Organizational design (OD) hinges upon a caveat posed by Myron Tribus, “what does the business organization [leaders] desire?” Business organizations can be designed in a myriad of ways and possess a plethora of leadership styles. Tribus remains correct; the entire design can be simplified into a single decision about the organization’s makeup and summed as the business is either a money tap or a socially involved mechanism trying to improve society and culture. If money taps, there is not much left to say. The organizational design, culture, and climate will reflect the owner’s desire to collect as much money as possible until the tap runs dry and the business is cast off by industry. If socially involved, the decisions are obvious, and further delineation is superfluous.
For several years now, I have researched corporate training; from the start of recorded history, corporate training has protected business knowledge as much as it is screening people out for not being the “right fit” for a business and as a means of controlling behavior. Originally an untrained youth would be indentured to a master, who agreed to do work in exchange for knowledge and ultimately be trained to become a journeyman, then master of a trade, craft, or business. Your options were controlled long before interest was gaged and contracts for services were purchased.
Schools sprang up, and indentured servitude was expected to fall away. Instead, only the indenturing of people went slowly away, but the servitude remains and is as healthy today as it was in the 1600s. Currently, servitude is cloaked in terms of culture, competitive stance, and corporate knowledge, and the corporate trainer remains the arbiter of entry into a business, trade, craft, etc. The trainer does not impart knowledge but exemplifies behaviors, attitudes, and mannerisms that the business leaders consider tenets of competition.
Finally, let’s name the 800# gorilla in the room, servitude is captivity, and captivity is how a person is described who changes into what the company desires of its long-term employees. Thus the phrase “Captured by the system” indicates this phenomenon. What does it mean to “Play the game?” the same thing, change your attitude, behaviors, and ideals, and become one of us, doing what we tell you to do.
By naming this phenomenon, I am not being cynical. Multiple researchers of peer-reviewed research have discussed this phenomenon in their research and called it key to business success, placing the onus onto trainers and training to expound and exhort compliance of the human element. Trainers are considered mentors, managers, job coaches, HR representatives, supervisors, etc.; if you fill a leadership position and trust, it is because you exemplify the business’s manners, attitudes, behaviors, and culture. Understand compliance is neither good nor bad. Non-compliance leads to ostracization and eventual unemployment. However, submission does not guarantee long-term employment either, as those businesses relying most heavily upon human compliance tend to burn out fast and bankrupt themselves.
All operational processes and procedures rely upon changing behaviors, not necessarily upon gaining new knowledge. In making this statement, I am not discounting gaining new knowledge, as new knowledge can arrive in many shapes, sizes, and encounters, but the primary role of a trainer in corporate offices is not new knowledge imparting but behavioral controls. The indentured servant model of a Master training Journeymen and Journeymen training Novices has not changed these many centuries and remains firmly set in the “modern” principles of organizational learning.
Why is this important to know?
Not understanding the model and putting into place a person who does not comply is as dangerous to the health of a business as a thief, a liar, or a con man. ENRON did not fail only because of the action of the leadership team. ENRON failed because the model of behaviors exemplified by the leadership team and taught to employees poisoned the organizational body. Hence the corporate trainers led the failure of ENRON, for the corporate training model follows GIGO (Garbage In equals Garbage Out!). Understanding that the trainers were responsible for ENRON’s collapse does not excuse any person’s conduct. Instead, it more fully places the blame on the leadership team who exemplified behaviors anathema to good organizational health.
Take any business, successful or collapsed, military organization, or non-profit; these distinctions do not matter. Review them closely, and you will find Tribus’s choice personified in the employees’ actions, cultures, desired attitudes, behaviors, dress styles, mannerisms, etc. Suppose a learner is preparing to train others, and doesn’t understand these fundamental aspects of corporate training and organizational design. In that case, that trainer will teach poorly, and those employees will have short careers in the business.
Hence the most extraordinary aspect of controlling costs does not arrive in cutting people but in training them for compliance, improving the understanding of the role of behavioral adaptation, and improving the incentives to adopt the culture of the business. A client of mine is facing this exact scenario; the economic downturns have hit them hard. Instead of focusing on improving costs through behavioral adaptation, they have begun cutting people, leaving in place the trainers that are fundamental to the problems the company is facing. Proving the maxim, “You cannot correct the problems with the same thinking that spawned the problems.”
What is needed?
Unfortunately, what is needed is not what is currently wanted, but the path forward will require pieces of the following solution. What is needed is a new model for corporate training, and the model has been historically proven to be successful. Joseph Smith Jr., an early American religious leader, founded several highly successful communities and launched a leadership revolution and a religious organization. His leadership style was based upon the following principle, “Teach them (people) correct principles and let them govern themselves.”
Technology has removed the brick stick to beat compliance into employees. Technology has also leveled a lot of playing fields, putting employees into a position where they must act for themselves, guided more by self-interest and self-preservation than any generation of workers previously. Add in COVID lockdowns that spurred the rise in remote workers, and technology has released a lot of employees to work outside the accepted strictures of an office. The release of employees has done two things, changed the behaviors compliance spectrum and removed the front-line supervisor as a primary trainer in monitoring and controlling cultural acceptance.
Several years ago, a researcher was told by front-line supervisors, job coaches, and mentors of a company that communication and training were not in the specific job roles of these people. Thus, they could not be held accountable for poor communication on their teams. Remote working has eliminated these aspects on the part of the front-line supervisor. Therefore, if the supervisor is not teaching independence, allowing for self-preservation, and promoting the freedom of thought and action in employees, those employees are now acting outside the company culture and operations, and disaster is looming. To their horror, the New York Times just discovered that company-forced cultures are being called into question when employees are not in the office, and demanding employees return hurts bottom lines.
Thus, the front-line supervisors must adapt. Adaptation in managers nullifies a manager’s power and authority, sparking fear of downsizing into these mid-level managers. Fear mixed with self-preservation leads to more problems for a company’s leadership (C-Level Suite) to consider. The self-interested but not free mid-level manager will crave their benefits, perks, and powers, like any drug, and the withdrawal process is never pretty. Again as recently exhibited by the New York Times, their trainers are proving that they do not understand people and technology and do not know the role of the trainer in corporate training.
Since the mid-1990s, technology has risen, coinciding with the need to provide front-line employees more freedom to make decisions and take rapid action. Mostly, this freedom has clashed with “traditional” models of behavior demanded of by what is considered novice servants. Yet, technological growth was not considered a fundamental threat to tradition until the COVID-lockdowns. Regardless of the politics in the lockdowns, the truth remains, the traditional roles have fundamentally shifted, and the businesses that embrace this new role for the trainer, including a new model for operation, will reap success in the whirlwind.
Hence, while not wanted, the model suggested is what is needed. Employees must be taught correct business principles and fully granted the freedom to govern themselves. Thus, the role of the trainer shifts from behavioral compliance to knowledge instruction and behavioral exemplar. More to the point, all levels of a business need to conduct themselves differently. Relying less upon behavioral and attitude adoption and more upon individuality, expression, and thinking to complete business tasks.
Front-line and mid-level managers are, by necessity, going to have to decrease in the new model. Relying upon layers of managerial oversight is not going to work, and honestly has never worked, and the costs of this oversight have proven too expensive. The gap between C-Suite Level decision-makers and the front line has grown too large and too expensive, and until this is acknowledged, the role of the trainer will continue to be hindered by old-model thinking. The 1960-1980s saw the exponential rise of middle managers, coinciding with significant cost increases and a tripling in government influence, all in the name of controlling behaviors, dictating attitudes, and demanding compliance.
The growth of the middle manager was considered “new thinking,” and history has proven this idea is as false as fools’ gold and as worthwhile. Middle management restricted freedoms, and while employment laws have granted, since the 1940s, employers the ability to take these controlling actions, these actions remain fundamentally unfair. The employees have slowly gotten more freedom back from their employers. Each business will find a balance between the extremes of absolute liberty and the oppressive regime of stolen freedom. The proposed model helps strike a balance as nothing else will, but caution is needed here; there is no one-size-fits-most solution in this balancing act.
Since the industrial revolution began, businesses have competed upon their employees’ skills and influence to serve customers, which is the fundamental truth that cannot be ignored any longer. By the C-Level Suite, the skills, freedoms, liberties, behaviors, attitudes, and investment of the employee dictates the company’s ability to compete for market share. While much lip service has been undertaken to this fundamental truth, action has lagged considerably, and this trend can no longer survive in the global markets. The front-line employee must be taught to understand this truth that they currently grasp like a fish in a stream, and they must become empowered more to act in this role. Requiring the trainers to know, prepare, and teach these principles to power action by the front-line employee.
Teaching correct principles and allowing employees to govern themselves is cyclical. The employee will rely more heavily upon trainers to teach the correct principles. Increasing the need for value-added, timely trainers who support individual liberty and freedom in employees to generate customer-centric solutions. These trainers will need to be taught so that they can teach more perfectly, and the cyclical process will continue. Needs for training will drive new training, producing more freedom to act and driving more demand for training.
Returning to the decision posed by Tribus, regardless of whether to be a money tap or a community-building organization, embracing a new model for the role of the trainer will prove beneficial. Reducing mid-level managers will produce direct bottom-line cost reduction. Increasing the freedom of front-line employees while also training them to generate customer-centric solutions will open new lines of business and new opportunities. There are no downside consequences to adopting these changes earlier than your competition and proving the concept. As a business leader, are you brave enough to embrace these truths, or will you watch what you have built be destroyed by those who are? The choice, as always, is yours, and if you would like help, please feel free to reach out.
© Copyright 2023 – M. Dave Salisbury
The author holds no claims for the art used herein, the pictures were obtained in the public domain, and the intellectual property belongs to those who created the images. Quoted materials remain the property of the original author.
Last week, feel free to look it up on YouTube, Officer Tatum was discussing a Drag Queen show where children are present, and the Drag Queen is exposing their underwear regularly to the horror of the children attending. Now, take a minute and put your critical thinking hat on. If a man or woman exposes their drawers to a child anywhere, that person is arrested for exposure and investigated for child endangerment and other potential crimes. Yet, if the person claims to be a cross-dressing member of the LGBTQ+ community, the law somehow doesn’t apply. Tell me why!
Generally, I am against banning books, but I am all in for age appropriateness in materials offered for reading. Tell me, should kindergarten-aged children be learning about masturbation? Their young minds and bodies are not developed sufficiently, yet what do we find in kindergarten required reading, how to masturbate? It was inappropriate to have harlequin romances in a junior high school library. What I needed was to learn about love, not sex. Not knowing there was a difference cost me a lot of time and relationships. What is the exposure to gay sexual details doing to the children’s minds right now? Why are these materials not only allowed but promoted to children?
Where are the rights of parents? On YouTube, a discussion was held that a mother and father had no legal say in what their child was taught in his second-grade classroom. Really, where did the rights of parents go? In 6th -12th grade, I freely admit I forged parental signatures on permission forms. Yet, my parents were still afforded their right to say no and tell the school board. More, when my mother became vociferous sufficiently to make a nuisance, she was jailed for contempt regarding teacher overreach in what was being taught to my younger brothers.
You have no claims upon my personal liberty, and I want my rights back!
Distichia Moralia provides with keen wisdom the following, “Speech is given to many; intelligence to few.” After the European trip of US President Joe Biden, intelligence is in short supply in the White House, the staff, and of course, the US Media! Would someone please tell me how so many can say so much, yo-yo’ing from one point to another, and still make no sense? Honest question, the other day someone told me the patients were running the asylum, and I countered no, the clowns took over the circus. Both sentiments are accurate, but I detest clowns, and mental patients can occasionally do something brilliant.
I recently encountered a highly emotionally driven individual who claimed to have a problem but could not identify whether they were experiencing a problem or inconvenience. This person wanted but could not identify a need. The heaped emotional hyperbole only added fuel to the fires of hostility. From this encounter, this article is born.
For example, the 
Trace through history, and every time the government has undertaken a path to grow, the industrial complex has more closely tied itself to biggering government as a path to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. However, the growth of government has come at the expense of the electorate through increased laws and legislation, bureaucratic mandate, and larger standing police organizations. All this while simultaneously reducing the quality of education, restricting the power to read, write, and figure, and calling the advances “progress.” Restrictions on competition, merging to form larger military-industrial organizations, and increased costs have shut out citizens from politics, thus capturing the reigns of government to keep feeding the growing beast.
Look at history, especially recent history, and you will find that the most nefarious, liberty stealing regulations, legislation, and bureaucratic mandates have come while America was focused on 9/11, Afghanistan, Iran, ISIS, and the list goes on and on. The hellaciously destructive and misnamed “Patriot Act” was born from 9/11, when had we merely focused on enforcing the laws already on the books, Americans inside America would not have lost all constitutional rights within their own country. The Patriot Act is but one example of the problems created by confusing wants and needs, mistaking a problem for an inconvenience, and using the cudgel of government authority to force behavior changes in the citizenry.
If you believe in the potential of all to pursue life, liberty, and happiness, join me! If you prefer the thumb of government and the boot of oppression, find me when you tire of being abused, cheated, used as cannon fodder for illicit wars, and robbed from, so a select few government employees and elected representatives can live off your sweat and tears. This is the stark reality we are living in right now! We must choose a side and then stand. As Father Mulchay said, “You can’t miss when you have good material.” We, those who stand fast in our liberty, cannot miss, we have good material (the US Constitution), and we can win the day!
There comes the point where every person reaches their penultimate point. They can take no more, stand no more, and allow no more abuses to be heaped upon them by others. On 30 August 2021, when 
I love fried chicken, watermelon, BBQ ribs, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on white bread. I have been eating this way my entire life; I will not change just because some dweeb is projecting their racism onto food. Food cannot and should never be labeled as “racist.” I love grits and fried eggs, with cheese and gravy, or biscuits and hashbrowns. I am a huge fan of fried okra and pork. I enjoy a bowl of hominy and honey with a bit of butter and cornbread. Bring on the food, leave the politics on the porch!
There is no such thing as a violent protest. You are either protesting (peacefully) after having obtained the proper permits and in accordance with the laws, or you are terrorists hell-bent on destroying society. There is no middle ground, and I refuse to bend on this issue, regardless of the media’s claims! When you begin looting, burning, acting violently, this is the time to call in the military. The rules of engagement include returning violence equal to or greater than the violence shown to restore law and order: no police, military response, and open fire. Law and order is the police’s job. Terrorism is the military’s job, and those who survive receive a terrorist trial in a military tribunal.
I have written about abortion previously. I have discussed the problems with 
Most societies fail because leaders have violated the core fundamental principles those societies were built upon. The people have lost the way to hold the leaders accountable to the fundamental principles that originally built the society. In modern societies, these principles are codified laws from founding national documents, and holding the leaders accountable would involve lawyers and judges, as well as time and other leaders committed to holding together the system to ensure those who broke the system are held liable and accountable before the law, and not a mob.
What do you want most? What government is most important to you? Is your government system sufficiently powerful enough a motivator to propel you to action to save it and pass it along to the next generation? America has had leaders who have been quoted as saying something to the effect of, “The blood of current generations must renew the tree of liberty to remain free.” What will you sacrifice for liberty today, for your children to experience freedom tomorrow?
Act with haste, prepare with confidence, and move with speed. Get loud! Stand like a rock! I was told standing is not an activity. The person proclaiming that has never stood still and faced down an enemy, or they would know just how arduous standing can be! Seek learning through study, discussion, questions, and faith. Seeking learning through faith means that you will actively believe until you can prove otherwise, even if it means waiting patiently for a while to learn more.
DNC-Consulting 