Elliott Who? Elliott “MidLife Crisis” Jaques
By Michelle Malay Carter on April 10, 2008
- Where did the term ?midlife crisis? come from?
- How about ?corporate culture??
- Who founded the Tavistock Institute (precursor to OD?s seminal home, the National Training Lab)?
- Who received a special award from General Colin Powell in 1992 for military leadership and instruction?
- Who created an actual science out of the arbitrary, highly subjective selection, promotion, compensation, organizational design, and managerial leadership practices and principles — the kind most corporations use every day?
You guessed it, the late Elliott Jaques. (FYI – pronounced Jacks if you want to chat about him at a cocktail party; no letter “c” in the name if you want to Google)
Jaques is the creator of the meta-model Requisite Organization. If you’re in the business or any business, his model is one to be familiar with. If you are serious about wanting to change the system, not people, this is your book.
If This Stuff is So Great, Why Haven’t You Heard of Him?
Jaques’ colleague at George Washington University, Jerry Harvey, the author of the Abilene Paradox, dedicated a whole chapter in one of his books to this very question. The chapter is called, Musing about the Elephant in the Parlor: Who the the Devil is Elliott Jaques? To read it, click here and scroll down to reading number 5.
Career Choice Point
When I was exposed to his work, I had to dramatically change my consulting practice because I realized much of what I was currently doing was akin to putting lipstick on a pig. Luckily, I wasn’t very far into my consulting career and this choice was not very costly. But it is this very self-preservation crisis point, called anaclysis, that Jerry Harvey says keeps people from embracing the Requisite model.
Starter Article
Because Requisite Organization is a total-system model, reading the book itself can be a little like reading an encyclopedia. Here’s a great article by Art Kleiner to get you started, Elliott Jaques Levels with You.
I’m OK. You’re OK. Let’s fix the system.
Let me know what you think after you read it.
Filed Under Executive Leadership, Managerial Leadership, Organization Design, Requisite Organization, Work Levels
Comments
7 Responses to “Elliott Who? Elliott “MidLife Crisis” Jaques”
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OK, Michelle, I read both articles. My reactions to the “Elephant” article were a raised eyebrow and a “Hmph–that figures.” Not too much more to say about that.
As for the “Levels With You” article:
* Of course! This fits with what I’ve seen and intuitively felt was true for years.
* I gotta know your reaction to the Jaques quote, “There are too many damn consultants around who would go along to firms and say, ‘We can evaluate all your people.'”
Are you *sure* that you wanted us to read that second article?
Hi Will,
Best practice is for us to help the managers who are working with the people evaluate the people. They do it anyway. We give them a framework and a common language that that helps them do it more consistently and accurately.
Thanks for the comment.
Regards,
Michelle
Having read both articles, some points came up:
1. Jaques’ theory sounds decidedly Aristotelian/Thomistic, in that it takes human nature as a constant and as normative for behaviour. As far as I know the only institute that still looks at ethics this way is the Catholic church (their ban on contraceptives is ultimately based on ‘human nature’ and the ‘natural’ role of procreation in said nature).
2. His ideas about human nature center on cognitive capabilities. Cognitive deals with content. As far as my experience with management goes: managers are usually not interested in content, or cognitive capabilities for that matter. In the company that I work in, those with the most knowlegde and/or cognitive capabilities are called ‘professionals’ (who are considered immensely difficult to manage) and they are invariably paid less.
3. Jaques redistributes responsibilities in a way that no modern manager ever would: as far as I know managers are all strict believers in the gospel of ‘personal responsibility’ (to the point where it is an employees personal responsibility that his boss wasn’t prevented from making a mistake).
4. The theory may be true -I recognise a lot at least- but the dangers are just as big: it starts of with an innate inequality in humans. That is never a comfortable idea, especially when it is true. Before you know it we have another ‘the bell curve’…
So I’m undecided yet.
Hi Richard,
I appreciate your feeding back your thoughts. I think you’ve done a great job of synthesizing some important points.
I do think Jaques underplays the role of personal temperament/values in deference to cognitive capability. My posts this week (4/14/08) address the subject of temperament and values.
Yes, the shift in thinking around accountability is a big one when it comes to implementation within an organization. It takes time, commitment, perseverance, and practice to make this one work. But I have seen it.
As for the Bell Curve, if you hire well using Jaques’ framework, you should not have a bell curve. Jack Welch created a bell curve system at GE that is still revered, and I think it is punitive and misinformed. See: http://www.missionmindedmanagement.com/where-jack-welch-got-it-wrong-the-mandatory-annual-low-performer-cut
So, yes, you are right. Jaques framework misapplied could lead to a mess. But, I say, ignorance of it, is creating more of a mess. Under our current system, self-reported engagement is at 21%.
I appreciate your open-mindedness. Many people simply “shut down” when they see something they don’t like with the theory.
Take some opportunities to “apply” the theory over time, and I suspect you will become more convinced. When I work with managers, we teach, they go away and watch the world of work through a new requisite lens, they come back and learn some more and back out and look again. Over time and many iterations, nearly all are convinced of its validity.
Regards,
Michelle Malay Carter
My own take on the limitation of Jaques’ theories is that while they wonderfully address the issue of levels (strata) for both organizational design and individual capacity, they explain little in the way of “category” (which I suspect are similar to Michelles “personal temperament/values,” if we compared notes on the details)–why individuals do better in certain types of work (as opposed to levels of work) rather than in others.
That said, I don’t critique Jaques for not having addressed the issue of category–the limitation is that a senior leader or management consultant needs to know about both levels and category, not that any one thought leader should give us every good answer. God bless Elliott Jaques that he did so much to explain one of the two, which certainly cuts down on the total amount of uncertainties facing us.
FYI, my current favorite instrument for assessing “category” preference/fitness is the Personalysis assessment from Personalysis Corp (www.personalysis.com). Even more so than any of the DiSC instruments, I find that Personalysis aids in both self-understanding and tactical improvements to working relationships through improved communications strategies. Unlike DiSC assessments (while helpful and relevant, they reach a point where their insights are too generalized to be useful in forming specific courses of action) or the MBTI (its recommendations seem to break down as soon as you try to put them into practice), I’ve found that the insights from Personalysis assessments scale down to the detailed tactical level quite well.
Getting back to the main point, though: Despite my enthusiasm for Personalysis over the past 12 years, I grew to feel over time that it had a major hole in that it didn’t explain why people who seemed otherwise well-suited for their category of work failed when assigned to higher levels of responsibility. When George Smart introduced me to RO about 8 years ago, that piece of the puzzle clicked into place! And then I had my own, “Why haven’t I ever heard of Elliott Jaques before?” moment…
Hi Will,
Yes, you and I are on the same page with the category/personality/values issue. Jaques plays it down, but I think it’s important in the overall employee match to role equation.
My favorite assessment tool is the Human Patterns. The creator took 14 different assessments (DISC, MBTI) and combined them. It’s pretty comprehensive. We offer it on the PeopleFit site as the Strength Based Leadership Inventory.
Regards,
Michelle
Hi Michelle,
Actually I did read the post on Jack Welch a while ago, but that was not what I meant by the phrase ‘the Bell Curve’. I meant the 1994 book that argued black people were less intelligent than whites.
Jaques theories propose a pretty all-emcompasing explanation of la condition humaine, it entails some form of inequality and the inequality is -worst of all- of the cognitive persuasion.
If and when applied by the wrong kind of people, his theories could lead to -as you call it- ‘a mess’, much like Darwin ‘led’ to social Darwinism.
While not saying that Jaques -or Darwin- is wrong, I do think his idea’s are pretty dangerous.
My question would be: what would you prefer: a dangerous truth, or a relatively harmless falacy? (I don’t have an answer yet…)
O, and I forgot Marxism! Influencing behaviour by influencing not the people, but the structure within which they function. Structure drives behaviour, that sounded decidedly Marxist to me.
This is what I found intriguing: Marxism and Catholicism in a management-theory.
Last point (and then I’ll stop): I was wondering what you (or Jaques) would do with -say- level IV people with ardent level VI ambitions in an organisation?