Choice Theory (40 page)

It takes time to prepare students for these tests (though not much), but it is time well spent. I think teachers could devote half the fourth grade to this endeavor because schools are so heavily judged by their fourth-grade students’ performance on these tests. The fourth graders would learn a lot by spending time on these tests and really learning why the answers are correct. Don’t think that the time is wasted. These tests are devised by experts; what they ask is worth knowing, and using this procedure gets results. It is not cheating; the tests are there to be used in any way you want. Besides knowing the material, there is a skill to taking tests that can be learned only with practice. For example, studies have shown that reading the answer choices before reading the question substantially increases the scores. Teachers could check that research out in their classes as a game. Whatever you do, don’t give the students the real test cold. That’s unfair.

The Huntington Woods School gets good scores on the Michigan state tests—at the eighty-fifth percentile or higher—without what I am advising here. That is a tribute to the teachers’ competence in teaching. But I still think that for most schools, a little practice is in order. If schools are not teaching for competence and quality, I advise a lot of practice. Look at all the practice that goes into taking the SAT or the ACT and the money it makes for test-preparation companies. Preparation must pay off, or these companies would not be in business.

What I have suggested about quality schools is my ideal. In actual practice, some schools that are trying to become quality schools will not slavishly follow my suggestions. The kind of people who are involved in quality schools are creative thinkers and implementers. The teachers at Huntington Woods know what they are doing and have added to many of my ideas and gone much further than if they depended more on me. But what is behind
everything they do is choice theory. Good relationships are the key. Beyond that, schools are limited only by their own experience and creativity.

At a minimum, there are six criteria for a quality school:

1. All disciplinary problems, not incidents, will be eliminated in two years. A significant drop should occur in year one.

2. At the time the school becomes a quality school, achievement scores on state assessment tests should be improved over what was achieved in the past.

3. TLC means that all grades below competence, or what is now a B, will be eliminated. Students will have to demonstrate competence to their teachers or to designated teacher’s assistants to get credit for the grades or courses. All schooling will be eliminated and replaced by useful education.

4. All students will do some quality work each year—that is, work that is significantly beyond competence. All such work will receive an A or higher grade. This criterion will give hardworking students a chance to show that they can excel.

5. All staff and students will be taught to use choice theory in their lives and in their work in school. Parents will be encouraged to participate in study groups to become familiar with choice theory. A few of these groups will be led by teachers to start, but parent volunteers will be asked to take the groups over once they get started.

6. It will be obvious by the end of the first year that this is a joyful school.

I
N 1942, WHEN
my late wife was sixteen years old, she worked part time in the office of a large paint factory. The owner, a wealthy man in his eighties, enjoyed bringing her into his office to tell her stories about how cleverly he had run the factory. His favorite story started in 1932 during the height of the Great Depression. At that time his office staff, about forty people, was managed by a woman who had been with him for years. One day he told the manager he wanted her to start work at eight instead of the usual eight thirty and would pay her for the extra half hour. But she was not to tell anyone she was being paid for the extra time.

In 1932, jobs were scarce; there were ten people ready to step in immediately if there was an opening. Six days a week—they regularly worked Saturday morning—forty employees saw the
manager hard at work when they came in. A few came earlier and then a few more. They were afraid to say anything to her, and of course she said nothing. Fearing for their jobs, they began to come in earlier and earlier until, in a few months, they were all coming in at eight and going right to work. When he told my wife the story, the old man laughed and slapped his leg saying, “A half hour free work, twenty hours a day, six days a week out of forty people for nine years.” Then the war started, jobs were plentiful, and the scam was over.

The power of bosses like that old man has now been curtailed somewhat by better times, but boss management, my designation for external control psychology in the workplace, is still very much the norm. Although many school administrators boss teachers and do untold harm to education, they have nowhere near the power that most private-sector bosses have to send the message: I am someone to fear. But if high-quality work is what the manager is trying to achieve, fear is the worst strategy. The core idea of the leader of the world’s move to quality, W. Edwards Deming, is
Drive out fear.

For most of us, work is the defining component of our lives. What do you do? is often the first question asked when you meet someone. If you are doing very little, this is a painful question. Unhappiness, not so much with the job itself, but with the person you work for or the people you work with, is a leading cause of low-quality work.

Just as a test, when I began to write this chapter, I looked in the newspaper for an example of this unhappiness, and there it was. A man, thinking he was being taunted and ridiculed at work, killed two fellow workers and wounded three others. Two days later, I couldn’t miss a front-page story about low-level managers being asked to work overtime, up to forty hours a week, or be fired. The old man at the paint company is not as out of date as I thought. Being treated well at work by both supervisors and each
other is in all our quality worlds. When a worker, at any level, is discontented, low-quality work is the result.

Although a top manager who bosses sets the norm for the whole organization, in today’s managerial climate blatant bossing does not usually occur at the top. But because it is still a fixture in most workers’ minds, it pervades the whole organization unless the top manager has taken some obvious steps toward lead management. Even if these steps have been taken, it takes several years for this fact to register in the minds of lower-level managers who have known nothing but bossing. The longer a lower-level manager has been exposed to bossing, the more he or she uses it, no matter what is occurring at the top. In practice, this means that the lowest-level managers tend to use bossing the most and are the hardest to reach when an organization is trying to change to leading. In a small company of one manager and two workers, even the senior worker tends to boss the other.

The specific harm of boss management is that it prevents anyone who is bossed, which means most managers and almost all workers, from putting the people above them into their quality worlds. But it goes further than this, creating a dog-eat-dog climate in which trust is the dog that always gets eaten. Low quality and high cost are the prices we pay for all this unnecessary distrust and fear. If we are to have any chance of ridding the world of work from the depredations of boss management, the people at the top need to become aware of its effects and then take active steps to replace it with lead management based on choice theory. As they do, they have to be prepared for a struggle. Lower-level bosses like to boss, and workers don’t mind it too much because it gives them the excuse to play the ancient workplace game: do as little as you can get away with and blame the boss for the low quality of the work.

Boss management is not complicated. Reduced to its essentials, it contains four elements:

1. At all levels, the boss sets the task and the standards for how well the work is to be done and rarely consults workers in this process. The boss does not compromise; the workers have to
adjust to their jobs as the boss defines them or suffer the consequences, including losing their jobs when there is no union or contractual protection against this power. The boss fights long and hard for the right to boss without interference. The more he or she bosses, however, the lower the quality of the work.

2. The boss usually tells, rather than shows, the workers how the job is to be done and rarely asks for their input as to how the job could be done better.

3. The boss, or someone the boss designates, inspects the work. Because the workers are not involved in this evaluation, most do only enough to get by and inspectors are continually under pressure to pass low-quality work. This is a deadly quality-destroying combination. Furthermore, in a boss-driven environment, workers who do more than they have to are ostracized by their coworkers. Since the work itself is never in the workers’ quality worlds, the idea of doing quality work rarely crosses their minds. They laugh at the slogans about quality that are a fixture of many modern boss-managed workplaces.

4. When the workers resist the boss, as they almost always do in a variety of ways that compromise quality, the boss uses threats and punishment to try to make them do what he or she wants. In so doing, the boss creates a workplace in which, from top to bottom, the managers and workers are adversaries and fear rules. The boss thinks this adversarial relationship is the way things should be; cooperation with workers is a subversive idea.

In this present era of high employment, it may seem as if I am making too much of an issue of how people are managed. There are plenty of jobs, and the country is prosperous. The major factors that have led to this prosperity are low inflation, stable prices, workers who are not demanding more than small wage increases, and technology that has led to increased productivity at the same or lower cost. Competition has also kept prices and wages in check, and the Federal Reserve Board seems able to adjust interest rates to keep inflationary pressures low. There doesn’t
seem to be any popular demand for greatly lower taxes and no wars are in sight, both of which tend to restrain interest rates and keep a lid on inflation. All this has been coupled with a slow but steady deflationary decrease in the deficit.

What we have done, and no one seems sure of how we have accomplished it, is to achieve a good balance of all the factors needed for prosperity. But this balance is delicate. It depends on restraining something that has never in human history been restrained very long, something endemic to business and politics that has destroyed prosperity in every modern society the world has ever known:
human greed.

There are plenty of greedy people who, thinking only of themselves, do not even try to understand how fragile prosperity is. Some are demanding lower taxes, others higher wages. Some say there should be more military spending, others less. A popular rallying cry is cut big government, while others say there is a limit, that we must maintain a safety net. If any single group gets as much as it wants, the fragile balance we seem to have fallen into may be destroyed. History will repeat itself: The stock market will falter, and prosperity will be threatened.

The Federal Reserve Board can regulate interest rates, but it can’t regulate the potential for greed that is written into our genes. Coupling a variation of the third false belief of external control psychology—It is right for me to have much more than others—with the genetic need for power,
greedy people picture themselves in their quality worlds as deserving a lot more than other people.
Historically, the prosperity pictures in the quality worlds of powerful people have never been successfully frustrated.

If these pictures raise their ugly heads too high, the present years of low inflation and high employment will come to a screeching halt. We will then have to repeat the painful process of getting all the prosperity factors back into balance. It took almost twenty years and a war to do so the last time, and the stock market is rolling along with as much or more power as in 1929.

In defense of what seems to be their greed, the people who want a lot for themselves use the
I deserve it
argument and claim
it is their skills that keep their companies competitive. Without these skills, there would be much less job security for their employees than there is now. I can’t fault this argument; look at all the jobs and wealth Bill Gates has created. Who can say that Gates does not deserve the billions he’s made for what he has done? Unfortunately, the main cause of greed has little to do with what anyone deserves. It is the product of the intense need for power in the genes of greedy, successful people. These people, like all of us, are driven by what they feel, and the stronger the need, the better it feels to satisfy it, no matter what others may suffer.

Within reason, taxing seems to be a way to limit greed that most Americans, the greedy are an exception, have accepted. Our rate of tax compliance is among the highest in the world, strong evidence that we are not a greedy people. But it is also well known that the greedy in all societies throughout history have been creative in evading taxes, so taxation has never been as successful a balancing factor as it might be. Political systems with no free elections work badly because there is no way to restrain greed without the ability to pick who governs.

As much as our American system is criticized, we may be among the least greedy people with wealth and power the world has ever known. Europe did not ask for the Marshall Plan after World War II. General George Marshall, a man who seemed to have no greed at all, offered it, and the American people supported it. This leads to the question I would like to try to answer:
Will we always have so many greedy people that there is no way to ensure much longer periods of prosperity than we have had?