The Christian bureaucrat

But before I get deeper into the relation between the layman and the Church, let me briefly talk about a couple of ways in which the Christian attitude can help transform secular societies: specifically, how the Christian in management can make management be what it can be, and how you can be a Christian politician. In both of these cases, the first reaction is to say that these things are irredeemable; but I think that the problem lies in attitude rather than structure; and so the redemption of bureaucracy and politics is fair game for the Christian.

The general attitude toward management is that it is an instrument for greed; and the general attitude toward bureaucracy is that it is as inhuman a way of getting things done as any that has ever been devised. And I think this is true of both in their fallen state; but I don't think it is built into the nature of either.

In the first place, the "greed" aspect of management is based on the fallacy that a business exists solely to provide profit for the investor, and therefore the manager's sole function is to maximize profit. Everything else--the product or service provided to the consumer, the working conditions of the "help"--is supposed to be a means toward this end.

But in point of fact, as I have argued in The Moral Dimension of Human Economic Life, any business with employees has three coordinate purposes: (a) providing a service or product to the consumer, (b) providing opportunity for human work or service to the employees, and (c) providing compensation for the investor's service of sinking his money into the firm and taking ultimate responsibility for its actions. None of these purposes is subordinate to any other one, whatever the motivations of the founder of the business might be.

But since these are coordinate purposes of the firm as such, it follows that the function of management is to see to it that all are realized, and that none is sacrificed to the fulfillment of any other. Providing shoddy products because that's the best way to maximize profits is wrong and must not be a goal of management; providing excellent products and good profit cannot be done if this means inhuman working conditions; and so on.

Now then, the "entrepreneur" nowadays, in firms where "management" is meaningful, is generally not some one or few individuals, but thousands of people, very few of whom have enough shares of stock to be able to influence what management does in any significant way. Therefore, in practice, what large firms do is not what the investors want, but what management wants.

Hence, management has a rather free hand, in practice, in deciding the policy of the firm; if the top management wants to take the economics textbooks at face value and make "profit" the only goal, no one is going to stop them; but if they want to make quality products and good working conditions and salaries equal to profit on the priorities list, no one is really going to stand in the way either.

And since these are the purposes of the firm as such, then the Christian manager, who sees this, need not have any fear that his Christian respect for workers and consumers is making him do bad business if he does not subordinate them to the profit of the investors. Profit is not a dirty word to him, because investors do deserve compensation for their service in investing their money in the firm; but inordinate profit is just that: a disorder, and the Christian can see that, because he can see the firm as it is in itself, and not as it is in the subjective eyes of the investors.

So much for greed. What about bureaucracy?

What a bureaucratic structure actually is is "layers of authority." That is, what can be commanded is structured, so that at each layer, the people who issue commands have room to be free, and are not simply slaves of those higher up.

What I mean is this. Top management sets the goals of the firm or organization, and the basic priorities--but it has nothing to do with the day-to-day operations of the organization. The next lower level takes these goals and tries to figure out how basically these can be achieved: and this level sets as goals for the one below it the basic means for implementing the goals set at the top. The next level down takes these as its goals and sets as goals for the following level the basic means to implement them; and so on down the line, until you get to the person who is the worker, who simply follows the orders and doesn't give any.

The point is that what the people three steps down from the top are doing is using their own ingenuity to figure out how to implement the task assigned them from the second level down; and in general how they do this task is up to them, and is none of the business of the second level: the business of the second level is what the task is, and whether it is done, not how it is done.

Thus, bureaucracy, by keeping top management from meddling in the "how" of things, leaves them free to set the tone of the firm as a whole, and still leaves their subordinates free to work as humans within that tone. Since humans are free beings, then bureaucracy is in itself the most human way to get complex tasks done, because many people are being treated as responsible human beings, not simply machines used by the people at the top.

Now of course, the people at the top have to know whether the task they assign is in fact being done, and that in the process no one's rights are violated in the doing of it; and so they have to be informed about what is going on at lower levels. But this information should not concern itself with the "how" but with the "whether" the task is being humanly done.

The problem in bureaucracy occurs here. Upper levels of management are not really clear about what their role is on what goes on at lower levels; and they are apt to interfere in the "how," because certain methods for them are "better," and those at lower levels aren't doing things in the "right" way, even if the right things are getting done. This is interference.

And those in lower levels are uncomfortable with this freedom-with-limitations. They are apt to see that, if they do something in a way that seems not the "right" way to those higher up, they suffer; and so they tend to protect themselves by not doing anything on their own and waiting for orders before they will try a method, of pestering those above them about questions of methods and means, of keeping secrets from them about things that didn't go right. Communications either are too extensive or too little. The upper levels of management get a distorted picture of what goes on, and are told what the lower levels think they want to hear; and the result is worse than having them try to undertake the whole operation themselves.

The obvious solution is that there must be trust in the organization, based on the knowledge by subordinates that they will be left alone to exercise the authority they have on their own level, and will be judged on results and non-violations of rights, not on evaluations of methods. Those at the top must be really willing to let subordinates have free rein within the limits set for them; and this takes the attitude of "letting go," and really delegating authority, not just the appearance of it.

But this, as I said at the beginning, is a question of attitude, not particularly anything distinctive you do; and the Christian, who sees things and people as they are, and who knows that the Master is running the universe, will be less unwilling to let go than the boss who is afraid that he will be taken advantage of.

And the result? Happy people are people who can set out to accomplish something and succeed. If you let subordinates know that they have a range in which they are free to try what they want in accomplishing the goals you set for them, then they have room to try and to succeed. If you are willing to let them experiment and perhaps fail; if you are available to help them, but aren't always looking over their shoulder; then you have succeeded in one of the purposes of the firm: making the firm a place where humans can work humanly.

No easy task, this; but it is not my purpose here to define it more exactly. It is for the Christian in management to try to make bureaucracy be what it can be.