As I See It: A Brief History of Employee/Manager Relationships

by Victor Rozek

In medieval times the pharaoh was displaced by the king, the lash was replaced by the sword, and apres- death housing was supplanted primarily by agriculture. Management was less directly involved, setting production quotas and administering punishment for slackers. Peasants still didn't receive payment for feeding their management, but in a gallant display of managerial self-interest, they were allowed to make a dash for the protective walls of the castle when invaders threatened. It was, in a sense, a policy that simultaneously protected and culled the labor force. The youngest and strongest peasants could outrun approaching danger; the older, slower ones were permanently laid off.

During the Renaissance, if you could paint chapel ceilings you could do pretty well for yourself, but if you peeked at the heavens and concluded that the sun was fixed and the earth moved in diurnal rotation around it, you could find yourself before a monastic management grievance committee known as the Inquisition.

The Industrial Revolution didn't do much to improve the relationship. Sweat shops, child labor, starvation wages. Monied classes considered business vulgar and workers a necessary evil. The relationship between manager and employee continued to be one of antagonism and mutual contempt.

But over time a variety of radical forces, from unionization to secular humanism, led management to conclude that well treated people were more productive than poorly treated ones.

Management suddenly became a science, and theories began popping up like smoke stacks. At the turn of the last century, Frederick Taylor's Scientific Management Theory rocketed to popularity. Taylor espoused standardizing and measuring tasks while rewarding and punishing workers. Only the first three elements of his theory were revolutionary. Management already had a great deal of experience with punishment.

In the 1930s, Max Weber tinkered with Scientific Management adding his own Bureaucratic Management twist. Weber was medievalist at heart, with a Teutonic bias for command and control. He advocated building hierarchical organizations with strong lines of authority and strict regulation. Even carrying out routine tasks required adherence to detailed standard operating procedures. Bureaucratic Management Theory is the reason why, to this day, the simplest tasks that could be made endurable are instead repetitive and boring.

Then came the Human Relations Movement, still with us today. It is a movement based on the startling proposition that workers are actually individuals with unique skills and interests, and that their well-being will be reflected in an organization's success. But such radical notions created some immediate problems. Without the threat of sudden and certain punishment, people could be quite unpredictable. So the behavioral sciences were consulted to learn how to understand and control, er, manage, this new breed of needy, willful workers, and how best to exploit the full range of their competencies.

Scores of new management theories erupted, some exotically named, like "X," "Y," and "Z." There were employee empowerment schemes, team building programs, and quality circles. Managers were taught to manage by consensus, by delegation, and by simply walking around. There were "five minute managers," and managers who presumably worked all day. There were even oxymoronic "corporate mystics."

All of this attention to management style was having a beneficial effect on employees. These theories, after all, were just schemes to get us to do stuff better and quicker by being nicer to us. As the vinegar turned to honey, employees ceased being treated like sunburned Egyptians hauling pyramid stones and became company assets. No longer lowly hirelings, we were human resources, which sounds suspiciously like living inventory.

Yes, people were being treated a lot better because for the first time in history managers were required to develop social skills and exercise psychological sensitivity. But, in terms of practical outcome, some things hadn't changed. Employees still helped to feed and house their managers, although the lash and the sword acquired a civilized veneer and were artfully referred to as "performance evaluations."

Now, the following insight won't earn me a Pulitzer, but computers changed everything.

Let's face it. Many of us got into IT (then DP) because we had marginal social skills to begin with. And there was little need for us to exercise psychological sensitivity, because computers have none. What we prized most was being left alone with our systems, free to experiment, explore, and create. For many of us, the fact that these machines were expected to run a business was ancillary to their primary purpose, which was to provide us escape from the world and a dose of intelligent entertainment.

As machines go, computers were unique. They required a direct input of human intelligence and rewarded us with a wondrous array of products. The higher the intelligence, the more remarkable the product. This was called programming, and it was essentially a solitary function best done in cloistered detachment near coffee and junk food machines.

The problem was that the best among us--those with the least developed social skills, least capable of exercising psychological sensitivity, and therefore the most likely to work in solitary detachment, creating brilliant software--were eventually promoted to management.

Highly technical loners were suddenly asked to manage people who wanted no management, because they, too, were loners. Poorly organized, uncommunicative, and likely to see users as a nuisance, these managers hired people like themselves, who loved technology and could work independently. To the rest of the company they were aliens who spoke in acronyms and had poor eating habits. If the outcome for the users wasn't always satisfactory, at least meetings were mercifully brief.

In truth, during the early data processing days, before computers became demystified, the manager/employee relationship was rather clannish. It was an alliance based on shared secrets. No one outside the glass house knew how the beast with the thousand cables worked. In those days, "the system crashed" was an acceptable explanation, and those who brought it back to life were imbued with Merlinesque powers. Like conspirators, managers and employees shared the mysteries of the blinking monster. The passing on of that knowledge was an initiation for the chosen. The users, like the terminals on their desks, were kept dumb. It was us, not so much against them, but us separate from them.

Now everyone has a computer on his desktop, and "the system crashed" is only an acceptable explanation for Windows users. The mystery is gone and employees are expected to be initiated before they come to work.

The demise of the glass house signaled a subtle shift in power. While the computers were safely behind locked doors, we were in charge. Users got what we gave them, and their biggest concern was response time. Occasionally they came to us with their humble requests knowing it would be many months before their needs would be addressed.

With the advent of distributed processing and networks, the users took charge. Before, we catered to the needs of the machine; now we were expected to cater to the needs of the company. Users came to us with demands. They wanted it yesterday, and it had better work the first time. This transference of authority required a very different type of IT manager. While technical managers were still valued, the point person of an IT organization had to possess superior people skills and the ability to manage multiple projects. Few candidates possessed all three skills.

Managers with strong people skills were valued for maintaining good user relations, but often had difficulty managing their own staff. These managers frequently knew less than the technical people they hired. They no longer served as the primary technical authority within the department, and, unable to provide specialized guidance, managers lost respect in the eyes of their employees.

Likewise, managers hired for their project management skills were, by temperament, more concerned with charts, graphs, and timelines than the needs of their programmers. Meanwhile, the pressure on everyone was increasing. While no salesman is expected to close every deal, IT is expected to function perfectly, all of the time. The system must be available, the software must function flawlessly, and communication lines must be operative 24/7.

The pressure to be perfect has had one obvious and one less-obvious effect on IT personnel. The obvious effect of chasing perfection is that there is constant tension within the organization, which is reflected in the manger/programmer relationship. Managers can ill afford the luxury of patience; employees can ill afford the luxury of fallibility.

Working for today's IT managers mirrors the experience of having a very demanding parent: Failings are neither welcome nor tolerated. As such, communication between manager and programmer is frequently guarded and incomplete. When the whole truth can harm you, editing is survival.

As a result, employees may feel as if they are never fully seen, and managers sense they aren't getting the full story. The issue is one of conditional trust. The more pressure--whether internally applied by top management and the user community, or externally induced by economic conditions--the more conditional the trust. If the clannishness of DP days has evolved to an IT world dominated by self-interest, it is in part due to the second and less obvious outcome of the pursuit of perfection.

While IT is a lot better and does much more than DP ever did, the status of IT personnel has actually diminished rather than ascended. The reason is that "perfection" is now the norm, and whatever is normal cannot simultaneously be extraordinary. The Space Program is another casualty of excellence. A shuttle launching now generates less excitement than a fireworks display.

Being "normal" also makes one replaceable, and being replaceable is not consistent with feeling highly valued. Even though there may be a shortage of skilled programmers, there is nevertheless the impression that, as one manager told me, "This isn't rocket science; a lot of people can learn this stuff." And many companies frankly don't care whether the next generation of programmers comes from India or Indiana.

If the current state of IT manager/programmer relationships is marked by high pressure and low trust, the next phase in computing may change that. Web-centric computing promises to move computing services even further from their providers. And that may be the good news. IT personnel will be valued anew, this time for their navigational capabilities, guiding users through the maze of Web-based offerings. As solutions become more fluid, successful managers will have to be flexible and adaptable, while programmers will function as consultants as well as coders. And if there is one thing consultants appreciate, it's flexible and adaptable management. Especially their own.

This, I predict, could be the renewal of a beautiful friendship.