Give them a common cause to endorse.

THE NEED FOR A COMMON, NOBLE CAUSE

People need a common, noble cause for organizational fulfillment, not a narrow business plan (1) ... however perfectly financial and technical it may be. It's not plans that stimulate the imagination, but the vision of things, which situates the organization's common cause in nobility of idea and heart. People don't think in numbers (backward) but in projects (forward). They don't rely on a quantity of facts (mechanistic thinking) but on a quality of being (organic thinking). They don't look for an effect (consequence), but a cause (condition) to their commitment to active living. They don't want to be controlled (constrained) but encouraged (motivated) (2).

NO EXPECTATIONS, NO HEART, NO SOUL, NO EMOTION, NO INTELLIGENCE

Too often, managers imagine that the organization can be understood as a machine, “with neither heart nor soul, and even less emotion or intelligence of its own” (3). They sound like a financial market (in ringing money), instead of thinking like a leader of men (in stimulating projects). Yet the organization they manage serves a socially useful purpose (customer satisfaction), even if it produces economic activity (shareholder satisfaction). And it is the exercise of the ways and means of the task (staff satisfaction), which ensures the meeting of these same two prescriptions (mission satisfaction). All of this takes place in a market environment (vision satisfaction), with goods and services that meet the needs and expectations shared by both suppliers (values satisfaction) and customers (value satisfaction).

VALUE IS NOT RESTRICTED TO THE PRIVILEGED FEW

Organizations are only as good as the men and women who build them (entrepreneurs), manage them (leaders), and animate them (players) (4). The life of organizations is not restricted to the privileged few who control their destinies but is open to all those who take part in the activity, personalize it, energize it, and make it profitable. Nothing happens within them without the task mandates, from which the offer to customers is derived, being fulfilled, enabling such organizations to launch and then maintain themselves in business. Operating profit, which induces a capacity for renewal in business (5), following the investments initially made to launch the activity, is never the fruit of a single player, however high up in the organization's job hierarchy. There is no organization, in the sense of a system, where only one player is involved. And the economic efficiency of productive organizations is not linked above all to the “control of people and actions”, by superiors in need of constant surveillance of others. It has the scope of the commitment of the players, in the phase of successful activity, within them. This (commitment) can be explained by the motivation inspired by the business management modes, methods, and practices selected, approved, and applied by the takers to the activity of these same organizations.

THE WILL TO COMMIT SPREAD THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE ORGANIZATION

What employees need most is inspiration powerful enough to want to achieve the organization's mandates, with the bonus of the promise of self-fulfillment in the process. It's not strategic planning that drives employee commitment at work, but the vision that justifies the organization's mission. We're talking here about the orientation of action within the organization, at the level of the direct stakeholders in its activity - its front-line staff. We're talking about a general approach here, not numerical objectives, even though these should be in line with the sharing values to which the organization subscribes. The result of this approach will be a greater sense of commitment, throughout the entire task, within the organization. Everyone will see this as a source of success, in the use of resources required for the expected production of top-quality goods and services. Motivation at work, which will enable this quality to be achieved, has never been a matter of exhortation on the part of managers, but a matter of intimate conviction on the part of those immediately involved in the organization's activity. An organization that instills distrust throughout its workforce, through the “tight controls” it institutes, imposes, and maintains, ends up completely undermining the motivation of those it would like to harness to the successful execution of its work mandates.

PEOPLE MOTIVATE THEMSELVES, BASED ON THE ORGANIZATION'S IDEALS

People need intelligence in organizational governance, rather than “control over their actions” at work. They can take responsibility for themselves, without being infantilized by being held accountable in their way. While business plans can serve as a timetable for the task at hand, they cannot be expected to be instruments of commitment at work. The people motivate themselves, based on the ideals conveyed by the organization and reinforced by a healthy work climate. This is verified and validated through the modes, methods, and practices of interrelationship management, throughout the organization's employment regime. The organization's capacities, potentialities, and opportunities are enhanced, in terms of efficiency, because the commitment of its stakeholders to its activity is strengthened. So, it's not so much the quality of governance assumed by management that brings the organization into tune, but rather the consensual action of stakeholders in the organization's activities. There must be a certain resonance, through commitment to the task, between culture and management... so that all the stakeholders in the organization's activity can maintain the hope of optimizing its operations. The common and noble cause of harmony in the behavior of all parties finds confirmation in an equitable quid pro quo relationship, where personnel (culture) and executives (management) rally their efforts to satisfy the organization's purpose.

THE ORGANIZATION MUST MAKE COMMON CAUSE

Making common cause is a plan, and a hell of a lot more useful than an accounting grid of business prospects! Investors, bankers, and venture capitalists don't invest so much in the business plans submitted to them... as they do in the people behind the projects (entrepreneurs are more important than their projects themselves since their projects depend on them to come to fruition) (6). Those who don't know how to surround themselves with winning staff (7) - staff who are properly stimulated, because they are treated with intelligence, trust, and respect - are cheated in advance, no matter what project they put forward. And no one can surround themselves with real winners unless they are open to the frank and ongoing contribution of others (8). A contribution that can only succeed if there is manifest openness to others (9). And openness to others is not a matter of degree (deficiency), but of fullness (abundance).

“CONTROL” HINDERS RATHER THAN ANIMATES

Control never engenders commitment to the complete, sustained, and voluntary contribution, but concealed, continuous, and calculated contravention of controlled things (10). Coordinating resources is a hundred times more likely to produce positive results than all the mechanisms for “controlling people and actions” in the workplace. When transparency exists (11), trust is confirmed, and the commitment to surpassing oneself is not long in coming. But all this has never been contained, expressed, and validated by the business plan. It is experienced, consolidated, and enriched, while carrying out the work assigned, by business management modes, methods, and practices firmly founded on the quality of interrelations between management and staff. A culture of control and a climate of mistrust, through the interposition of opaque governance, centralized decision-making power, the imposition of variable-geometry accountability and the exclusion of any recognition of individual contributions to the organization's results, cannot achieve this.

BUILDING A SELF-FULFILLMENT ORGANIZATION

Organizations centered on the prerogatives of management, as well as the orders and controls of supervision, are spaces that extinguish self-fulfillment. Yet workspace and time should be a springboard to market excellence, through the firm commitment they engender in everyone in the organization. It's the kind of commitment that will keep everyone working towards the success of the organization's own business. The organization is not a domain of imposition, either from the top or the bottom of the employment pyramid, but a compact of transversal sharing of risk, effort, and the rewards of work. This is something that many managers don't seem to have learned, let alone understood, despite the publication of so much high-quality international research on the factors of self-commitment in the workplace.

MATHEMATIZING THE ORGANIZATION IS MORE A SOMATIZATION THAN A SUMMATION OF ITS ACTIVITY INTO RESULTS

Profit at any price is no more an end of the organization than it is a means of action, even though it often reflects a morbid preoccupation with activity that induces behavior more focused on the “control of people and actions” than on the commitment of players to surpassing themselves on the task. By trying too hard to mathematize the organization and its activity, managers end up somatizing its results and performance. The mechanistic approach to business management has never had and never will have, the effect of improving winning conditions on the comparative activity of organizations. Organization is about people, for people's needs, for people's purposes. Activity is only a means of responding to man and his needs, not a substitute for his condition of being.

PROFIT IS NOT OPTIMIZATION, BUT AN ACCOUNTING DISCREPANCY IN THE ACTIVITY CARRIED OUT.

Consequently, the organization's activity, and the management of its affairs, must be subject to considerations of self-fulfillment (12). And this inexorably requires the humanization of inter-individual and collective relations within the space-time of employment. Any organization that fails to meet this prerequisite of improved management of the relationship between man and man will inevitably fail the test of optimal performance over its useful life cycle. Operating profit (surplus) is in no way a demonstration of the fulfillment of the organization's raison d'être (purpose). At most, it's accounting proof of the gap between effort and output.

PEOPLE WHO WANT TO SURPASS THEMSELVES ARE DRIVEN BY A SOCIALLY AND HUMANLY UTILITARIAN CAUSE.

Optimization of the operation, which contains the entire economic logic of the organization's production system, lies in the trajectory of performance improvement over the entire life cycle of the organization. And the improvement of business management modes, methods, and practices that will lead to this requires a commitment to surpassing oneself, on the part of the stakeholders in the organization's activity. Performance, which optimizes the return on available resources to satisfy the organization's mission, must not make the investment profitable to the detriment of everything else. It must make the efforts of all those involved in improving the organization's services profitable. The mission is not a milestone in the exercise's cash flow, but a propulsion towards excellence in satisfying the interests of the organization's stakeholders. People are driven by a common and noble cause; a cause that lifts the spirit, the heart, and the soul, while being utilitarian in its outcome and social and human in its initiation.

SERVICE IS THE END, ACTIVITY IS THE MEANS

The organization is a crucible of mission, conditioned by the vision of those who carry it out. Commitment to the organization predisposes to commitment to the task. It is therefore through the cause (end), and not through the objective (means), that motivation at work is sustainably sustained in the organization's people. People feel this, even if, all too often, they don't put it into words. The fact remains, however, that everyone needs to feel uplifted, and wants to achieve their full potential through concerted action in the productive organization that employs them. Service is never for oneself, but for others. Activity is never for oneself, but for others. The organization's raison d'être is never for itself, but for others. And the market is never a property for anyone, but a place where everyone can define what they have and what they are. The common cause, noble, must be proposed, led, and accomplished by destination... in everyone's interest.

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(1) Hope, J., Bunce, P., and R??sli, F., (2011) The Leader's Dilemma, How to Build an Empowered and Adaptive Organization without Loosing Control, Jossey-Bass, p. 21 f.

(2) https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/les-gens-ne-veulent-pas-%C3%AAtre-contr%C3%B4l%C3%A9s-mais-marcel-jb-tardif-mba?trk=pulse_spock-articles

(3) Wheatley, M., (199), Leadership and The New Science, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, p. 145.

(4) It is immobility in a system of flows that creates instability. Movement, on the other hand, allows us to regain our equilibrium, since flow is the essence of constant displacement. In an open, free market, the organization is a system of flowing ideas, projects and decisions. Movement must lead the organization towards achieving its mission (investment in innovation), not back to square one of the status quo ante (fear of risk).

(5) Business renewal begins with managerial innovation, before translating into technical innovation (production) and technological innovation (product). And innovation, in this era of high-frequency business model replacement, should no longer be approached as a risk, but as a necessity.

(6) Wise investors know that the person makes all the difference because he or she alone is the decision-making instrument that will institute, in the operating system, the will to succeed necessary for the activity to be carried out. This will be never to impose oneself on others, but to cooperate and coordinate with others on behalf of all.

(7) Winning employees are those best suited to a boundaryless management environment (see note 11). They allow initiative, innovation, and change. In short, it's about surpassing oneself, and by doing so, surpassing the organization and the activities it carries out.

(8) The contribution of others is never more secure than when there is transparent management, recognition of own contributions, decentralization of decision-making power, proven business ethics, fair treatment of individuals, and accountability applicable to all stakeholders in the activity... starting with senior executives and directors. Accountability, divided by job level to better exclude managers and directors, is less a truncated system of accountability for the players than a counterfeit that invites individual and collective contravention by the players in any organizational matter.

(9) There can be no openness to others if the basis of management is “control of people and actions”.

(10) Talk to real, professional psychologists (licensed, certified, and competent), not “amateurs” in the discipline. Psychology, no less than management, must not be based on guesswork... to the detriment of concentrated expertise and experience.

(11) The game of hide-and-seek, which consists of disclosing almost nothing to staff when you're a manager (executive or supervisor), pays off in return: staff do the same, under-optimizing their work effort and keeping quiet about the erring ways for which they're responsible. No wonder, then, that for decades now, the international commitment rate has generally not exceeded 21%. Will it ever sink in that “controlling others” (through their actions) means shooting yourself in the foot, when you're a manager, executive, or organizational supervisor? Have the proponents of “control-absolute-necessity-to-prevent-slipups” ever demanded that they be controlled first? We're flabbergasted by the contortion of language used by some proponents of “control-at-all-costs”, who propose not to make it “excessive” so that it's more easily accepted. It's like slapping someone, but not too hard, so that they accept it, ignore it or even enjoy it or ask for more. A slap is a slap, even if the recipient has been warned (to avoid an 'unpleasant surprise'). It's not a caress, even if it only grazes the skin. There's nothing elegant, inviting, or friendly about the gesture, the intention, or the effect on the recipient. Things are what they are. Let's stop talking in wooden tongues, to make people believe bladders are lanterns when it comes to governance, management, or results, as well as evaluation, sharing, or equity. People are less fooled than is generally thought. Intelligence has not been reserved for “superiors”, whatever some administrators, managers, “executives” and supervisors may think. Incidentally, the terms “superiors” and “subordinates” are loathsome, as job designations or function designations. Are there “inferiors” too? As for “cadres”, a notion that does not exist in English (where we prefer to speak of “middle management”), the word does indeed refer to parameters of the border, straitjacket, and limit type. In other words, the exact opposite of what Jack Welch has suggested as an approach to postmodern organizational management: the “boundaryless” approach (without physical, psychological, social, economic, technical, or other boundaries). Open-mindedness, rather than mental closure. The culture of the other, rather than the practice of the guilty. Cooperation, coordination, and mutual support. What our organizations need is a new mindset. This will require a complete renewal of the management class, which is bogged down in its belief in “control-foundation-good-management”. Instead of looking for financial results in the market, the management of organizations should first look for results in its governance, in its management, in its approach to the men and women in the workplace. Success is not a matter of numbers, but of the relationship between the takers and the activity in the organization... before it ends up in the market. This calls for a certain amount of open-mindedness on the part of those who make organizational decisions about the ways, methods, and practices of treating other people. As Julie Pellerin (LinkedIn) recently remarked to me, “Open-mindedness is not a skull fracture”. On the other hand, it often seems to be a painful sharing of the soul for so many leaders, whose heart is not in others but in... the lure of others.

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