Stewardship or Control?

Peter Block is an inspiring speaker and thinker about organizational and training issue. He is the author of Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self-Interest and The Empowered Manager. Peter challenged me to rethink some of my assumptions in a way that few other people have. We spoke at a Servant As Leader conference in Indianapolis. I wanted to make our interview less abstract, so I invited him to put some of his theories in the context of his own life and career. I like to think that my questions prompted him to examine some of his own. I treasure the copy of his book that he inscribed to me thus, "John, you, in many ways, live out the ideas in this book."

One on One with Peter Block
Published November, 1994

High-control, patriarchal systems are the most expensive ways to organize an institution

Participatory leadership. Customer-driven enterprises. Empowered teams. These are the buzzwords of the new organization. The good news is that employees in Information Systems may see it a little sooner than their colleagues in other parts of the organization. The bad news is that despite the popular rhetoric for building kinder and gentler organizations, real workplace change has been limited, touching only a small portion of the workforce. Most organizations still apply a patriarchal model that emphasizes the heavy hand of control and consistency.

That model, Peter Block argues, robs workers of the power needed to make the changes required to prosper in the next century. Moreover, the old patriarchal model is costly not only in dollar terms but in the toll it takes on workers as spiritual beings who, more than anything, want to contribute to something bigger than themselves. These arguments, and more, are laid out in Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self-Interest. (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco, 1993).

Peter Block is an internationally known author, trainer, and speaker whose work focuses on ways to create empowering organizations. He is a founding partner of Designed Learning Inc. of Plainfield, NJ. Block is the author of Flawless Consulting: A Guide To Getting Your Expertise Used and The Empowered Manager, which launched the empowerment movement in organizations throughout the world. Stewardship, his newest book demonstrates a conviction that workplaces need to be redesigned to enable workers to participate effectively as true partners in the organization and on a belief that integrity, courage, and compassion are essential to optimum organizational performance.

Block serves on the Board of the Association for Quality and Participation. He holds an M.A. in Organizational Behavior from Yale University. His undergraduate work was at Kansas University. He lives in Connecticut.

Let's define some terms of leadership. Can you contrast stewardship with patriarchy?

Patriarchy is a belief system. Its fundamental belief is that in order to organize effort toward a common goal, people from top to bottom need to give much of their attention to maintaining control, consistency, and predictability. The unwitting outcome of our belief in control, consistency, and predictability is that ownership and responsibility for solving the challenges of cost, customer satisfaction, and employer commitment are localized primarily at the top of the organization.

How does stewardship differ from this model?

Stewardship begins with the willingness to be accountable for some larger body than us. It assumes that the core worker is central to change. It bets on local solution and control. Stewardship springs from a set of beliefs about reforming organizations that affirms our choice for service over the pursuit of self-interest. It rejects the concept of care taking.

Are you saying that the best change is driven by the managed instead of the managers?

Yes. Patriarchy expresses the belief that it is those at the top who are responsible for the success of the organization and the well-being of its members. Stewardship flows from the choice to yield on consistency in how we manage, and thus to support local units in creating policies and practices that fit local situations. It questions the utility of maintaining consistency and control as cornerstones of management.

Are computer and software companies more or less prepared to accept your message?

I think they are more likely to be aligned with my message. That's because, to these companies, time is everything. As a consequence, they tend to be less hierarchical and favor fluid structures, short cycle time, high response time. The marketplace forces high-tech companies to be flexible, moving people around. But they err in the other direction. High-tech companies use people up. Read The Soul of a New Machine [about the development of Data General's minicomputer]. The company consumed people and used their pathology against them. What they call freedom, to me is often abandonment, which is not my idea of partnership or empowerment.

Many companies are struggling to survive. Isn't it a luxury to consider ideas such as stewardship?

I don't think so. High-control, patriarchal systems are the most expensive ways to organize an institution. The tremendous cost of enforcing control adds no value and stifles people.

What evidence do you have that high-control organizations are more costly, in dollar terms, than partnership organizations?

Why are small organizations able to move more quickly and cheaply than large organizations? The only reason is that they are not as heavily controlled. Nobody measures the cost of controlling; all they do is measure the cost of labor. We have contempt for labor in this country. We are willing to export it; for eight cents an hour, we are willing to ship it out at a moment's notice.

Is it contempt for labor to give workers in Mexico or India jobs that formerly belonged to Americans?

We can also get cheaper vice presidents if we go to Mexico or India. Why don't we also export the managerial class? To me, there is a bias against labor.

Is implementing stewardship free?

There are some start-up costs. Stewardship requires management skills that, to date, we have allowed only the ruling class, the managerial class, to have. Those management skills need to shared with those who have been denied them. There is also a price to be paid for more equitable and outcome-based pay systems.

Oh-oh. This sounds like it might hit me in the pocketbook.

Many of us believe that our organizations should guarantee that our pay keeps even with inflation, and that we should make as much or more money next year as we did this year. This is our wish to be taken care of, regardless of what we deliver or the organization's ability to pay. If we live with partnership, we have to live with the risks of being an owner. The price we pay for claiming ownership is we lose the safety and reassurance that tomorrow will be provided for us.

What's to become of people who prefer to work in a patriarchal system?

What's to become of them now? There will always be deep, widespread patriarchy in this world. Anybody looking for patriarchy will have an easy time finding it.

The information age relentlessly favors clever, skilled people capable of flexible response. Are you concerned about the non-clever, unskilled, rigid people in the workforce?

You're asking what do we do with the deadwood? My first thought is, let's identify the problem. Imagine a roomful of your co-workers. "Would everyone in this room who is not very clever, who wants to be dependent, who does not want their freedom, please raise your hands so we know what to do with you." I don't buy it! This is an Ayn Rand mentality, as if there are some clever and non-clever, some autonomous and some dependent people in the world. It's a strain of elitism that says we need to identify and train leaders. It's a subtle form of classism.

Let me reframe the question this way: Are human beings capable of using their freedom responsibly?

Everyone needs to answer that question for him or herself. There's data to support whatever side you come down on. There's enormous data that says we're not. And there's some evidence that suggests that perhaps we are. What evidence do you want to look at?

You're suggesting that what you see is what you get?

Exactly. I love that concept. What kind of experience do you want to have?

If I'm a high-control manager, am I not protected against more of the uncertainty and pain that the world throws than a low-control manager?

There is no way to escape unscathed in either event. The world comes at us in its own way. If I'm high-control will that be safer? I don't know. If I'm participative and empowering will that be safer? I don't know. Most people's answer is a defense against their own suffering.

What about people who abuse the freedom?

Accountability says that if you don't use your choice in the service of the organization, I'm going to take it back. It becomes a membership question.

Is there room for loyalty in the old fashioned sense of the term?

I don't think loyalty should be a subject of barter. If by loyalty, you mean I make you a promise for a long-term relationship, I don't see how I can promise that anymore. I don't think I should do things to engender your loyalty.

People perceive that companies are less loyal to their employees today than they were, say, 30 years ago. Is this perception based in reality?

Well, when were they loyal? When companies were monopoly operations, they could afford to do anything they wanted. They moved people around for 30 years. God bless them. I would like that world. But I wouldn't do anything to make sure of that outcome. In any case, I wouldn't accuse anyone of disloyalty. I would accuse people of not committing themselves.

One aspect of the Information Age is telecommuting and virtual communities. Workers will be spending much less time tougher in a physical sense. Do you see any fallout from this development?

I don't look forward to that technology at all. I think we'll pay an enormous price for telecommuting. It will help instrumentalize our lives. I don't know how we can develop relationships. The technology will anesthetize us to the meaning of contact, dialogue, and intimacy and will deepen our alienation.

You don't put much stock in the virtual organization?

At the level of information exchange, it's magnificent. But virtual gives the illusion of real contact. I don't see how you and I could have this same conversation screen-to-screen. What telecommuting does is it allows me to control the relationship a lot more because I can then manage what I show you, all of which goes against intimacy and human contact. What problem does the technology solve?

Well, for one thing, the technology will allow you to stay in your beloved Connecticut.

I don't think I should stay in my beloved Connecticut.I'm here in Indianapolis because Indianapolis has something to tell me about the world that I can't get in Connecticut.

What you are calling for in Stewardship is a massive redistribution of privilege. What is your personal level of privilege?

I occupy the top 1/100 of 1 percent of all the people in the world in the level of privilege I control.

Only people who are profoundly uncomfortable with privilege can be trusted with it. Are you comfortable with your privilege?

I accept it. I work with it.

Do you intend to give any of it away?

No. When I was in the Philippines, I asked a fabulously privileged person how he could reconcile his privilege with all the poverty so intimately around him. He replied, "If I give up all my privilege, it will not help anyone and there will be one more who is voiceless." I want to retain my voice.

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