Week 48, 2022—Issue #232
Management, Authority, and Control on the Human Side of Enterprise
It’s been 60+ years since McGregor wrote the Human Side of Enterprise. These are three of my favorite quotes.
Douglas McGregor was a founding faculty member of MIT’s Sloan School of Management and president of Antioch College. He’s known as one of the most influential management thinkers of all time, responsible for models such as Theory X and Theory Y on workplace motivation (see #168). His seminal work — The Human Side of Enterprise — was published more than 60 years ago in 1960.
These are three of my favorite quotes:
1. Management
“Management by direction and control…fails under today’s conditions to provide effective motivation of human effort toward organizational objectives. It fails because direction and control are useless methods of motivating people whose physiological and safety needs are reasonably satisfied and whose social, egoistic, and self-fulfillment needs are predominant…Management cannot provide a man with self-respect, or with the respect of his fellows, or with the satisfaction of needs for self-fulfillment. We can create conditions such that he is encouraged and enabled to seek such satisfactions for himself, or we can thwart him by failing to create those conditions…The essential task of management [therefore] is to arrange organizational conditions and methods of operation so that people can achieve their own goals best by directing their own efforts toward organizational objectives.”
2. Authority
“[A] leader cannot avoid the exercise of authority any more than he can avoid responsibility for what happens to his organization. In fact, it is the major function of the top executive to take on his own shoulders the responsibility for resolving the uncertainties that are always involved in important decisions. Moreover, since no important decision ever pleases everyone in the organization, he must also absorb the displeasure, and sometimes severe hostility, of those who would have taken a different course. A colleague recently summed up what my experience has taught me in these words: ‘A good leader must be tough enough to win a fight, but not tough enough to kick a man when he is down.’ This notion is not in the least inconsistent with humane, democratic leadership. Good human relations develop out of strength, not of weakness.”
3. Control
“Theory X offers management an easy rationalization for ineffective organizational performance: It is due to the nature of the human resources with which we must work. Theory Y, on the other hand, places the problems squarely in the lap of management. If employees are lazy, indifferent, unwilling to take responsibility, intransigent, uncreative, uncooperative, Theory Y implies that the causes lie in management’s methods of organization and control…All these methods of social control are relative; none is absolute. The appropriateness of a given form of control is a function of several other variables. Effective control consists in ‘selective adaptations’ to these variables. The engineer does not dig channels to make water flow uphill; the salesman does not give commands to a customer;…a nation at war does not offer professional help to the enemy.”
Management, authority, and control.
At one point, these words made my make my hair stand on end. But not anymore. McGregor’s writing helped me come to terms with the… terms.
It’s all a matter of perspective.
- At the Human Side of Enterprise, management isn’t about bossing people around. It’s about facilitation and service to others
- At the Human Side of Enterprise, authority isn’t concentrated at the top — it’s distributed, allowing decision-making to be decentralized
- At the Human Side of Enterprise, control isn’t absolute — it’s a tool that managers can dial up or down in support of motivation and growth
That’s all for this week.
Until next time: Make it matter,
How can we build better organizations? That’s the question I’ve been trying to answer for the past 10 years. Each week, I share some of what I’ve learned in a weekly newsletter called WorkMatters. Subscription is free. Back-issues are published to Medium after three months.
This article was originally published on Friday, December 2, 2022.
