A profound insight into the nature of power is provided by the management thinker of the early twentieth century, Mary Parker Follett. Harry Onsman explains her contribution.

We seem to be coming to the end of the mechanist era of management. The theorists and writers of the early twentieth century such as Fayol and Taylor who dominated management thinking for most of the last century mostly shared a view of management as a mechanical and rule-driven activity. Today, the big sellers in the world of management are writers like Charles Handy, Peter Senge, and Ken Blanchard, all of whom share a preference for a more fluid and organic view of the management process.

One of the core differences between then and now is the belief in "one best way" to achieve an outcome that would benefit an organisation and its people. To the mechanists, the point of management is to find the best way to achieve that best outcome. To the management writers of today, there are many different paths to achieving an outcome. Even the notion of what constitutes the best outcome for an organisation is under debate.

As always, there are exceptions to this pendulum principle and as usual, Peter Drucker leads the charge as the exceptional writer in the field, capable of taking the broad view. In a sense, Drucker represents the turning point in the middle of the century when the balance started to swing away from the notion that management is the application of universal principles to a set of specific situations.

In some ways, however, this idea of swinging balances hides the fact that even when the mechanists reigned supreme, there were thinkers and writers around who eschewed that approach. Today, some of these read remarkably like modernists. First and foremost amongst these contemporaries of Taylor and co. is Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933).

To really appreciate how ahead of her times she was, you need only look at her writings on such a fashionable topic as "empowerment". Whilst the term was not in use in the first part of the twentieth century, Parker Follett’s observations on the concept heralded an approach that even now has not fully penetrated management thinking, let alone management practice. When it does, we will finally be able to move beyond the current facile pre-occupations with what empowerment entails.

"Workplace empowerment" has become a recurring theme in management thinking. This is largely so because the illusion of management control is gradually being stripped away by technological changes, flatter hierarchical structures, virtual organisation, and the advent of knowledge workers. The boss is no longer in control when she does not understand the equipment that the workers are using, isn’t there to call the shots, and does not know what the workers know.

In the face of these changes, managers are turning to the gurus of empowerment as an intellectual justification for what is happening anyway. It is almost as if the decision to empower workers restores to managers a psychological sense of control over a process that is actually inevitable. Nothing like the semblance of control when you’re powerless!

There is a fundamental paradox in all this that Mary Parker Follett was the first to identify. She came to management from a practical background (eg setting up the earliest vocational guidance centres in the US) but focused on the dynamic interplay between the individual and the organisation. She wrote about leadership, control, authority, power and conflict when Taylor lectured the US Senate about the very static structures of work and organisation.

The paradox of empowerment is that you cannot actually give power to another. Others can empower themselves and you may assist or resist that process. So when a manager decides to "empower" a worker, unless they set in place a process of self-empowerment, they are involved in an act of delusion. This is based on the notion that the power game is a zero-sum game, where if your power goes down, mine goes up. When the worker’s power increases, the manager must somehow have less of it.

This "zero-sum metaphor" misleads managers into thinking that the process of empowering others is somehow to the managers’ detriment. When you empower others, you lose power. Replace this metaphor, say, by the "knowledge metaphor" (as in knowledge shared is not knowledge halved) and the concept of empowerment becomes a positive and uplifting notion. Parker Follett calls this having "power-with" as opposed to the notion of "power-over" which is implicit in the "zero-sum metaphor".

She describes "power-with" as "a jointly developed power, a co-active, not coercive power" (Metcalf and Urwick, 1941 p. 101). In this way, the notion of power in empowerment becomes a self-developing capacity that is encouraged by the manager. It is more closely related to personal development than it is to "authority".

With this one concept of "power-with", she both predates and encapsulates the fundamental issue in so-called "empowerment programs" advocated by some. And that is that it is not about power but about enabling others to develop their abilities.

By conceptualising it as a process rather than an act, she removes most of the ground from beneath those who question empowerment as something that will undermine the authority of management. This inevitably leads to considerations of context, of the structural and social elements in organisations that either facilitate or hinder the development of "empowered" employees.

By re-conceptualising the notion away from power-over to power-with, Parker Follett changes the empowerment debate from a competition to a joint development project. It is probably the most sensible contribution so far made to the discussion on empowerment. And that is a contribution from the 1920’s, long before the debate was even conceived!

Parker Follett provides few step-by-step formulas for implementing her ideas. This would contradictory to her beliefs that it is hard work creating organisations that thrive because their people are encouraged to thrive. Her prescriptions are for the long-haul, not the one-minute sprint. But her writings contain many of the notions that are now becoming fashionable in management thinking such as the "win-win" approach to conflict resolution, the importance of "respectful reciprocity", the concept of emergent strategy, and the idea of creating synergies through co-operative endeavours.

In his introduction to a recent collection of Follett Parker’s writings, Peter Drucker called her a "prophet of management". For inspiration about the pressing management issues of today, it may be valuable to turn the clock back a hundred years or so.

References:

Metcalf, H & Urwick, L (Eds), Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett, Pitman, 1941

Graham, P, Mary Parker Follett : Prophet of Management : A Celebration of Writings from the 1920s, Harvard Business Press, 1996