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Reciprocal Needs in the Employment Relation

We can look at two sides of the management coin: What do the individuals get out of it? And what benefit does the whole system derive from it?

I will disregard any benefits that accrue to managers just by holding the position of managing. Those are just circular logic. Circular logic abounds in discussions of management and hierarchy. For example, consider status reports. It will be said that status reports are necessary so managers know what their employees are working on. It’s circular because it treats the existence of hierarchic management as axiomatic, then demands an interaction to serve that hierarchy. In other words, I will not consider interactions that only exist to serve the structure itself.

Let’s look first at the needs that an individual has as an employee. From “Drive” we see that an individual is motivated by autonomy, mastery, and purpose\cite{Pink09}. Over the long-term, these positive motivators have the greatest effect. However, they do require security and trust. A developer working on a big, change-the-world project still can’t be motivated if they fear layoffs will be coming next month.

Over the short term, an individual also needs to avoid the demotivators. A bad fit in workload, autonomy, rewards, fairness, community, or values\cite{Masl97} will outweigh long-term positives by about three to one.\cite{Amab11}

I will frame these needs in the form of questions to which an individual would like to have answers.

1. “What should I be working on now?”
2. “Do I know how to do it?”
3. “Can I work in a way that I enjoy?”
4. “Am I good at what I do?”
5. “Does my work mean anything?”
6. “Can I get my work done in time?”
7. “Can I get the resources I need to do the work? (Training, equipment, assistance.)”
8. “Am I making enough money?”
9. “Am I being treated fairly, compared to my peers in the company?”
10. “Am I being treated fairly, compared to my peers in the rest of the industry?”
11. “How do I fit in here?”
12. “Does anybody care about me?”
13. “Does anybody care about my work?”
14. “Do I agree with my colleagues about the right ways to work, act, and interact?”
15. “Where am I going?”
16. “Can I get there from here?”

With each of these needs, they are not met by “the company”, because “the company” is not a corporeal entity: it cannot talk, think, act, or feel. Rather, each of these needs can be met by interactions with other members of the company. By the same token, if a need goes unmet, it is unmet because some important interaction is not handled.

Some questions also address relations among people. These are not questions a person would ask about themselves, but rather questions a person would ask about how to affect other people in their company:

1. “How can I deliver a hard message to X?”
2. “I believe that X is not meeting their commitments. How can I get that fixed?”
3. “How do I ensure I never work with X again?”
4. “I know that X is creating legal or financial problems. What should I do?”

We will turn now to the reciprocal side of the employment relationship, which is the needs of the system as a whole.

In order to keep functioning, the system has to be able to deal with certain issues. When I say “the system”, of course I mean that the individuals in the system need a way to arrive at collectively acceptable decisions and implement those decisions.[fn::Although John Gall would disagree with me. In his view the system has ends of its own, namely those which cause the system itself to grow.] Unfortunately, there will always be some systemic needs that are not unanimously popular. For example, you can’t ask for 100% decision about the need to terminate someone’s employment. It may be necessary for the company, and even good for the majority of the people, but it won’t be a unanimous decision. Other decisions may involve changing the character of the system by hiring people in new skill sets or service areas or exiting service areas that many of us enjoy.

These system mechanisms can’t be expressed as personal questions, since there is no “I” to voice them. I’ll write these as declarations of systemic needs. In order to function and scale, the system needs mechanisms to:

1. Limit expenditures to within available resources.
2. Ensure that all needed tasks get done, not just the fun ones.
3. Incorporate new people as the company grows.
4. Correct problems that could disrupt the system.
5. Reposition within the market.
6. Converge on cultural and community standards.