CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Twilight of the First-Line Supervisor?
NO JOB IS GOING TO CHANGE more in the next decade than that of the first-line supervisor in both factory and office. And few people in the work force are less prepared for the changes and less likely to welcome them.
Automation is one of the forces drastically altering the supervisor’s role. In an automated process, workers cannot be “supervised”; each worker has to be pretty much in control of the process, has to understand it, know how to program the machines he is responsible for and reset them. In an automated process, the worker switches from being an operator to being a programmer. Instead of a supervisor he needs an assistant. He needs information and continuous training. He needs someone to make sure that parts and supplies arrive on time and in proper sequence. He needs coordination with other parts of the process.
Most rank-and-file workers have little difficulty adapting to automation. But their supervisors do. When Nissan robotized its big automobile assembly plant outside Yokohama, training rank-and-file workers for the new jobs presented few problems. But practically all the supervisors had to be moved to traditional plants. Office supervisors may face even greater and more difficult changes.
Equally traumatic will be changes in industrial relations—especially in blue-collar work. They threaten the supervisor’s authority and his self-image. Companies that introduced quality circles expected resistance from the blue-collar workers; there has been practically none. But supervisors resisted strongly. The whole idea of the quality circle is that the machine operator knows more about the job than anyone else. And what then is left of the supervisor’s authority?
Worse still, in quality circles and all similar programs the rank-and-file employee gets to work directly with the staff—with quality control and industrial engineering and production scheduling and maintenance. But to the traditional supervisor in American industry, control of access to staff people is central to his authority and stature. All the other changes in industrial relations on the production floor now being tried out equally diminish the authority and reduce the control of the supervisor and transfer power to the worker: flexible benefits, employee share-ownership, productivity bonuses, profit-sharing, and so on. All are based on the proposition that the worker takes responsibility, has control, tells rather than being told.
In the office there is an additional problem: a growing generation gap. Office supervisors tend to be the oldest group in the labor force. And the group largely consists of people who have missed out on promotions and who have been left behind in the rapid expansion of the last fifteen to twenty years. The people they supervise increasingly are much younger and better schooled. In a recent survey of abnormally high clerical turnover in a nationwide insurance company, the most common reasons for quitting given by former employees were “My supervisor was just plain uneducated” and “My supervisor wanted us to use quill pens when I have been trained to use word processors and computers.”
It can be argued that the traditional supervisor is an anachronism and an impediment to productivity.
It’s not a new argument. IBM, hardly a permissive company, accepted it twenty-five years ago when it abolished the traditional supervisor in its factories and replaced him (or her) with a manager who does not supervise at all. The IBM manager is a teacher, an expediter, and an assistant. He or she has a minimum of disciplinary power and a maximum of responsibility for making the work group take responsibility for its tasks, for the design of its jobs, for standards of production, and for teamwork. The supervisory job at IBM is largely discharged by blue-collar workers themselves, men or women whom the work group itself designates as its team leaders and to whom the manager is a resource and an assistant. But in most of American business, the supervisor is very much what he or she was many years ago, a boss, though little is left of the authority and responsibility the boss had fifty years ago, before unions and powerful staff and personnel functions came in.
In the last few years the emphasis in many companies has switched back to training the first-line supervisor—and none too soon. For we have learned that training in new production processes and new industrial relations has to start with the first-line supervisor. Only when supervisors have been trained thoroughly can we successfully train workers. For instance, wherever quality circles have been successful, they first have been test-run with the first-line supervisors, before bringing in the rank and file. The quality circle thus became the supervisor’s own program and the supervisor’s own tool (as it is in Japan). By the time rank-and-file employees were brought in, the supervisors had also accepted the quality circle as a way of getting recognition and status.
Similarly, in a recent major switch to flexible benefits in a large mass-production plant, the key to eventual success was the first line supervisors and their active involvement. Before the company committed itself to the new approach it had a team of experienced first-line supervisors work out the specifics. The group worked for several months with the consulting actuaries, developed with them alternatives and options, tested various programs, and got to know thoroughly what each involved, what each meant in terms of additional benefits and/or “give-ups” for each group of employees, and what new responsibilities each of the proposed programs would impose on first-line supervisors. Only then did management sit down with the union to hammer out a major change in labor-relations philosophy and in the contract.
The training needed is for a different role rather than reaffirmation of the traditional supervisor’s function. To benefit from the changes—in technology, in industrial relations, in demographics—we need a stronger, more confident, more responsible first-line supervisor. We need to do what IBM did twenty-five years ago when it determined that the job of its “managers” was to bring out and put to work the strengths of the work force: competence and knowledge and capacity to take responsibility. This is not being permissive; on the contrary, it is being demanding. But it is demanding very different things from what American business by and large (aided and abetted by traditional union contracts and union relations) has been demanding of the first line.
During and right after World War II, the first-line supervisor was the center of industrial-relations concerns. For a few short years it then seemed that first-line supervisors would unionize to defend themselves against both higher management on the one hand and the unions of the rank-and-file workers on the other. For this brief period management paid attention to the supervisor—to his training, his status, and his compensation. For the last forty years, however, American business, with some exceptions, has taken the first-line supervisor for granted. But in the next decade the supervisor will again become central to industrial relations. Indeed the status, authority, and responsibility of the supervisor—as well as his compensation and promotional opportunities—may become our most pressing and difficult problem in the management of people at work.
(1983)