CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Getting Control of Staff Work

CORPORATE SERVICE STAFFS—THE PEOPLE who analyze and plan, supply knowledge, design policies, and give advice—have been growing at very high speed in most American organizations. Their growth is even faster in the nonprofit sector than in business. But since the 1950s at many major manufacturing companies, staff employment has grown five to ten times as fast as the number of “operating” people in production, engineering, accounting, research, sales, and customer service. The unchecked growth and excessive power of service staffs is considered by practically all our foreign critics to be a serious weakness of U.S. industry, and a major cause of its poor performance.

Staffs weren’t always so bloated in America. In the 1950s many foreign visitors, especially the Japanese, came to the United States to learn how companies ought to use their staffs. It may be useful to remind ourselves of some of the lessons which our visitors put into practice in their own countries but which many American companies apparently have forgotten.

First, staff should concentrate on tasks of major importance that will continue for many years. A task of minor importance, if it is to be done at all, should be done in operations and by operating people. A task of major importance that will not last forever—for example, the reorganization of a company’s management—is better handled as a one-time assignment. Then one calls in an outside consultant or, often the better way, one forms an ad hoc task force. One can get rid of either as soon as the job is done. But a staff of internal “organization consultants” will immediately build its own empire and start looking for places to “reorganize,” a quest that will inevitably do damage.

Staff work should be limited to a few tasks of high priority. This is the rule most often violated in American business, especially by large companies. One personnel department I know has twenty-eight sections, each grinding out “policies,” “programs,” “procedures,” “manuals,” and “training courses"; thirty years ago it had four sections. Another company has fourteen sections in “marketing services.”

Proliferation of staff services deprives them of effectiveness. Worse, it destroys the effectiveness of the people who produce results, the operating people. Every staff service is convinced that its concern is the most important area in the business, whether it is wage and salary administration, or sales forecasting, or inventory management. Each is busy, as it should be, producing policies and procedures. And each then expects operating people, from first-line supervisor to chief executive officer, to give it adequate time and attention.

Unless the number of staff tasks is closely controlled, staff will therefore gobble up more and more of operating people’s scarcest resource: time. I like to use a simple test: If staff work in its totality—from planning and cash-flow analysis to a new public relations policy—requires more than three or four days a month of the working time of operating people on any level, then, except in rare moments of crisis, the staff needs to be pruned.

This means that every time the staff takes on a new task, it should abandon an old one. “All right, you want to go into productivity research,” one says to the personnel vice-president. “Which of the things you are doing now are you going to give up?”

Effective staff work requires specific goals and objectives, clear targets and deadlines. “We expect to cut absenteeism in half within three years” or “Two years from now we expect to understand the segmentation of our markets sufficiently to reduce the number of product lines by at least one third.” Objectives like these make for productive staff work. Vague goals such as “getting a handle on employee behavior” or “a study of customer motivation” do not.

Every three years or so, it is important to sit down with every staff unit and ask, “What have you contributed these last three years that makes a real difference to this company?” Staff work in a business, a hospital, or a government agency is not done to advance knowledge; its only justification is the improvement of the performance of operating people and of the entire organization.

Rules for staff people are just as important as rules for staff work. Don’t ever put anyone into a staff job, for example, unless he or she has successfully held a number of operating jobs, preferably in more than one functional area. For if staff people lack operating experience, they will be arrogant about operations, which always look so simple to the “planner.” And unless staff people have proved themselves in operations, they will lack credibility among operating people and will be dismissed as “theoreticians.”

This is so elementary a rule that even the most extreme proponent of staff supremacy, the Prussian army of the nineteenth century, strictly observed it. An officer had first to get promoted twice in troop command—from second to first lieutenant and then to captain—before he could sit for the general staff exam.

But today, in government even more than in business, we put young people fresh out of business or law school into fairly senior staff jobs as analysts or planners or staff counsel. Their arrogance and their rejection by the operating organization practically guarantee that they will be totally unproductive. By contrast, no man in Japan, whether in business or government, gets into staff work of any kind until he has had seven—or, more usually, ten—years of successful performance in three or four operating assignments.

With rare exceptions, staff work should not be a person’s “career” but only a part of his or her career. After five or seven years on a staff job, people ought to go back into operating work and not return to a staff assignment for five years or so. Otherwise, they will soon become behind-the-scene-wirepullers, “gray eminences,” “kingmakers” like those brilliant mischief-makers, the staff officers of the Prussian army. Staff work, by definition, has great authority, the authority of knowledge. But it has no responsibility; its concern is advice, plan, forecast, rather than decision, execution, results. And it is the oldest adage of politics that authority without responsibility corrupts.

Above all, the true results of staff work are more effective, more productive operating people. Staff is support for operating people and not a substitute for them.

(1982)