A Lack of Prudence, a Crisis in Leadership
Randall Smith: You can’t screw up the finances of your organization and then demand budget and salary cuts. You can’t talk about “transparency” and then constantly hide key information.
Ignoring bottlenecks, multiplying touchpoints, creating information silos. These are widely discussed practices that result in organizations becoming more bureaucratic, less efficient, and more likely to fail.
If, like me, you need some help with this vocabulary, here are the accepted definitions:
- Bottleneck: A point of congestion in a workflow that creates a backlog.
- Touchpoints: Points of contact between customers and delivery of service.
- Information silo: When information is compartmentalized and not easily communicated across different departments or individuals within an organization.
These are also common practices among America’s managers and university administrators.
As a professor of theology, I don’t read business books – I prefer Augustine and Aquinas – but even I know about bottlenecks, multiplying touchpoints, and information silos, so why don’t so many highly remunerated managers of American institutions?
From Good to Great is a best-selling book on business management. The story written by most managers should be called From Good to Mediocre – and then Gone. The addendum would cover “How to Bankrupt Your Institution, put Employees out of Work, and Walk Away with a Bundle.”
We are facing a crisis of leadership. Too many managers of institutions are highly paid and barely competent. Too many boards of directors are asleep at the wheel, allowing institutions for which they are responsible to drift and fail. A whole class of managers is protected from failure by the system. They are rarely fired, even when clearly incompetent, and when they do lose a job, they often receive the kind of healthy severance denied to blue-collar workers. Often, they “fail up” and land a better position elsewhere where they can continue doing poor work.
One soon recognizes on search committees, for example, that many institutions are simply passing around their failed, second-rate managers to other institutions because most search committees are looking for people “with experience.” Chancery offices are too often staffed with priests who couldn’t be trusted with a parish assignment but who, because of this management “experience,” later become candidates for even higher office. Principals of bad schools were often poor teachers who took some “academic management” classes. These aren’t leaders; they’re managers. Bad ones.
I was once invited to attend a business school presentation on what the students would propose as “consultants” to a non-profit organization. Perhaps they thought that, as a theology professor, I would be against “profit.” But I’m with Pope Saint John Paul II who wrote in Centesimus annus: “The Church acknowledges the legitimate role of profit as an indication that a business is functioning well. When a firm makes a profit, this means that productive factors have been properly employed and corresponding human needs have been duly satisfied.” It amazes me how often “profit” in the sense identified by the pope is less a factor in business than personal aggrandizement, rent-seeking, and the pointless turf battles of people who shouldn’t be anywhere near a leadership position.
What I saw in these presentations were students taught to think of business problems as something to be treated with new branding, different marketing, alternative financing, and the shifting of responsibilities, as though business problems were all a matter of shifting entries on a spreadsheet. No one said a word about the people who work or the people for whom the work was being done. No one drilled into their heads my wife’s basic motto: “The answer is always people.”
What does the Catholic Church have to offer in this time of crisis? One answer would be to recover the wisdom of a true leader like Pope Saint John Paul II and the invaluable lessons found in his great encyclicals Laborem exercens and Centesimus annus. The Church could offer invaluable lessons in transparency, how to remain “mission-driven,” and how to develop institutions built on a reliable understanding of the dignity of workers. But another crucial lesson would be how to avoid empty, meaningless jargon.
Many members of our contemporary college-trained “manager class” have mastered talking the talk of “transparency,” “best practices,” “core competencies,” “improving system outcomes,” “creating capability,” and “enrolling stakeholders.” But when they act, it’s clear that they have no real understanding of what any of that means in practice. Their decisions are as uninformed, as dictatorial, and as unwise as those who have never studied those ideas – often, more so. Indeed, it sometimes seems as though studying the language of bad business practices makes people more adept at them while studying the jargon of “best practices” make them worse.
George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language and Josef Pieper’s Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power should be required reading in every Catholic university and every business school in the country. For, as Pieper writes: “Propaganda by no means flows only from the official power structure of a dictatorship. It can be found wherever a powerful organization, an ideological clique, a special interest, or a pressure group uses the word as their ‘weapon.’” There are many such powerful organizations, ideological cliques, special interests, and pressure groups in the nation presently, and most of them use (or more accurately abuse) language as an instrument of power, not truth.
In this time of a crisis in language and leadership, the Catholic Church and Catholic institutions could offer a service – of showing what true leadership looks like and helping to “purify the dialect of the tribe,” as T.S. Eliot says in Little Gidding. I mean, it could, I suppose, if Catholic institutional bureaucracies didn’t so often make all the same mistakes and worse. You can’t screw up the finances of your organization and then demand budget and salary cuts. You can’t talk about “transparency” and then constantly hide key information. You can’t keep using the vague language of “social justice” while showing little or no understanding of what justice entails in concrete circumstances.
And you can’t master the jargon of “synodality” and “consensus building” and then rule by personal diktat. I mean, that’s just so. . .managerial. Like something from a badly run American corporation.
You may also enjoy:
Stephen P. White The Virtues of Reform
Michael Baruzzini Catholics in a Different Time of National Crisis
AUTHOR
Randall Smith
Randall B. Smith is a Professor of Theology at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. His latest book is From Here to Eternity: Reflections on Death, Immortality, and the Resurrection of the Body.
EDITORS NOTE: This Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
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