The Manager's Job
It was no doubt an accidental coincidence that, in the past week, dissatisfaction with the present position of management in industry should have been expressed by three bodies so diverse as the British Association of Colliery Management, the National Institute of Indus- trial Psychology and the Conservative Party. But this sort of coin- cidence will go on occurring, and industrial inefficiency will go on growing, until the present confusion between two different methods is recognised and a genuine attempt made to sort it out. So long as the traditional system, in which the rewards and penalties of management fall to recognised managers, limps along side by side with an amorphous new arrangement in which more and more powers are wielded by trade unions and civil servants, the problems of function, status and personal relations—problems on which all three bodies laid stress—will not be solved. In fact, there will not even be a starting point for a solution when in addition the authority of the managers is weakened by vague and slow direction from above and the authority of unions undermined from below by shop stewards and the Communist Party. The present vices of the coal industry mentioned by the president of the British Association of Colliery Management—low targets, sluggish output, slow mechanisation and growing discontent—will persist and spread. The best managers are already disappearing and not being replaced. Personal contacts, and the development of personality itself, are being handicapped by the transfer of higher technical functions away from the pits to an im- personal Coal Board, and the transfer of negotiations on wages and conditions to impersonal unions and associations. The complaints which are arising are no mere empty grouse. They are the natural reaction of men who understand their jab to a state of affairs in which that job is being done badly or not done at all.
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