While alive, my father was a manager for about 20 years. My mother has likewise been a manager for around 20 years. I’m friends with managers. Leadership is a cause near and dear to my heart. Thereby, this paper is for those interested in the subject or engaged already as a manager.
The knowledge here stems from the Art of War by Sun Tzu translated by Lionel Giles and my own reflections on the matter. Although, as with all my works, thanks must be given to the many positive influences I’ve had. I trust those friends will know who they are if they are reading this. I don’t think the books I’ve read care, but I hope somewhere the spirits of the author’s feel my thanks for their work.
Management and The Art of War by Sun Tzu
The structure here will be simple. There will be a quote from the art of war and a subsequent attempt to explain with modern context – repeated overtime until myself or the book is spent. Yet, the whole book will not be explained. The Art of War, like any book, has wisdom with and without utility. Its’ historical context is the Chinese warring states period circa 500 B.C. There are many parts that, despite sincere artistic license, refuse to be translatable into applicable lessons for today. How many wagons of material it takes to support an army of 100,000 men – although vital to the Yin dynasty – is less so now.
If soldiers are punished before they have grown attached to you, they will not prove submissive; and, unless submissive, they will be practically useless.
If, when the soldiers have become attached to you, punishments are not enforced, they will still be useless.
First and foremost, this quote is about the importance of attachment between managers and employees. Without attachment between these two different groups, there is no hope that difficult requests (often felt like punishments by the employee) will be met. There are two actions by managers that are foundational and springboards for deeper attachment. These are controlled physical (within sight and sound) connections between themselves and employees and the achievement of basic managerial tasks unique to a given workplace. The phenomenon of working from home is challenging the former, and many workplaces have unique responsibilities for managers. However, generally they ensure work is done, timeliness is observed, and pay is dispensed. Interacting with staff and accomplishing the most basic tasks are first priority for managers trying to develop attachment.
Some employees will have specific requirements for attachment beyond these bare minimums though. Often those who exceed bare minimums, want their manager to do the same. This means the task of attachment becomes one unique to the disposition of a given employee. Some employees need to see a strong work ethic in their manager – like getting in early or staying late. Some will need their manager to get to know them as a person by asking personal questions. Some will need to see a display of fortitude in the form a stern response to a work issue. Some will need to see a calm response to an inflammatory situation. Some will need to see their manager take an interest in their physical health. Some will need to see a sense of humor from their manager. Some will need to see cleverness. Some will need to see humility. Some will need to need to see vulnerability. Some will need to see their manager take a direct interest in the work done by the employee (manager spending time on the line). This last example is common, but is occasionally hindered by laws and certifications required for the work being done, where the manager technically can’t do the work of the people they oversee. In these cases, it’s often satisfactory to spend time discussing or learning the work done by the employee. Some employees, will need to see multiple or all of these previously mentioned actions i to feel a sense of attachment to them. This can be a difficult task. Yet, the first part of the quote is frighteningly true. Those managers who fail to develop attachment between themselves and their employees will be persistently dealing small or significant insubordination.
Let’s now spend a short time addressing the middle part of the quote which connects submissiveness to practical usefulness. The word “submissive,” is often derided in modern professional contexts. It’s often associated with slavery or weakness. Yet, it simply alludes to a worker’s responsiveness to commands from a manager. Without responsiveness to commands from higher ups there will be a splintering and disorder to the work being done or delays in action. These are serious consequences in the coordination of a battle field or in the modern workplace. For example, let’s imagine a health system MD managing a region with five offices and 25 doctors. He is an administrator who left full time practice to manage – a leader. One day, he is reading a medical journal and finds an interesting new protocol for addressing heart arrythmia amongst a subset of patients common in their region. So, he studies all the research behind the new protocol and reaches out to various medical professionals for advice. At the end of the two months, he has well studied presentations and a firm ground for instituting change. Along the way, he achieved his mandatory tasks: biweekly clinic checks, paper-work review, phone call availability, and scheduling. There were no significant issues of workflow during the two months of study. So, he arranged meetings to tell everybody to begin using this new procedure. From the outset, things had appeared to have worked. Everyone he met with smiled and said they would try and adopt the new policy. However, six months later he brought in a watchdog branch of the health system to review patient experiences and see if the new protocol had helped. It had helped patient outcomes, but to his severe distress, only 6 of the 25 doctors had actually instituted the change.
Do you see why this happened? In the process of developing his command, he failed to meet the first priority of physical contact with his staff. Although he truthfully did put in good work, there was no attachment between the work he’d done on the project and the people who were supposed to follow his orders. None of the doctors saw the diligence with which he studied and annotated research papers. None heard how genial and intelligible he made himself when seeking advice from other healthcare professionals. None had the little interactions with him that happen in any workplace between work hours. His failure to see and overcome the physical barriers between himself and his staff stripped a basic level of attachment and prevented more advanced methods of attachment development too. Feeling unconnected to their leader, they saw no fear of disappointing their manager and incurring punishment.
Let’s look at one more example and then finish with the last part of the quote. Imagine an operations manager at a plastics factory. They oversee a staff of nine techs who oversee a machine that melts plastic and forms it into deodorant dispensers. This manager knows the machine extremely well. Her technical skill is more adept than the techs. She went to school for chemistry and specialized in plastics. However, she is much younger and more inexperienced than the techs she oversees. Still, she is very capable as a manager. She spends time on the floor with her techsm demonstrates to them her technical skills, and achieves her basic management tasks of scheduling, training-management, and inter-departmental work well. However, she still notices that, in comparison to the other shift manager, many of the techs don’t take her more difficult directions and requests as seriously. She deems this is because of differences of culture and age. So over six months she finds ways in which to “become a tech” culturally. She begins eating the foods they eat, drinking the highly caffeinated beverages they drink, golfing, drinking more at team building functions, laughing at the rude jokes they like, nodding at their fringe political beliefs and conspiracy theories. After the six months, she thinks it is working. No one seems nervous around her and things are running smoothly. Then, the youngest tech on the team, very capable but nothing culturally like the rest, makes a number of missteps. Having already ingratiated herself deeply into the culture of the majority of the techs, the manager quickly brings the hammer down on this young tech with a series of stern and embarrassing tongue lashings. This is easy and a gut response. To her and the other techs, he is an outsider and easy to knock around. No one gives her flak for it. He did screw up multiple times. However, this widens a gap that had already developed. Then within a week, one of the older techs has a heart attack at work and is out for a month and on another of the older techs clumsily fractures his tibia at home. No one says it out loud, but the truth is evident. Alcohol, fast food, nicotine, and caffeine are at fault in both cases. The first is from chronic use. The latter is from acute use (everyone knows he drinks when he barbecues, and that’s what he said he was doing when he fell and broke his leg). Our manager is in a serious pickle now. She needs to cover the work of two men. She tries with the young tech. He doesn’t have a family yet (flexible schedule) and is highly capable. He could be quite an asset in the situation. However, he feels no attachment to the underlying plea in her request, and indirectly tells her there is nothing more he can do beyond his contracted work agreement. She goes around to other techs, but each of them has families, schedules, tee times, and trips to the casino they like more than their job. They don’t understand what it is like to be a manager in her position. She understands them, and they like her for that. Yet, they don’t understand what things are like for her. Ultimately, she ends up putting in an extra 20 hours a week herself working as a tech to make up for the losses and has to transition a management intern onto the floor. It’s a terribly taxing two months and her personal life suffers because of it.
This example actually references something unspoken in the quote, yet very true. Attachment is important, but it is an attachment between two separate people – manager and employee. Her way of developing attachment concealed her position as a manager from the employees. Thereby when it came time to make a serious request, her employees did not feel the weight of her leadership or the bond between manager and employee.
Both of these examples are not lost causes or hopeless. The administrative doctor simply needs to move on from his loss and repeat the process closer to his staff. The operations manager needs to establish her individuality and leadership by beginning to lay the groundwork for gaining a significant share of the culture she is technically in charge of. A good start might be a health initiative that she leads by example.
Now, onto the last part of the quote. Attachment makes punishment significantly more difficult for a manager. It generates a closeness that punishment seems unsuitable with. However, it cannot be forgotten that people, no matter how we feel about them or how we have treated them, are flawed. The job of the manager is to recognize failure and address it with punishment light and tough – both to the employees and to themself (especially if they are top of the totem pole). Attachment ensures the punishment has meaning and doesn’t break up the work or self-directed relationship. The punishment is the reinforcement back to the central messages and goals laid out by the manager.
The Commander stands for virtues of wisdom, sincerity, benevolence, courage, and strictness.
To be continued.
Marcus King 