What Kind of Furniture was in Sitting Bull's Office?

Too many managers act as if they and their workers aren't the same species. They employ expensive consultants (hey, that's us!) to tell them how to motivate their employees - praise, support, involvement, autonomy. What makes them think that the people who work for them are so different from themselves?

In the book, The Genius of Sitting Bull, the authors point to one of Sitting Bull's strengths as a leader, that he lived among his people. He knew exactly how ready his troops were to attack. He ate what they ate, slept where they slept. Living among them, he also had the same information they had. Custer, apart from his men and disdaining to listen to information from scouts was fatally uninformed.

Today, I walked through a building where the managers all have offices while their workers are in cubicles, some of them no more than a desk with a few inches of "wall" on each side. The managers have nice oak or cherry furniture while their workers have prison-grey steel desks and bookcases. I am sure this saved the organization a lot of money. Everyone is expected to work exactly eight hours a day and the lowest level employees are even required to ask their supervisors if they want to use the restroom. I asked someone, who was a very competent worker who had been there for years, to help me. As we passed his boss, he stopped briefly to explain why he was away from his desk helping me, a client !

In the tribal managers course, Dr. Longie quotes management researchers who stress the importance of "autonomy, support, recognition" in motivating employees. The managers I walked past today would argue they do all of those things. In fact, the very employee who was helping me had a certificate in his cubicle recognizing him as a "team player" or something.

As my children would say - I call bull shit on you.

Honestly, if you are a manager, you have designer furniture in your office while your staff are working with no privacy and you give them a ten-cent piece of paper you printed out on your printer as "recognition" and email them "atta-boy" three times a month - are you any different than Custer who referred to his men as "cattle"?

If you are a manager, take this quick quiz:
1. Name three people who work for you.
2. Now name three people who work for THEM who are doing a good job.
3. For each of those people list what is important to that person. What does he or she really like about the job? What does that person dislike the most?

I know a person who is head of an organization of about 300 people and very proud of the fact that he knows the name of every person working for him. What the hell difference does that make? This same person doesn't have a clue about the problems his employees face because he seldom leaves his office unless it is to meet with others at "his level", accompanied by one or two of his favorite employees who are constantly gushing about his brilliance and hands on approach. As you might guess, he has a very big, very nice office.

If you have an open door policy, how many people who are two or more levels below you in the organization ever actually walked through your door, sat down and talked to you about anything? Why not?