Manpower

by Lincoln C. Andrews

It appears that industry is quite awake to this fact to-day. Industrial literature abounds with considerations of the humanity of labor. Employers have come to realize that the purchase of labor is a contract for future delivery, and that what they get from it will depend not so much on the bare delivery of the labor they have purchased, as on the continuing spirit in which it is daily and hourly delivered. The employer knows that he wants the loyal, enthusiastic, co-operative service of his employees, and that he cannot get it for money alone. He therefore adopts such organization and policy in his business as will make possible the loyal co-operation of all, and then attempts to have his men so handled as to get this result.

The latter consideration is vital, for the best of policies may be ruined by the meanness or incompetence of subordinate executives. The morale officer of one of our largest corporations has recently stated that he has no trouble with the employers or with the men, but that he has all kinds of trouble with the superintendents and foremen, who seem unable to understand how to handle the men. Knowledge of leadership is essential not alone for the chief, but even more for his subordinates who are in direct contact with his men.

It is easy to say that leaders must so handle their men as to inspire loyalty and enthusiastic service—but most of them will have to be taught how to do this. That was the failure in army training. The manuals all prescribed that the officer must so handle his men as to build up discipline and a high morale, but nowhere were there any instructions as to how to do it. The art was handed along by tradition, often incorrectly. War brought the need for quickly training hundreds of thousands of leaders, and it was found necessary both here and in foreign armies to reduce this art of handling men to written principles which the young aspirants could study and learn to apply. This was found very efficient in the army. It may well be equally efficient in civil life. The ghastly wastes from poor leadership and consequent inefficient work, the heartburnings and discontent and lack of high purpose which are so common in every field to-day, certainly call for some attention if we are to meet successfully the tests which the next few years have in store. We have got to quit looking for cure-alls and get down to work; and work efficiently and happily, knowing again the homely joy of doing things well and the satisfaction of accomplishment.

Our leaders must be "good leaders." This does not mean only employers and their subordinates, or only labor leaders. It means every man in the nation who is responsible for the control and work of others. These men are all leaders in our sense, each one responsible for the effects of his leadership on the members of his group, be it large or small. Let these men sense their responsibility, realize that the quality of their leadership has far reaching effects upon character as well as upon immediate accomplishment, and they may easily by personal example and thoughtful conduct of office arouse a tide of loyal service which will sweep discontent and palliatives into oblivion and fairly flood the country with sanity, prosperity and happy living.

As a first step toward this, no matter what his business or profession, each leader should realize that in controlling the work of his men he is handling human tools—sentient human beings, like himself. Here is a craftsmanship worthy of study. One may not hope successfully to handle these tools, hit or miss, without special thought or training. Yet many have never thought of this, or considered what it means to them personally as leaders. If they would do this alone, they would find themselves self-prompted to such conduct of office as would give far better results. When a man is charged with directing the efforts of certain individuals to a given end, these individuals become instruments in his hand for the accomplishment of this purpose. They are his tools. He will find them sensitive, difficult instruments, capable of splendid accomplishment if skillfully handled, but blunt and ineffective in unskilled hands. Every leader should realize and continually think of this fact: My principal tools are human beings and I must think how to handle them as such.

If a man has won promotion to leadership, no matter in what field of activity—in sport, shop, office or the field—he may no longer win success by skill in using the tools he has been using. It is now his job to direct others in using them. These others, these human beings such as he was, are now to be his tools. And as he won his promotion by training his body, brain and nerves to use his original tools to best advantage, so now he will succeed as leader by learning to use skillfully these new human ones.

As a first step toward learning these tools, the leader should get at least a crude conception of what this human being really is, and how he is controlled in his daily walk. Let us therefore for a moment consider man the animal. We find him in his beginnings running naked and alone with the beasts in the primeval forest—without knowledge of community life, even of family life, and not knowing the use of human speech. But for his "will to improve" he was apparently no more highly endowed by nature than some of his fellow species. Yet that will to improve has in the processes of time enabled him to develop within himself his present marvelous organization of nerve centers and co-ordinated control, and through the power of his self-invented language to store his brain cells with the wisdom of the ages. Thus enabled to analyze and to reason, he has progressed step by step until he has reached his present mastery of the forces of nature. To-day he may fly in the air higher than the eagle, may work at will beneath the ocean, may sit at ease and listen to the natural voice of a friend through thousands of miles of distance, or may analyze the composition of the heavenly bodies and predict with accuracy their every movement. And what the race has thus accomplished in development through the ages, each man is privileged to accomplish in his lifetime. For he is born into the world with brain cells empty and with less nerve control than a kitten, but endowed with hereditary capacity and that wonderful will to improve, which enable him to talk and to read in early childhood, and to develop his faculties in time to a degree limited only by the determined purpose of his ambition.

Such is man in the outward manifestations of his prowess. Meantime he is a creature almost pathetically responsive to his inherent instincts and in his daily walk largely controlled by habit. It was the beneficent intention of Nature to leave man's mind free for the contemplation of higher things, free to form visions of better things and to reason out the means for attaining them. She therefore relieved his mind of the trivial cares of deciding just what to do in the thousands of cases for action in his daily life, and designed him to do all these normal things in response to impulses from natural instincts, or in unconscious obedience to the direction of habits which he commences to form in infancy and continues to form throughout his development.

So we find man a creature of almost unlimited capacity, but pathetically sensitive to his environment and treatment because so helplessly responsive to instincts and habits. And this capable yet sensitive animal, man, is to be an instrument in the hands of another, a man like himself, except that he has qualified to be the leader. How reasonable that this leader should have to give serious thought to this situation and seek to understand nature's powerful influences in guiding the actions of both himself and his men. What folly for him to expect to be able to handle them blindly, hit or miss, without consideration of man's peculiarities and the fundamental things that control him.