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Better
Together: Restoring the American Community by Robert D. Putnam and Lewis
M. Feldstein Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Capital Readers who enjoyed Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone,
will gravitate naturally to his latest book, Better
Together: Restoring the American Community. The new book profiles a dozen
situations in which there’s evidence of social capital being built up, and
communities are formed or strengthened. Even if you didn’t read about the
breakdown of community in Bowling Alone,
you’ll find something to think about and inspire you in the stories about the
challenges of building social networks that succeed. Here’s an excerpt from
the beginning of Chapter 10, (pp. 206-15), “UPS: Diversity and Cohesion,” the
only corporate story told in the book: In
the mid-1960s, the United Parcel Service was overwhelmingly an organization
of white males, many of them Irish Catholic, many with a background in the
military. Aspects of the company parallel military behaviors and values: not
only the brown uniforms worn by all UPS drivers, but careful training in
standard operating procedures and a culture of teamwork and loyalty. (Loyalty
has been such a fundamental UPS value that, for many years, no one who left
the company for any reason would ever be hired back. Even a student sorting
packages part-time at night to finance a college education was disqualified
from future employment if he gave up that job.) As in the military, people
who succeeded at UPS rose through the ranks, proving themselves as package
handlers or drivers before they moved into management positions. Leaders of
the company were UPS lifers, with twenty or thirty or more years of experience
in the organization behind them, usually acquired in various jobs at numerous
facilities around the country. Though geographically dispersed, the managers
of the firm were remarkably homogeneous and close-knit, with extensive
networks of acquaintances among people who had worked together in the course
of careers that spanned more than a quarter of a century. In
the summer of 1965, the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles erupted in riots
and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, prohibiting employment discrimination
based on race, color, national origin, religion, or sex, went into effect.
Walter Hooke believes UPS hired him as East Region personnel manager at about
that time specifically to help the company address the requirements of Title
VII and the challenges of social turmoil in the 1960s. The assassination of
Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1968, would spark riots in cities across
the country. The black power and antiwar movements, hippies, the sexual
revolution, and the drug subculture attested to a divided populace contending
over values, justice, politics, and different ideas of what being an American
meant, or should mean. It
is easy to imagine UPS responding to that stew of unrest and apparent
instability—so unlike its own culture—by trying to turn inward, protecting
itself by taking even greater care to hire only "people like us,"
resisting legal and social pressures to change. Instead, along with other
diversity efforts it made, the company accepted Hooke's plan to launch a community
intemship program that would put managers in social service programs in
America's turbulent cities for six months at a time. Hooke convinced company
leaders that the only way to understand people who, they believed, would be
future employees and future customers was to engage them and their problems'
He pointed out that UPS package cars (as the chocolate-brown delivery trucks
are called internally) had not run in Cleveland, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and
Washington during riots there: what had happened in the cities directly
affected the company's ability to do its work. Ignoring people and problems
was bad for business, he argued. UPS
has been and remains a no-nonsense, results-oriented company, with a fervent
emphasis on efficiency and focused hard work. At the same time, it maintains
a practice of service to the community that goes back to cofounder James E.
Casey, who set up the Annie E. Casey Foundation, one of several public
services established by his family and the company. For many years now, a
highlight of the annual senior managers' meeting has been the presentation of
the Jim Casey Community Service Award to the UPS worker—as often as not a
part-time package handlerr-who has.made the greatest volunteer contribution
to the community.
So a combination of practical and ethical considerations supported the
intemship idea. The first intemships were set up in Philadelphia and at the
Henry Street Settlement in New York City. More
than thirty years later, the program is still in operation. Program sites have included
Pittsburgh; Oakland, California; and Montgomery, Alabama. Today< selected
UPS managers take part in community internship programs in Chicago; New York;
Chattanooga, Tennessee; and McAllen, Texas. They live and do community work
in those places for four weeks, not six months, but the aim is the same: to
learn about the lives of potential UPS employees and customers by being
there, listening to people speak for themselves, and working with the
programs and agencies that support them, and, in the process, to become aware
of life issues that probably affect some of the people they currently
supervise. Although the "alumni" of this program constitute only a
fraction of all UPS managers, many of them (such as Lea N. Soupata, senior
vice president for human resources and a member of the UPS board ofdirectors)
now hold key corporate positions. The fact that busy, up-and-coming managers
are often assigned to the program indicates the importance of equal
opportunity and cross-cultural understanding within the firm. Through their
intemship work these managers contribute to the communities, but the main
target of the program is the managers themselves; its central purpose is to
give them experience and understanding that will make them better managers in
a diverse company. If
America's social-capital deficit is to be addressed, it is hard to imagine
how that can be done without carefully considering the links between the
workplace and community. At the beginning of the twenty-first century more
Americans are working outside the home than ever before. Some evidence
suggests that they are spending longer there, as well, although experts
disagree about the trends in work hours. The issue of social capital and work
has two facets: •
Work can affect social capital outside the workplace (as, for example,
incorporate-sponsored volunteering or-workplace flexibility that enables employees to reconcile
their professional obligations with their family and community obligations). •
Work can affect social capital inside the workplace (as, for example, in the
ways office architecture or supervisory practices affect relations among
coworkers). The
UPS community internships illustrate the former, but UPS is hardly the only
company in America to provide opportunities for community service. UPS is, in
fact, an even more interesting story because of the role of social capital
within the workplace itself. We picked UPS, not Ben &.Jerry's,
because it is a very large, profitable firm in a highly competitive global
industry. UPS does not represent "boutique capitalism," and it is
not a cushy place to work. Although we have not done a scientific survey, we
believe that UPS has pursued a more social capital-intensive strategy than
many comparable firms. UPS management has followed this strategy not out of
altruism, but because of a hard-nosed business calculation that it is a good
way to make a profit, just as HUCTW builds community as a good way to
organize a union and Saddleback builds community as a good way to save souls. Diversity and Cohesion UPS
in 2002 looks very different from the all-male,, all-white company it was in
the 1960s. African Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Pacific Americans, and other
minorities now account for more than one third of the firm's employees.
Minorities hold 27 percent of managerial positions. Women are 21 percent of
the UPS workforce in the United States. Women constitute 27 percent of
management and 25 percent of supervisory personnel. In 2002, UPS ranked
twenty-fifth among Fortune magazine's "50 Best Companies for Minorities,"
the fourth consecutive year it appeared on the list. Diversityinc.com ranked
UPS third in its list of top ten companies for diversity in 2001. UPS’s
culture of hard work, cooperation, connection, and loyalty remains
surprisingly similar to what it was thirty years ago, despite changes in the
wider culture, expansion to new business and therefore employees with new
skills—IT (information technology) professionals and air freight pilots,
for instance-and increasing diversity. But our discussion of the company's
cohesive culture and, we believe, relatively high level of organizational social capital needs
to be placed in a cautionary context. First,
no dispersed organization of nearly four hundred thousand people can be all
one thing. The experience of individuals and groups will necessarily vary. At
UPS as elsewhere, there are good managers and bad, people who like their jobs
and people who do not. It would be easier to write about social capital at
any one of a number of small, "friendly" companies, but UPS is
interesting precisely because it is a large firm in a highly competitive
industry that has survived and maintained its strong culture for almost a
hundred years. The
social-capital landscape at UPS is further complicated by the fact that the company
includes three fairly distinct groups of workers. UPS depends on a large
number of unionized part-time workers to sort and load packages in its many
hubs and centers. UPS drivers also are unionized—and we will say more about
the Teamsters and UPS later. Although many current managers have been drivers
or package handlers, they have moved into work that is different from what
the unionized fellow employees do. The turnover rate among managers is less
than 2 percent; among part-time package handlers it is as high as 50 percent
or more, depending on location. Pay for part-time work at UPS is no longer
dramatically higher than for almost any other part-time employment, as it
once was, although part-timers do get fully paid health care and
pensions—rare benefits in part-time work. It
is possible to ask, though, whether UPS is one company or two—or even three.
To an unexpected degree, it seems to be one company and one (complex)
culture. To begin with, the work brings package handlers, drivers, and
managers together. UPS's core work of sorting and delivering
packages is grueling, more demanding physically than an outsider can imagine. Commpleting
those tasks is a daily challenge that can be met only when people cooperate.
Always fighting the clock, sometimes fighting the weather. UPSers share the
daily drama of getting a tough job done. Even drivers who spend most of their
time on the road alone, depend on the package handlers who load their
vehicles: a poorly loaded package car makes their work impossible. Tales
of cooperation are part of the company's folklore. The Christmas holidays
provide prime examples of workers banding together to sort and load
impossible volumes of packages, including instances of senior managers
helping out at the conveyor belts when there was no other way to get the job
done. Drivers describe making their deliveries when bad weather kept FedEx
and Airborne Express off the roads. Experienced drivers vividly recall their
first days on the job, when the workload seemed not just difficult but nearly
impossible. Ken Black, who has been driving a package car in the Greensboro,
North Carolina, area for more than two decades, says that the best advice he
got from veterans when he started was "Don't quit at the end of the day,
wait until the next morning." They knew he would be tempted to give up,
as they had been. Even with that advice, Black says, his first day of making
solo deliveries, a Friday, was almost his last: "I got lost; at
nine-thirty at night I was still trying to deliver packages. I got back to
the center so late, there was nobody there to tell I was quitting." Over
the weekend, Black recovered and drove the route on his own. Monday went a
little better, and twenty-two years later he is still at it. The
very difficulty of the work draws people together. Being able to "hack
it," showing the strength: and persistence the work demands day after
day, defines what it means to be "a real UPSer." Displaying those
qualities generally trumps ethnicity or background when it comes to gaining
acceptance or respect. The
focus on difficult work and the clarity about what it requires have helped
this widely dispersed global company of 3 70,000 maintain its culture and
sense of cohesion over decades of growth and change. There are other sources
of unity, some of them viable and symbolic. Like any uniform, the brown
uniform worn by every driver represents membership in a collective
enterprise, commonality over individuality. The shared, explicit standards
and practices that define many jobs at UPS also contribute to unity. All
drivers go through the same extensive training to learn the "340
methods"—detailed standard techniques designed to ensure safe, prompt
deliveries. A
number of less tangible factors contribute to the connectedness and coherence
of the UPS culture—to its social capital. Many of them are the same as the
important sources of social connection in other organizations we have looked
at that, in most ways, seem very different from this one: Valley Interfaith
and HUCTW are two examples. Like them, UPS is rich in conversation and
storytelling. Like them, it devotes much effort to finding and developing
leadership ability in its members. To a remarkable extent in a company
characterized by standard practices, it allows and encourages decision making
at all levels. As Valley Interfaith and HUCTW exemplify relational
organization, UPS exemplifies relational work. As Ernie Cortes says,
"The answer is relationships." For
a large, global company that values efficiency almost to the point of obsession,
UPS is surprisingly hospitable to face-to-face conversation. Every morning,
in every UPS hub and center, drivers gather for a brief prework communication
meeting, or PCM, before they go out on the road. Everyday, all around the
country, drivers meet at lunchtime in parks and parking lots to talk, mixing
social conversation with works: veterans help newcomers find obscure
addresses or solve other problems; the drivers exchange missorted packages or
balance their remaining loads to make sure everything gets delivered on
time. Hub and center managers are Out
on the floor, talking with the people they supervise. (Managers who hide in
their offices are noted and criticized.) District and regional managers spend
much of their time traveling to work sites in their areas of responsibility.
Being there, shaking people's hands, asking them about their work, and
talking directly to them about company policies and expectations is the norm.
Paul Funari says that he brings together the staffs he manages in Maryland and
Atlanta every month so that they can have ongoing direct contact. One
senior manager remarks, "We are not a memo kind of company" and
former CEO Jim Kelly says, "I don't even know the phone numbers of the
people on our management committee because I never pick up the phone if
they're in the office. We just walk into each other's offices when we need to
talk." Like
other large companies, UPS uses e-mail to distribute data and information,
and it tracks package movements, electronically, but, unlike many firms, it
does not see electronic (or even phone) communication as a substitute, for
face-to-face contact. It does not go in for virtual teams, which many
organizations have embraced in the name of speed and economy. (Funari's
monthly meetings would be considered an unnecessary expense in many large
companies today. Those companies would opt for conference balls instead.) But
building and maintaining the trusting relationships on which the company
depends require more direct connection. A
lot of the conversation takes the form of storytelling. Some of the stories
are formalized. At Jim Casey Night at the annual senior managers' meeting,
current leaders recall and discuss aspects of the founder's work and the
values inherent in them. Veteran drivers recount tales of their early
difficulties to encourage newcomers and to communicate some of the tricks of
the trade. They also recall the veterans who shared stories with them when
they were new; the tales, for instance, of winter deliveries in rural
Wisconsin that include tips for preventing ice from forming on the steering
wheel and how you are likely to find your farmer-customers at different
places, depending on the weather. Longtime managers tell stories of their own
experiences as package handlers or drivers twenty or more years earlier. It
is a way of creating a connection with people currently doing the work by
building credibility: managers demonstrate that they know what the job is
like. Valley
Interfaith, and HUCTW build strong relationships in part by putting decision
making in the hands of members and by developing leaders from among their
memberships. In addition to believing that members know the most about their
own needs and problems, the professional organizers recognize the role genuine
participation and shared power play in relationships of trust; just giving
matching orders to people is unlikely to create
commitment and connection. UPS
seems an unlikely environment for encouraging employee decision making. The
company's unambiguous aims and its standard practices seem to leave little room
for autonomy or even choice. The "340 methods," for instance) spell
out drivers' actions in extraordinary detail, even instructing them to insert
the key in the ignition with the right hand while fastening the seat belt
with the left to save a second or two of time. Bat on larger issues and
within the framework of these standard techniques, the drivers decide how
best to get their work done. So when a major customer in the Boston area
requests an earlier pickup and delivery time, the center manager asks the
driver how he thinks he might provide the requested service and still serve
his other customers. Similarly, part-time package sorters decide when they
should leave their posts to help a coworker who is falling behind; they do
not need management permission. In a way, having clear norms and goals frees
up people at all levels to make decisions consistent with accomplishing their
tasks. A driver comments, "I'm not going to call my supervisor to ask if
l should go back to pickup a package later in the day. I already know what
he'll say.” UPS
is no democracy, but trusting the people who do the work to make the
decisions necessary to get it done has been part of the company's culture for
a long time. In 1956, long before business thinkers began talking about
empowerment and distributed decision making, then-CEO George D. Smith said: It should be noted that it is considered desirable to have authority for decisions and actions as far down the line as possible. This is decentralization of authority in contrast to autocratic, centralized big-boss control. In this way, decisions should be more in keeping with the needs of the job, which have a better chance of being known where and when the needs occur. Leadership development—providing opportunities
for people to advance within the company-is a key goal. Like Valley
Interfaith organizers, who continually seek new leadership talent, UPS managers
are on the lockout for the hourly workers who get the respect and attention
of their peers and may make good future managers. Promotion from within
remains the norm. The overwhelming majority of the senior managers who attend
the annual management meeting have been with UPS more than twenty years. The
annual Employee Relations Index survey, taken voluntarily by more than 85
percent of employees focuses on questions of opportunity and recognition: Is
good work recognized? Are managers open to new ideas? Are opportunities for
advancement available? Managers are required to address problems indicated by
survey responses immediately. In
recent years, business journals have announced that loyalty is dead, that
each employee should think of, himself as a "company of one,"
developing critical skills that will allow him. to jump from organization to
organization whenever a better offer comes along' or when he
loses his job. The widespread firing of employees that many organizations
consider the first step to lower costs and increase profits-the dreaded
downsizing—lends some credence to the death-of-loyalty idea. Although UPS has
temporarily laid off workers when its volume of work dipped, it has always
hired them back, often within days, usually within weeks. It fires employees
only if it judges that they are not performing adequately, never for the
purpose of shrinking the workforce or (as is the case with some organizations
that practice "rank and yank") firing the lowest-rated 10 percent
of workers every year, using fear to keep employees up to snuff. UPS
recognizes the mutuality of loyalty—you have to give it to get it—and eschews
the downsizing and devil-take-the-hindmost firing policies that damage
connection, disrupting networks of relationships. The expectation that
employees (with the exception of most part-time package handlers) will make UPS
their lifetime career and that their commitment to the company will be
rewarded by the company’s commitment to them is the foundation of the
organization's social capital. Building community is hard work, and the twelve
case studies in Better
Together don’t represent finished success stories. The work remains
ongoing, and the dynamics change when different people engage or disengage in
the process. There’s richness to the range of communities described from
branch libraries in Chicago to school kids in Wisconsin who are discovering
what it takes to get things done in their community. In every story, there’s
something to think about and to learn. Steve Hopkins, September 23, 2003 |
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ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the October 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Better
Together.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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