Document created: 23 September 03
Air University Review,
March-April 1974
Lieutenant Colonel
Frank W. Jenkins
Developments in the past few years that will have significant impact on managing people are especially worth exploring in view of the advent of the “all volunteer force” in the military. If productivity and efficiency can be heightened while making the worker better satisfied with his job, the Air Force cannot help benefiting. The management developments to which I refer derive from findings of the behavioral scientist.
One problem with many ideas of the behavioral scientist is that they seem so obvious we assume them to be already in use. Also, we often tend to look upon the behavioral scientist approach as “too soft” to work in the military. For example, because we question the feasibility of participative management in flying an aircraft or commanding a unit, we tend to discard the idea altogether. Nevertheless, if we believe even half of what we espouse regarding the value of people in the Air Force, it is clear that we cannot scoff at any personnel management ideas that might help attain and retain a force of people capable of performing the mission.
The behavioral science influence has become increasingly noticeable in military management philosophy in the recent past. The Air Force Personnel Plan lists certain objectives to be met, each objective having an attending officer-in-charge whose job it is to ensure that the objective is attained. In the jargon of the behavioral scientist, this is known as “management by objectives” or MBO. However, the Personnel Plan guidelines, while effective, do not follow the MBO concept as originally conceived by Peter Drucker, Douglas McGregor, and others, which was based upon true participative management.
There is nothing wrong with listing specific objectives in the Personnel Plan. On the contrary, I believe this is a much-needed action that would certainly be of benefit in other management areas as well. But we delude ourselves if we think we have harnessed the essence of the management by objectives concept. Such an assumption exemplifies a common tendency in the military to grasp a popular phrase or basic idea, write a regulation around it, and believe that the latest management methods are being exploited. For this reason I intend to discuss some of the major concepts of managers oriented in the behavioral sciences and relate their findings to the personnel management task facing the Air Force today.
When Douglas McGregor introduced his Theory X and Theory Y concept in 1960 he endowed his Theory X manager with the firm belief that the average human being was a slacker who had an inherent dislike for work.1 A Theory X manager, said McGregor, must coerce, direct, and threaten his subordinate with punishment to make him perform. In contrast, a Theory Y manager believes that expending energy for work is as natural as expending it for play. He tends to regard the individual as having a high degree of imagination, ingenuity and creativity to apply in solving organizational problems. It is important to note that McGregor was not differentiating between management methods but between the ways people think of others.
McGregor believed that the Theory X manager was by far the most common and that most literature concerning personnel management could only have written by a Theory X writer. This certainly appears to have been true in the military, since most directives and regulations seem to be written on the assumption that the reader’s intelligence is only slightly above moron level. Consequently, over the years we have helped create a first-line supervisor, middle manager, and even commander who believe that the only way to lead is to direct, coerce, control, and threaten the individual worker. If he doesn’t respond with acceptable performance, we “throw the book” at him. In this age of increasingly expensive training and with our goal of an all-volunteer force, we cannot afford to so readily discard such a valuable resource. If we are going to make the volunteer Air Force work and keep the cost of such a force to a minimum, we must listen to what the behavioral scientists are saying and adopt their techniques when possible.
Not all of us truly believe the individual we lead, manage, or command is just as anxious as we are to accomplish the job at hand. More likely, we look upon many of our subordinates as near impediments to mission accomplishment. Often the supervisor believes he can do the job better himself anyway, so he does it. Or the commander feels he can handle virtually all problems that arise within his unit, so he tries to. These attitudes not only presuppose that the subordinate is incapable of handling the situation but, more important, cause the manager or commander to get so tied up in detail work that he neglects his own job. He is not making those decisions which he alone can make.
Any improvement in our personnel management techniques must begin with the Air Force manager drastically changing his basic attitude about people. An all-volunteer force, by its very nature, will consist of people who are trying, as best they know how, to get the job done. We must give them the knowledge needed to do the job, tell them what is to be done, and trust them to do it.
The term management by objectives was first used by Peter Drucker in his book The Practice of Management.2 As mentioned earlier, this is one of the catch phrases currently in favor but rather poorly interpreted nevertheless. Drucker’s use of the term is based on a participative approach to management. He believes that a man tasked to do a job needs to get involved in decisions regarding ways to accomplish that job and, in coordination with his supervisor, should set measurable goals for achieving the objective. This approach works best when there is a more or less repetitive task to be performed or when a time limit can be established, but it will work to a large extent in almost any work situation. We all have faced the totally unrealistic suspense date that must be met, yet how many times have we been asked what a reasonable time limit might be? When you are about to give your subordinates a job to do, why not call them together, present the problem, solicit their recommendations for accomplishing the objective, and reach an agreement on a time limit? This approach has two distinct benefits: first, some excellent ideas may surface that otherwise would not; and second, the individuals selected to perform the task will be more committed to attaining the objective than they would be had they not participated in the decision-making process. The essence of MBO is simply to establish realistic objectives or targets that are mutually agreed upon between supervisor and subordinate.
Chris Argyris has pointed out that the organization that manages to have every individual working toward a common goal, matching that of the organization itself, will be more successful than one that does not.3 Two key elements must be present for this to happen in any work unit: first, the individual must know where he fits in the organization as well as where the organization fits in the larger mission; and second, he must accept the goals of that organization as his own.
This may seem like a most obvious idea, but I recall an incident when I was executive officer in a refueling squadron. A sergeant from maintenance brought a young airman to me with various complaints about his not wanting to work on the flight line. The sergeant wanted to court-martial the man for insubordination. I took the airman into my office, sat down with him, and we began to talk. I asked him if he knew what the mission of the unit was. He replied, “To fly airplanes.” I asked him if he knew where they flew to or what they did. He knew neither. For the next few minutes I explained that our job was to refuel fighter aircraft in the event we were called upon for help in various parts of the world. I showed him maps of places where similar aircraft were deployed and explained why they were vital to our nation’s security. I even scheduled him to ride as an observer on a training mission. The young man never had any trouble after that.
The point of the example, of course, is that something was drastically wrong when that young airman had to get so close to serious difficulty before having explained to him the importance of his role in the unit mission. After I related this incident to the Commander, we initiated an education program, not for the one-, two-, and three-striper on the line but for every supervisor in the unit. These are the men whose job it is to explain the unit goals to the young airman and get his efforts directed toward those same goals. Their goals must parallel those of the organization.
A further step in our attempt at better personnel management in the Air Force is extremely difficult to achieve and may in some cases be impossible. Frederick Herzberg refers to it as job enrichment.4 Some in the military have confused this concept with a need for job enlargement. They falsely believe that by giving a man more of the same work to do they have enriched his work and made his job more rewarding. Not so. Job enrichment means making the task at hand as meaningful and worth doing as possible. Some jobs are so routine that they can never be enriched, and every effort should be made to automate these if at all possible. (On the other hand, the fact that sometimes a job can become richer merely by giving it to a different person indicates that richness lies within the perception of the doer.)
A job can often be enriched simply increasing responsibility. A sergeant who worked for me in a major command personnel shop took over a very routine task. He was a college graduate, so I was not surprised when he very quickly requested more to do. I gave him two new tasks. First, using information from his work unit, he was to prepare the biweekly briefing given to the Director, which had previously been prepared by a senior NCO or officer. Second, he was to devise a means of mechanizing his job. The first task he accomplished within thirty days, and the second in about six months. Needless to say, the tasks I gave him after that time were neither dull nor routine.
If the Air Force doesn’t want dull people, it had better make its jobs interesting and rewarding; only dull people like dull jobs. Unfortunately, the trend in the Air Force seems to be to mechanize many of the more interesting jobs because we have the capability to do so, rather than to improve management. One very interesting NCO or officer job that is becoming mechanized is the assignment process. A mechanized system has been justified with regard to reassigning enlisted personnel because of the large numbers involved, but I find little justification for its use in the officer assignment area. Yet we seem to be heading in that direction. One reason we have relatively fewer complaints from officers regarding reassignment than we do from airmen may be that the officer still has someone to talk to if he is not satisfied, while the airman does not. After conferring with his career counselor, an officer may continue to be unhappy with his assignment, but he has at least received an explanation for the action. We’ve designed the system so the airman has no one to talk to regarding his assignment except the computer, and I’m afraid we will eventually do the same for the officer. We not only lose several challenging jobs but also forsake good management practices for the sake of computer capability. On the other hand, many dull, repetitive tasks that could and should be mechanized by the Air Force continue to grow in size; the base of preference and assignment swap programs are examples in the personnel area.
A difficult problem facing the military manager today is how to work within an outmoded, bureaucratic organizational structure and still get the job done. The Air Force is organized around traditional line and staff relationships handed down through the centuries. We have so entangled the work force within a web of organizationally oriented manpower systems that it is becoming impossible to get the job done without deviating from those systems.
In his book Changing Organizations, Warren Bennis points out that because of the increased rate of technological, social, and political change in the world it has become necessary for large organizations to adopt a more responsive work structure.5 Many progressive companies, for example, are adopting unstructured work units consisting of perhaps twelve to fifteen members. The work unit is given a task to perform, and, using participative management techniques mentioned earlier, the unit decides how best to accomplish the job. If the method adopted proves less than ideal, the unit is free to change the system until a workable one is found. Finally, each worker performs the job for which he is best suited, and the unit operates at peak efficiency. If the task changes, the unit adapts to that change after another “brainstorming” session. Most of us have seen this situation in the military when an ad hoc committee is formed to accomplish a particular task. Usually, the committee is dissolved, and the individual returns to his “assigned” position. I would not recommend creating additional work for an ad hoc committee simply to keep it in being, but I would argue that the ad hoc group may be the “normal” organization of the future, while the structured line and staff organization may be needed only in specific cases.
Part of the web I mentioned is the OER/ APR system, which cannot readily adapt to flexible manpower shifts. Also, the traditional chain-of-command, which requires that each man have but one boss, can foster specialization to the point of inefficient workload distribution.
I recently had the opportunity to experiment with an unstructured work unit. One of the first things I did when I assumed the job was hold a meeting of all personnel in the division, acknowledge that they knew what their tasks and capabilities were better than I, and ask for their recommendations on organizational structure and job tasking. I received three not dissimilar recommendations, all significantly different from the established organization. We resolved the minor differences and reached agreement on workload distribution. As a necessary concession to the established system, everyone in the division was informed that although I would act as the rating official for OER/APR purposes, the senior NCO or officer in each work center would prepare an evaluation on each man working with him on a given task. A follow-up meeting about thirty days later took care of some minor job adjustments. After that time, adjustments were made only as job requirements were changed. We worked that way for the next two and a half years, and I believe that group to be the most capable, efficient work unit I have ever supervised. One major benefit was the ability of the unit to accept a “crash project” with no difficulty whatsoever. I also found that ours was the only work unit in which some individuals did not sit on their hands while others had work piled on their desks. Every member got to know the peaks and valleys of all the work centers and automatically pitched in to help where needed.
Obviously, these results could not be repeated for every work unit regardless of the size of the organization or the mission to be performed. But I find that more and more the Air Force is of necessity using what Alvin Toffler refers to as ad-hocracy management.6 It is rather commonplace for a specialist to be pulled out of his work unit to perform on a particular project. This is good as far as it goes, but I believe the Air Force must devise methods of allowing this procedure to be the norm rather than the exception. Two stumbling blocks to this end are the inflexible manpower system as well as an unrealistic and unresponsive rating system.
We need a more flexible manpower system that will allow the manager to adjust his force as necessary. Unfortunately, because of computer capability, the Air Force is allowing the system to dictate its organizational structure, rather than force the system to adjust to a more satisfactory management method when one is available. We also need a rating method that will allow for a far simpler evaluation to cover jobs of short duration—a system, for example, that would enable an ad hoc committee chairman to rate an individual on his performance even if it covered only few weeks.
There are two significant factors affecting personnel management that the Air Force must recognize if it is to remain a viable force capable of performing its mission. First, in the near future we can anticipate an austere manpower budget that will force optimum use of the personnel resource. In such an atmosphere, it becomes increasingly important that we reduce personnel procurement and training expenses wherever possible. Every fully trained individual we are able to retain will reduce these costs. Second, the Air Force must review its personnel and organization management techniques to ensure that latest methods are being used at all levels. Air Force managers must break away from using stereotype methods simply because bureaucratic inertia makes the introduction of new and better techniques difficult. Such techniques are available if we have the resolve to implement them.
Air War College
References
1. Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960).
2. Peter F. Drucker, The Practice of Management (New York: Harper & Row, 1954).
3. Chris Argyris, Integrating the Individual and the Organization (New York: Wiley, 1964).
4. Frederick Herzberg, Work and the Nature of Man (Cleveland, Ohio: World Publishing Co., 1966).
5. Warren G. Bennis, Changing Organizations (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966).
6. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
Lieutenant Colonel Frank W. Jenkins (M.S.A., George Washington University) is assigned to Global Plans and Policy Division, DCS/P&O, Hq USAF. Most of his flying duty was in C-130s of Tactical Air Command, and he previously served as Chief, Assignment Control Division, DCS/P, Hq TAC. Colonel Jenkins is a graduate of Air Command and Staff College, Industrial College of the Armed Forces, and Air War College.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this
document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression,
academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official
position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air
Force or the Air University.
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