who view argument and debate as a challenge to their authority. Authoritative managers embrace and authoritarians reject argument and debate.

In Australia it is dangerous to appear to be authoritarian: the bitter pill of power needs to be sugar-coated. This is where soft-skill management enters the picture in a suitably disguised, if not Machiavellian, form.

In the postmodern world of management, arguing is a career-limiting activity. Individuals who argue with their managers are likely to be accused of lacking the ‘soft-skills’ of management. In some cases, they are judged to have a low level of ‘emotional intelligence’. In more extreme cases, they are considered to be suffering from a personality disorder.

The popularity of soft-skill management in Australia has redefined management and created psychomanagers: managers who manage by personality. I use the term ‘personality’ broadly to include personality traits, psychological motives, and various forms of ‘intelligence’: cognitive; emotional; moral; and spiritual. Influenced by new age lunacy, postmodern preciousness, political correctness and feminism, management training has become a standing joke among those who want to be judged on actual results and not on their often difficult personalities.

The rise of psychomanagement has spawned a cult of personality that subjects individuals to psychometric tests in the mistaken belief that certain personalities make bad managers and others make good managers, and even leaders. But managers and leaders occupy mutually antagonistic roles and the shift from one to the other is fraught with danger. The manager’s authority is based on role and the leader’s is based on personal attraction. Given the behaviour of leaders in the twentieth century, many people have concluded that it is dangerous to follow individuals because of personality, ‘vision’ or ‘mission’. History tells us, or most of us, that if we follow leaders we are likely to end up in chains behind them.

Using psychology to manage others has great attraction because it offers managers the means by which they can control their colleagues. The problem is that psychomanagement requires knowledge and skills that managers don’t have. When managers become psychomanagers they have to gain insight into the inner lives of their colleagues, understand various personality theories, tests and therapies. Failing this, they yield their authority to counsellors, coaches or consultants who cannot agree on the basic assumptions about human behaviour. And when they try to apply psychomanagement, they undermine their authority because the relationships of psychologist and client and of manager and subordinate colleague are mutually exclusive.

Psychomanagement combines attention to performance and an obsession with personality and an assumption that the two are linked. They are not. Nevertheless, psychomanagers continue to promote the view, discredited by sixty years of research, that personality predicts managerial performance. Furthermore, psychologists cannot agree on even the most fundamental principles of personality. Behaviourists and existentialists argue against the existence of personality traits, and psychoanalysts claim they cannot be assessed by psychometric tests.

Managers who find the task of making employees’ strengths productive too onerous emphasise employees’ weaknesses. Their attempt to eliminate employees’ personal deficiencies encourages them to practice counselling in which they are not trained – and neglect skills in which they are. Once they embrace therapeutic counselling, the roles of manager and counsellor collide. Their point of intersection represents one of the major challenges for Australian managers who are required by occupational health and safety legislation to provide an occupational environment adapted for the physiological and psychological needs of employees. Clearly, those who want to manage by performance have had their waters muddied.

The popularity in Australian management of personality, motivation, bonding, emotional and moral intelligence raises interesting questions about the changing face of management. How did it come to pass that managers today are expected to ‘bond’ by howling at the moon, or walking on fire to demonstrate their ‘spiritual’ ability to defy the laws of physics? How did new age spiritualism, folk psychology and soft-skill management become part of the practice of management? Or, as the ancient Romans asked, Cui bono?

Traditionally, the role of psychology was to provide the opportunity for individuals to master themselves, not to manipulate others. Originally known as moral philosophy, psychology defended the maxim ‘know and master yourself’. As we shall see, psychologists have been welcomed into Australian management: some work with managers to encourage them to master themselves; others work for managers to encourage them to master others.

Australian managers are told that they should be managers and leaders, managers and mates, managers and mentors. They are told that they need coaches, consultants and counsellors. When they were confronted with ‘epidemics’ of Repetition Strain Injury, occupational stress, personality disorders and mental illnesses, many concluded that managing in Australia is a challenging business.

This book, then, is about Australian managers, their long-standing affair with psychologists, and the rise of the psychomanager. It is written by an Australian academic who for half a century has studied, taught and consulted with managers and participated in several of the social movements in which they have been embroiled. It is therefore a personal, selective, account of a professional life spent studying the problematic relationship between managers and psychologists.