That manager's de facto delegation of authority to the staff adviser (me) is every staff person's dream. Unfortunately, such faith comes only after a proven track record. We now examine staff-line relations and how advisers can improve their effectiveness. We begin with a young former Peace Corps member who, perhaps, became too dominant.
Richard's Advice
Richard Rule was an only son of a minister and school teacher. In later years he used to joke that he would have had to really goof up if he failed given the advantages of that background with its expectations of moral and intellectual success. And Dick certainly did not disappoint his parents. He was outstanding in school and a deeply committed young man concerned about his obligation to those less blessed. In high school, he strove to be a student leader, serving as president of the National Honor Society chapter and captain of the cheerleaders as well as head of the youth group at his church. His striving for leadership and service continued in college where he particularly enjoyed being selected as student representative on the college governance board which met frequently with the president to discuss administrative plans and problems.
He worked in a variety of the usual summer jobs during college but two experiences were particularly influential. One summer at his father's suggestion he worked as a door-to-door evangelist distributing literature and attempting to kindle religious interest in suburbia. He absolutely hated the experience, particularly the blank stares and even slammed doors he would sometimes encounter. In contrast, he loved his last college summer when he worked as an intern in the regional office of a well-known consulting firm. His job was to collect market data from shoppers in local malls and he found most of them very cooperative (and thankful for the product samples he would hand out in appreciation of their answers). His long-range plan after graduation was to go to either business school or law school, but first he decided to devote two years to the Peace Corps.
After orientation, Dick was sent to Cuenca, the third largest city in Ecuador with a population of approximately 80,000 people. Ecuador is a small country, larger only than Uruguay in South America, with a population of some five million. It is very poor, relying on agricultural exports for much of its income. The Andes Mountains run through the nation's center making trade and communications between areas very difficult, and particularly retarding the economic development of the inland region where Cuenca is situated.
Richard's main task was to assist in the formation of credit cooperatives in Cuenca. A credit cooperative is known to people in the United States as a credit union or a savings and loan cooperative. Members place their savings in the cooperative, as they would in a bank, but loans are available only to members, at a lower interest rate than at commercial banks. Yearly, all profits are returned to the members based on the amount of savings they have in the cooperative.
A cooperative is usually governed by a board elected by and from the membership. It includes a president, vice president, treasurer, and the heads of the credit and supervisory committees. The credit committee approves all loans and the supervisory committee insures that the cooperative is being operated according to its by-laws. Professional managers can be hired by the cooperative, but this is only feasible when the cooperative is large. In most cases, all leadership comes from part-time, unpaid, volunteer members.
Credit cooperatives have been formed in many less developed areas because of the lack of credit resources available to small merchants and farmers at reasonable interest rates. Credit cooperatives can help in filling this gap. At the same time, they mobilize community capital by teaching members the importance of regular saving. Unfortunately, such cooperatives were unknown to most of Cuenca residents and those in existence had fared poorly.
When Dick arrived, three formally organized cooperatives had already been founded, but one had failed and the other two were stagnating. The strongest of the three was named "La Merced" after the patron saint of the neighborhood in which the cooperative was formed. The president Juan Caldera and the treasurer Carlos Marchan were familiar with the mechanics of operating a cooperative, but were not aggressive in promoting it. As a result, "La Merced" had only 100 members and $4,200 in capital. No new members had joined in the last six months. Most of the members were small shop, husband and wife merchants.
The other existing cooperative in Cuenca was headed by Felipe Mendosa who was tremendously proud of being the founder and president. He ran the entire show in the manner of a grand patrone, serving as president, treasurer, and chief loan approver (an illegal combination of functions). He did not delegate any authority and resented criticism from anyone. He restricted membership to his friends and boasted of his efforts to look out for their welfare, but limited their voice in the operation of the cooperative.
The third credit cooperative was made up of local carpenters, but it had failed because its political agenda dominated its loan mission. The membership did not seem to understand the specific purposes of a credit cooperative and how it was to operate (for example, the leadership would take members' savings and spend them on flyers and billboards for local elections). The carpenters' cooperative had not been officially disbanded, but only a complete recasting could save it.
After working with these cooperatives for six months, Dick Rule had made the most progress with the carpenters' group. They had accepted him as a member and had essentially turned over all operations to him. He was custodian of the funds which had grown to almost $8,000 and he restricted loans to legitimate member personal emergencies and work requirements such as the purchase of wood and tools. Dick felt deeply honored to be so trusted by the co-operative's members and he enjoyed being able to help them.
This experience was so positive that Dick concluded that more people should be involved in credit unions than just the two hundred then participating. He thought a single large cooperative for the entire city was desirable. Instead of independently improving the other two existing cooperatives, he thought it would be more sensible to merge all three into one. He hoped that this would produce a nucleus of trained personnel to manage itself and other cooperatives and a larger base of members from which to convince others that credit cooperatives could be a success.
Toward this merger objective, Dick met in turn with each of the three cooperative presidents. Listen to Dick's words describing what happened:
"I approached each of the cooperatives with my idea. Sefior Mendosa strongly rejected the plan and dismissed me saying that the other cooperatives should be dissolved, with their members joining his organization. The other two cooperatives in turn rejected Mendosa's position, but did agree to discuss consolidation of their two groups.
When the meeting was held, I explained the purpose of the merger and carefully detailed how it could be accomplished. Each cooperative would officially withdraw from the national federation and a new one would immediately be established so that there would be no loss in services to present members. With the increased membership and more capital, the new cooperative would be able to make larger loans to its members with greater regularity. All present officers would resign and a new directorship would be elected from the combined membership.
At this point, the proposal began to encounter difficulties. The president of "La Merced," Senor Caldera, did not like the idea of disbanding his cooperative because it would lose its name. He felt that the name's religious significance was extremely important and should be retained. Senor Maldonado, the president of the carpenter's union, rejected "La Merced" name because it would seem like they were capitulating to the other cooperative--and besides his members wouldn't like the conservative religious association.
When the discussion dealt with election of officials, fear was expressed that if one cooperative outnumbered the other, their directors might be completely reelected leaving the other cooperative without representation. I suggested that the president could be from one cooperative, the vice president from the other, and so on, but each wanted the first president to be drawn from its ranks. Neither existing president was willing to accept the second position in favor of the other (and in theory, we shouldn't even have been discussing such office "deals" because the law clearly requires nominations from the members).
The meeting was finally adjourned with no progress toward consolidation, but with heightened suspicion between the two groups. Later when I met with individuals in each cooperative, I could see that they did not want to discuss the matter further. Future plans were dropped and the idea died. I continued to run the carpenters' cooperative with satisfying success, but of course had to leave when my Peace Corps tour was up. Unfortunately, I was unable to replace myself with someone equally objective in decisions so the carpenters' credit cooperative reverted to its former mix of political and personal purposes to the detriment of its real mission."
Upon returning from the Peace Corps, Dick earned an MBA while majoring in operations management and decision sciences. As always, he was an outstanding student and was much courted by prospective employers. He accepted a position as senior management consultant in the corporate headquarters of Passy Chemicals, a medium-sized, multi-plant chemical company. Dick was given a modest but nice office with freedom to hang his favorite pictures and framed credentials on the walls. A memorandum went out from the senior vice president of administration to all sixteen plant managers announcing Dick's availability, "to consult on production and policy matters, especially for facilities in the Southwest and in Latin America because Dick speaks fluent Spanish and has extensive experience in the area." His bio-sketch and picture were published in the monthly company newspaper which circulated throughout the company.
After the initial flurry of introductions and meetings with plant managers, however, Dick grew quite bored. He just did not receive the telephone calls and invitations that he expected. Sometimes a day would pass without any request for his services. Given the press of moving into a new home and helping his wife with their new daughter, at first Dick was grateful for the relaxed work place. But he began to miss the action, to feel excluded from situations where he might be helpful, and even rejected by high-status executives whom he knew he could impress if given the opportunity.
Dick spoke with Scott Tatum, the firm's executive vice president, of his growing anxiety about his future at the firm. Tatum replied that things are often slow for a new staff person until line management gains confidence and trust in his or her ability and integrity. But he suggested that Dick be more active in reaching out to the field managers--and indeed, in "selling himself" to the field.
Since chemical operations were widely distributed, Dick had to travel quite a bit to develop relationships with plant managers. Sometimes he was angry about spending five hours on a plane only to discover the plant manager was "too busy" to see him or that he was "shuffled off to some local assistant" (Dick's words). At times he felt like he was being patronized.
During these plant visits (even the unpleasant ones); Dick began to notice things that he was certain he could improve, if only he could get the plant managers to listen to his ideas. But he needed good data to formulate his suggestions and in most cases he didn't know how to get them. While visiting a plant in Houston, Texas, however, Dick met Jesus Hernandez, an Ecuadorian who had immigrated to the United States. They would chat about the hard life in Ecuador. Hernandez had a position as assistant foreman in the local Passy Chemicals plant and from him Dick learned a great deal about its operations. Because Hernandez completed the production and quality reports for his shift, Dick learned what they contained and where they were filed. Hernandez would show him his shift's reports which suggested some problems to Dick, but he knew that he also needed historical records. Although refused access to the files by the plant director of administration, Dick learned where they were stored and by coming in on the evening shift when the office was usually empty, he was able to make surreptitious copies of the reports simply by removing them from an unlocked office file and photocopying them. It took him three night-time visits to copy the desired records. (On the last occasion the office door was locked, but Dick was so excited about finally having real data to work with that after only a few minutes of hesitation, he opened the simple lock with a plastic charge card.) Based on these data, he was able to propose a waste reduction program to the plant manager, but it was rejected out of hand.
Fortunately, his analysis was not entirely wasted because Dick knew that conditions were quite similar at a sister plant in Monterey, Mexico. And here he was in luck because a new plant manager, Andres Galapardo, had just been appointed. While still at headquarters, Galapardo had informally drawn on Dick's computer skills to install an office network. About a month after Galapardo's appointment, Dick spoke to him about his observations in the Houston plant and his feeling that significant improvement was possible in Monterey. After initial hesitation at rocking his plant boat so soon, Galapardo accepted the plan. Although the program only reduced waste by half of what Dick thought it could if better implemented (at one point, he almost resigned because he knew that he could do it better than the plant manager), Galapardo was pleased and praised Dick to other company executives. After fifteen months at Passy, this was his first significant success and it was replicated in other locations. Dick's reputation climbed and in time his telephone was ringing more than he had ever wanted!
Eventually Dick was appointed corporate director of production technology whose staff has full access to all of Passy's chemical plants and who indeed must be consulted by any plants proposing significant maintenance expenditures or production investments. The firm's chief executive officer is unlikely to approve any such plant request without concurrence from Dick's staff.
What Did Dick Do?
Richard Rule is clearly an ambitious, hard-working person with significant needs for esteem, power, and achievement. He wants respect for his competence and recognition for his accomplishments. All his life he believed that his brains and energy would bring him success, and for a long time he was correct.
In Ecuador, however, he experienced failure because the three cooperatives were unwilling to implement his merger solution to what he saw as their problem-too few members and too few deposits. Sr. Mendosa's refusal to even discuss the issue, Sr. Caldera's opposition to a name change, and the carpenters' rejection of association with a religious-oriented group all appeared to Rule to be irrational. A merged, single cooperative seemed to Dick to be so clearly the best alternative that he couldn't understand any rational reason for rejection. He was insensitive to the social and political purposes that most members wanted the credit cooperatives to pursue.
Later in his corporate staff position at Passy Chemicals, once again Dick faced failure, not so much from rejection as from being ignored.
Field managers just didn't draw on his abilities even though Dick was convinced he could improve production performance. After his initial period of passively waiting to be called, Dick sought counsel from the senior vice president of administration who suggested he visit field personnel so that he could sell them on his abilities. Although uncomfortable with the cavalier manner in which he was sometimes treated, (remember how he had disliked being rejected in his religious proselytising), in time Dick did gain sufficient access to the Houston plant to formulate a waste control plan. Although rejected initially in Texas, this plan was later adopted by the Mexico plant manager with success. In both Houston and Monterey, Dick was "lucky" in drawing on personal relationships that helped him get access to data and then managerial faith in him to try out his proposal. His drive to succeed led him to ethically suspect actions like surreptitious entry to plant files, secret copying, and even "picking" the door lock of the Houston plant office. These actions did not bother Dick. He justified them to himself as being in the best interests of the firm because his motivation was to reduce waste. And in the long run, he did just that.
Dick's long-time dilemma will be whether or not he will enjoy serving as a consultant. He seems inclined to want to make the decisions and implementations himself rather than being the adviser. Indeed, in his present role as corporate director of plant technology he appears to have accumulated joint authority with plant managers over issues of plant maintenance, innovation, and investment. Let's look at staff-line authority and the process of giving advice.
Staff-Line Relations
The distinction between staff and line has its origins in the military: line officers were to exercise command in battle while staff were planners or advisers. In business, a classical principle emerged that only line managers had the authority to make operational decisions; staff existed merely to give advice. As we will see, modern firms have greatly elaborated the staff role, but let's start with that traditional advisory role.
Advisory Staff: Such professional staff is specialists hired to provide expertise to operating managers who feel they could benefit from their advice. It assumed that a line manager will initiate a request to the appropriate staff person. A production supervisor having equipment trouble might call a mechanical engineer; or a department head experiencing repeated discipline problems with a particular employee would call a human resource specialist. In this communication flow, the staff possesses no legitimate power and they appear quite passive, awaiting invitations to get involved.
In spite of the impressive framed credentials which they may hang on their office walls, however, newly hired staff specialists may find themselves a bit lonely with silent telephones. Operating managers are simply not familiar with them and skeptical of what they can contribute, even if their bio-sketches have been published in the plant newsletter.
Older staff colleagues and superiors will instruct young advisers to "sell" themselves to line managers. Such selling requires frequent and vigorous overtures to line management, a reverse of the behavior usually assumed of an adviser (that is, that managers initiate, advisers respond).
Surprisingly, staff specialists spend less time responding and more time initiating than any managers.
Response time is the mean hours per week on activities that others initiate. It includes talking to other people who call or come to the specialist or manager, attending meetings scheduled by others, and reading, analyzing, and thinking about received written materials. Self-initiated time is devoted to activities that the manager or staffer initiates such as calling someone on the telephone, setting up a meeting, going to someone's office to talk, or drafting correspondence and reports on one's own initiative. Although my sample size of eleven is small, the staff specialists observed spend less time responding to others who have come to them for advice or service than any of the managerial positions. In contrast, they initiate more consultations and discussions and spend more time making proposals and initiating innovations.
Not surprisingly given the poor support services often provided staff specialists; they spend more time on clerical activities and paperwork than any of the managers sampled.
In order to have something to sell, a staff specialist must have greater familiarity with line's problems and possibilities than he or she would derive from passively waiting to be called. But to gather data necessary to frame proposals, staff must gain entry to operating departments. Unfortunately for the staff, right of access cannot be assumed. For legitimate security or paranoic defensiveness, operating managers may sharply limit physical access. When I worked as an industrial engineer at Eastman Kodak, I literally had to show my identity card through a peephole in the door because Kodak depends more on secrecy to protect its technological advantages than on public patents. Therefore, controlled personnel access was important.
Most staff advisers will not have such dramatic limitations on physical entry, but substantial exclusion from an operating department's data files is common. Departmental personnel may simply not trust the staff specialist, perhaps even seeing him or her as a spy from headquarters.
Thus, the best-intentioned advisory staffers are caught in a dilemma. They can't wait to be called; they must sell themselves and their ideas. To do this they must have new knowledge or proposals to sell, but to develop these proposals they need access to data. Several tactics are used to gain sufficient trust, information, and power.
Becoming familiar: In uncovering problems, there is no substitute for immersion. The would-be adviser can just "hang around" socializing, trying to make friends by doing favors and odd jobs when possible. In time, he or she hopes to become so familiar that defenses drop and problems become visible so he or she can analyze and propose solutions. This tactic demands that the aspiring adviser invest time and maintain patience-resources often in short supply for an ambitious, achievement- oriented person.
Investing sufficient time to gain access and trust may be especially difficult if the adviser is expected to maximize "billable" hours, that is, to justify his or her time by charging them to an existing account or project. Some companies charge line managers for advisory staff services. The intent is threefold: (a) to put pressure on staff to justify themselves by proving their worth to internal clients; (2) to counter operating managers' perceptions that "free" staff can't be valuable; and (c) to pressure management to work more effectively with staff since it is charged to the operating budget.
Such charges can be helpful, but they do hinder the development of a new relationship if staff personnel don't have someplace to charge risky developmental hours. Most staff time accounting forms do have an unassigned line for project development, but informal norms usually warn a staffer not to charge too many hours to this code. To do so would be an admission that you are not in demand!
Hiding the hours: To create time for new project development, staff sometimes hides the time in existing large projects. Thus, the hours for one project can be padded with extra hours that are invested in investigating opportunities with another client. Since both "clients" are managers in the same corporation as the ambitious adviser, this practice is easy to justify because no one is really being cheated; it is all in the firm's overall interests, or so it is rationalized.
Although this subterfuge is clearly not as serious as an external consultant overbilling one client to invest in another (and certainly less unethical than overcharging one fat client like the Department of Defense in order to give a more competitive price to another), internal billing manipulation is lying and it can distort internal cost data important to management pricing and investment decisions. Nonetheless, the pressure on staff specialists to find time to develop new proposals is substantial.
"Stealing" data: To speed up proposal development, a staff specialist often is tempted to obtain data surreptitiously, perhaps by copying office files without permission. Such files are frequently not locked and access is a matter of sweet-talking a clerk into making the copies or the specialist hanging around until late in the evening and making copies after everyone has left. Again, such behavior is easy for the staffer to justify as being for the operating department's own good, even if they don't know what's best for themselves.
The most problematic situation is when the desired files are locked or protected by a computer security code. Very seldom will any staff superior direct you to break into the files. But (and this is a big but), successfully doing so without detection and selling a new project based on the data will be praised. And the staff department grapevine may even build up the offender's reputation so that he or she is perceived as a person "who gets things done" (perhaps the supreme accolade).
Again, rationalization is easy based on public glorification of those who are "creative" in gaining information for the greater public good (as with investigative reporters and secret government information a la President Nixon and All the President's Men). If you are caught in the process, however, it is very doubtful that any of your staff superiors will rush to your defense. I must admit that one of my breakthrough projects when I worked in industry grew out of data I was able to copy when the plant manager's office was empty on the midnight shift (thankfully for my conscience, the door and files were unlocked).
Conflict between Generalists and Specialists: Given this cold war climate, some line managers may (rightly) fear that staff specialists will infringe on their jobs and diminish their power and status. The structural evolution of many organizations suggests expansion of staff influence, often at the expense of line authority and autonomy. Two of the most time-honored management principles are disappearing: (1) unity of command (one should have one and only one immediate superior) and (2) authority should equal responsibility. Unfortunately, growth in organizational complexity with its accompanying specialization has made it virtually impossible to adhere to these old principles. The aeronautical engineering group leader responsible for developing an airframe is dependent upon access to a wind tunnel controlled by a testing manager over whom the group leader has no authority. It would be much too expensive for the group leader to have a separate tunnel, nor does he have the necessary expertise to operate it. Similarly, a production manager is responsible for her department's productivity, but she is dependent upon planning specialists, industrial engineering, and human resource specialists over whom she has no authority. Although the manager presumably receives no orders from these staff people, she does receive "suggestions," "proposals," and sometimes even "schedules" and "procedures." Under these conditions, conflict is not rare.
For line managers, the proliferation of staff advisers and specialists means that they no longer have complete control over their own operations. They personally may not have the knowledge necessary to manage their departments, so a gap between knowledge and authority develops. Generalists come to depend on specialists who appear to be lower on the hierarchy. As a result, over time their relationships become more stable. Line managers may possess the formal authority to make decisions, but if all they can do is sign the proposals submitted by staff specialists, who is really in control? One of the special burdens of Lyndon B. Johnson's presidency (and indeed any presidency) is that he felt himself inadequate to judge who was correct among his various military advisers on Vietnam.8 Some told him to put up an electronic wall between North and South Vietnam; others to retreat into fortified enclaves turning the rest of the country over to the Vietcong. He had the power to decide, but lacked the knowledge to judge which of many contradictory proposals was most valid. According to his brother Sam Houston Johnson, the president sometimes complained that his Texas state college education had not prepared him to judge between ideas from his Harvard and MIT advisers. But of course, he was not "dumber" than these advisers. His expertise lay in domestic politics and social reform, not military and foreign affairs.
Line-staff tensions can be exacerbated by age and social differences. The younger, more educated and better dressed staff may be distrusted by older production managers who came up via what they perceive as a harder route. To make matters worse, the ambitious specialist sometimes betrays condescension toward the generalist whom he or she sees as less able and less promotable. The younger college graduate specialist understandably relies on what he or she knows best-academic knowledge. The specialist is at least somewhat familiar with statistics, computers, psychology, and economics (and they can be very valuable).
Unfortunately, these theories can also hinder working relationships with older managers. Armed with an arsenal of analytical techniques, the graduate looks for problems to which they can be applied.
Unfortunately, the problems solved in the textbooks are sometimes not the problems important to the manager. Worse, talking to older executives in the arcane vocabulary of stochastic variables, multiple-channel processing, breakeven points, and self-actualizing opportunities can be threatening to them. Older personnel to whom such terms are unfamiliar may believe they are being manipulated.
In some cultures, older persons are automatically respected for age and assumed wisdom, but in the United States the young often respond to older people's skepticism with thinly veiled contempt. Because an older manager does not know the new techniques, the young specialist erroneously infers that he or she is incompetent or unimportant. This can be a career-crippling mistake, because organizational contribution and influence at higher levels have little to do with technical knowledge. An offended elder can oppose the brilliant younger staffer's advancement.
Of course, some staffers are only putting on an act, attempting to appear more confident and influential than they really are. To support this image, they try to appear infallible, which backfires into undermining communications with possible clients. Insecurity about their status and contributions leads many specialists to feel greater anxiety than operating managers. In general, staff professionals get fewer jobs
satisfaction and more conformity pressure than do operating line managers at the same hierarchical level. The greater ease of objectively measuring the line manager's value to the firm gives them somewhat greater independence than staffers whose performance evaluation is more subjective- and who then worry more about whether they are fitting in with the correct appearance and behavior.
Finally, staff and line sometimes perceive time and change differently. The staff specialist is often anxious to establish his or her reputation by persuading an operating manager to make changes. But the manager may not feel there is a problem and besides he or she would prefer to keep things as they are. "If it isn't broke, don't fix it" is a practical person's aphorism. Of course, in the long run it is dangerously misguided by promoting stagnation. Nonetheless, organizational stability is a virtue and it is understandable that a busy manager would prefer to maintain stability. With uninvited change proposals, the ambitious staffer can be seen as a threat. The staff "adviser" often sees problems needing correction when the managing generalist sees none or different problems.
Why Staff Advice Is Often Poor. Even under the best conditions of trusting access, operating managers often deem staff advice as unsatisfactory. Line management feels that it can't use staff's advice, or the specialists complain that the managers don't know what they want. Each side has a different explanation.
1. Line manager's view: "Staff is so eager to sell a project that they make unrealistic promises. Their results are much more modest- and disappointing to me."
* "Staff proposals are sometimes theoretically correct and I'm sure would have gotten them as from their business school professors, but their answers don't apply to my practical problems."
* "Staff people tend to be overspecialized. They look at the world through their own particular telescopes. Their perspectives are too narrow and their recommendations not integrated. I must consider, however, how implementing their recommendations would affect the total performance of my organization."
2. Staff adviser's view: "Line managers blame us when projects don't work out. But they create many of the failures themselves. For ex ample, a manager will sometimes toss a problem to me and expect an 'answer' without his involvement. If 1 try to get him to spend time with me analyzing the issues, he complains that he called me in to do that. In short, he tries to delegate the responsibility for the project to me without giving me either the authority to do it or his personal support."
* "Line managers often want improvement in their unit's performance without any change in their own behavior. They want me to change other's behavior and performance while their behavior remains unchanged."
* "Sometimes a line manager will tell me to give priority to a project. So 1 charge off and invest a lot of time in it. When I come back with recommendations, however, the line manager has lost interest. His priorities have changed, but I was never informed."
Given the differing perspectives of staff specialists and operating managers, to be an effective adviser requires substantial political competence as well as expertise.
Giving Staff More Authority. Top management may discover that hiring specialists and providing them with nice offices does not guarantee that line managers will utilize their services. Therefore, the top executives may strive to strengthen staff's position by mandating right of entry, compulsory consultation, concurrent authority, or functional authority.
To ensure that staff can obtain data necessary to analyze conditions in operating departments and prepare recommendations, senior management can inform line managers that the relevant staff personnel must be granted access to departmental data. Implied is that if staff specialists complain about lack of cooperation from operating managers, top management will side with staff. Such a hierarchical directive does of course greatly facilitate staff access to desired data, but it doesn't automatically guarantee a trusting line-staff relationship. Operating managers may resent staff's intrusion and perceive a control link back to the top where none was intended. However, in many cases of right of entry, the top does intend such a monitoring role. In general, mandated right of access will in the short run improve opportunities for staff specialists, but in the long run it probably hinders those advisers who would be most effective in developing valuable client relationships.
An even stronger form of right of access is compulsory consultation. To ensure that operating line managers consult the relevant staff on specific matters, top management may refuse to discuss lower line proposals unless staff has been involved. Thus, a senior vice president may refuse to discuss a manufacturing department head's request to replace manufacturing equipment until the department manager has discussed this with a staff consultant in engineering. Perhaps the firm's president insists on this to ensure that the engineering specialists have the opportunity to influence manufacturing methods and prevent unproductive duplication or dead-end projects. In this situation, the staff specialist's potential influence has been sharply increased, but the consultant-client relationship is even more strained. The operating manager who "consults" the staff adviser may feel that he or she is doing so under duress with little receptivity to the advice (which indeed, the manager may interpret as a veiled directive).
Even more extreme, top management may give staff concurrent authority so that operating managers must obtain staff agreement with their major proposals. In effect, this gives a staff specialist veto power over a line manager if the staffer disagrees with the proposal. For example, a company president might require manufacturing to obtain the concurrence of the industrial engineering department before scheduling employee overtime. Top management hopes that such divided responsibility would reduce poor planning and excessive labor expense.
Concurrent authority is common in government, primarily to limit individual corruption, but it can be helpful in keeping interdependent persons informed of what others are going. The built-in checks can prevent mistakes by ensuring that every relevant specialist has an opportunity to block potential errors. Unfortunately, in blocking mistakes a system of multiple concurrences can lead to over conservatism and rejection of promising innovation. Multiplying the number of people who can say "no" has the effect of reducing both errors and creative breakthroughs.
In terms of staff-line relations, requiring line to gain staff's agreement absolutely reverses the traditional pattern: Now the line manager has to sell his or her idea to the staff specialist! To be sure, the manager and staffer who get along well can transcend the quasi-authority staff position and maintain relations as adviser-client, but this is rare.
An organization can go so far in support of specialists that the distinction between line and staff is dissolved by functional authority. Each functional unit is assigned authority to initiate, veto, and control policies and procedures in its area of expertise. Thus, the personnel vice president may be responsible for all employment and training; the engineering vice president for all product design; the director of industrial engineering for production methods and incentive standards; and the financial vice president for all cost control and accounting procedures. Each is supreme in an area as long as top management supports and validates the vice president's decisions.
Functional authority ideally ensures that persons with expertise have authority in their areas, independent of traditional boundaries between staff and line. Nonetheless, real problems remain. Each function tends to see its responsibility as most important when in fact they are all dependent on one another. Coordination becomes difficult. Undermined is the principle of unity of command, especially for lower line managers. So many functional authorities can influence operating activities that a manager can receive contradictory directives from different specialists. As one refugee from Harold Geneen's ITT once put it, "ITT is the only firm where if a line manager and staff specialist get into a fight, the line manager is the one fired."
Who are Effective Staff Advisers?
Not every bright, analytically competent person is suited to giving advice, especially as a long-time career role. Indeed, the very attributes of high-achievement need and personal ambition that impelled them to academic accomplishment and credentials necessary to gain a staff position can work against being an effective adviser. Thus, the classic personality profile associated with effective senior managers is high need for achievement, high need for power, and low need for affiliation. Such people are motivated to define challenging objectives, enjoy influencing subordinates and associates to accomplish them, and are not dependent on whether they are liked by the people involved. This kind of person is often unhappy as a staff adviser, however, because he or she is impatient with less quick or less hardworking line managers. Therefore, they tend to push the line too hard, perhaps even striving to assume implementation power. Listen to the lament of one experienced consultant:
Most consultants I know would secretly like, just for once, for the tables to be reversed-for the consultant to hold the power in the relationship and to dictate to the client what resources will be available, how the change process will occur, and what the client's role in the process will be.
A passive operating manager may give way, but more likely an overly aggressive staffer will simply be rejected. And even if such an achievement/power-oriented adviser masks impatience with the line manager, he or she will eventually become frustrated by an inability to actually direct others in implementing proposals.
Excessively passive staff specialists are also ineffective. If need for achievement and power are too low, high-affiliation need may motivate a potential adviser to be too submissive to line management's desires. Mot being involved in meaningful projects might not bother such staffers sufficiently for them to exercise the data gathering and selling initiative necessary to gain sufficient access.
Effective advisers in personality are someplace between hyper-achievement/power and hyper-affiliation. They have significant but balanced needs for achievement, power, and affiliation. They have outgoing personalities responsive to others' needs, enjoy talking to people and derive satisfaction from solving challenging problems, but are happy to be a contributor to the solution and privy to the decision rather than the sole decider. And they seem to take special satisfaction in assisting high-status authority figures. Successful external management consultants often have demonstrated a lifelong pattern of moving from modest socioeconomic backgrounds and seeking association with prestigious people and institutions, including private colleges and service as officers in the United States Navy. I once invited a friend of mine who was senior partner in a blue-chip management consulting firm to visit with my MBA class. He spent the first fifteen minutes boasting to the class about the famous government and business leaders with whom he had met in the past month. This association seemed more important even than the conversations' substance or the quality of solutions suggested. He was proud of himself and felt that nothing else would so establish his credibility with the students than his access to managerial celebrities. But of course it is not really that superficial. The quality of his recommendations had to be high to maintain his access, but one wondered what means were and what ends were.
Most long-time adviser-consultants are a bit more ambivalent on this issue of prestigious association. On the one hand, they enjoy it and measure their own career success by who telephones them and who accepts their calls and acts on their advice. On the other hand, they don't want to perceive themselves as sycophants toadying to the powerful so they incessantly complain in private (especially to other consultants) about the intellectual and managerial inadequacies of their famous clients (to an outsider, the stories can sound truly amazing).
Will Dick Rule be Happy as an Adviser?
Richard Rule's career has elements similar to those of successful and effective advisers, but in general he appears more power oriented. All his life he has striven to be outstanding and to be recognized by prestigious authority figures for his accomplishments. In high school and college, he wanted to be privy to principal and presidential decisions through his involvement in student government. Serving in the Peace Corps in Ecuador, he certainly wanted to help. But even more he wanted the cooperative members and leaders to implement his solution to their problems, whether or not they agreed with his definition of their problems. Whether it was cultural imperialism or personal ambition, Dick was insensitive to local conditions; he just assumed that bigger and more centralized was better. If necessary, as in the case of the carpenter's credit cooperative, he assumed complete leadership. Although successful in the short run, such an approach doesn't prepare the "client" to gain independence from the "adviser." Upon his departure, things were not better (and perhaps worse) for his having been there.
Dick's laudable ambition was continued at Passy Chemicals where he became impatient with noninvolvement and passivity. He exercised initiative in gathering data and developing a waste-reducing proposal. One could decry his too easy ethics in surreptitiously obtaining his data, but he sincerely was interested in helping the company while building his own record of success. But even here he fought his frustration that the plan wasn't implemented as well as he thought he could have if he were in charge.
By the end of the case, Dick has convinced top management to expand his authority by giving him virtual veto power over operating management's production technology decisions. The line must consult his staff in order to proceed. In a sense then, he is really no longer an adviser who must sell his ideas and repeatedly prove his credibility. Dick has almost obtained total functional authority. He has escaped from being a staff adviser.
Advice on Giving Advice
Begin each assignment only when a line manager is ready. Don't "sell" so hard that the manager gives you a go-ahead only to get you off his or her back. Remember that your first task is to help the manager become aware of blocks to the unit's effectiveness of which he or she may be unaware. If you fail to develop this awareness, your advice is not likely to be accepted.
Build on success. Key is to have the manager-client develop rational faith in your knowledge and in your commitment to his or her interest. Therefore, no project is too small to complete well so long as the manager considers it worthwhile.
Don't do the whole job for management. You should share your knowledge with operating people so as to educate them, not replace them. As an adviser, you should insist that line management share control of the project by assigning a liaison person to work closely with you. Your responsibility is not so much to supply line with answers as to help them develop their own solutions. And implementation is likely to be more effective if line management feels that the recommendations represent its own best thinking, not yours. Try to submerge your own needs into the operating manager's goals. Acting on your achievement and power drives can undermine your effectiveness because you may push too hard to run your client's affairs.
Don't over-identify with line management. Maintain some distance. On the one hand, you should not overly identify with line management because this will cause you to lose objectivity. On the other hand, you should not be seen as a spy from headquarters. Resist the temptation to acquire more power by having top management give you concurrent or functional authority. Resist being treated as an "expert." Communicate honestly; tell the operating manager what higher management expects of you. Admit what you don't know, and don't tell the manager what he or she wants to hear if you believe his or her problem diagnosis to be incorrect.
- Remember that a major responsibility is to help the operating manager develop better diagnostic skills so that he or she becomes less dependent on you. A paradox seems to exist: You promote your success as a personal adviser by working to eliminate your own job through helping your client to become more self-sufficient.
- Recognize that older operating line managers may be less knowledgeable than you are regarding sophisticated analytical techniques, but this doesn't indicate that they are less intelligent or always resistant to change. Rather, your proposals must be expressed in their terms.
- Recognize your bias to perceive and define problems that can be treated with your analytical tools. As sophisticated as they may well be, these academic tools may not directly apply to the problems that line management is confronting.
