DO or GIVE: “WORKER” SEMANTICS

We get our word “do” from Latin. I was taught that it meant “give” - as in DOnate, whereas it has strayed through centuries in English to mean the opposite of idleness. I prefer to think of it as meaning both “do” and “give”. When I work for somebody, it feels better to know I am “giving” my employer something, rather than merely killing time. Just as surely, when idle, I can’t be giving at all. That said, idleness has its place. Bertrand Russell wrote In Praise of Idleness, not intending “salaries for idlers”!

In the same way, the words that came into our language courtesy of the Industrial Revolution are growing boring and tiresome. Take “manager”. The root is also from Latin: “manus” is a hand, and I suppose we must believe that managers “handle” things. Usually, they “manipulate”. Their task became to wheedle ever more work out of people, calling this “productivity”. If ever a word needed to be “decolonialised” it is that one!

For a long time, managers came from the ranks - after proving themselves “on the job”. That didn’t always make them good managers (see Dr Laurence J Peter, The Peter Principle). However, they were more effective than now in one sense: they were not asking others to do something they themselves could not do.

When managers were no longer expected to perform what they expected from others, but rather “specialise” in management, respect was lost and it all began to unravel. It is difficult to respect someone who can’t do what s/he is asking you to do.

Ricardo Semler (Maverick, Seven Day Weekend) Brazilian industrialist famously fired 95% of management within his first month of taking over his father’s heavy industry factory. Soon after that, he published earnings of all employed there, for all to see. It did narrow the wage gap, but having people swap roles and jobs for a time resulted in mutual respect. Floor sweepers notably did not in the slightest wish to ever attempt to understand upper management roles, (nor even covet their salary levels) after trying to perform in upper management!

For the sake of decolonising, and as we enter 4IR (Fourth Industrial Revolution) can we replace some tired old industrial words? What about using:

• doer

• maker

• chatter

• decider

DOER (Do-er)

This is someone who does ‘more of the same’ (and is arguably happy with that) daily. S/he is happy with learning new things from time to time, but unhappy with taking on too much complexity. It replaces wordls like ‘labourer’, ‘worker’.

MAKER

This is someone who is also a doer, but tends to put something new into action. S/he is a creator but not necessarily a designer (only). It replaces a word like ‘implementer’.

CHATTER

This is a playful communicator, who prefers the world of ideas, and loves to juggle them and come up with solutions for (sometimes radical and/or new) things. S/he tends to move around a lot, and to ask “why not?” rather than “why”. These people need to own and enjoy chatting and the value of lightness and play, instead of being guiltily glued to a desk “looking busy”! Chatter replaces ‘communicator’.

DECIDER

This a person happiest when s/he has to decide things. S/he has in the first place, the very precious skill of listening and the equally special skills of empathy, understanding and “response-ability”. Decider replaces ‘manager’ and ‘co-ordinator’.

AWARENESS, QUALITY

In all four of these positions, we feel it most important to foster and reward “awareness”. If people understand that there is poverty, and why and where it comes from, they have half a chance to help us free people from it. Being unaware of it tends to go hand in hand with accepting it as inevitable (nearly always wrong). in the 1980s, a negotiator tackled a worker question, about “transformation not happening soon enough” by promptly asking “what are you doing to bring about transformation?”! These things are for all of us to do, in our own ways. We believe if someone has a better understanding of issues, s/he is better placed to deal with them, and less inclined to leave thenm to someone else.

RESPONSE-ABILITY

Working is a given. We find everyone gets down to it with a will, so we prefer to see a person as a responder. There is a timetable, or diary, and s/he responds to that time of day. For example, our cows are milked first thing in the morning, before we get into the veld or whatever. So, we resond to that time of the day by milking (just as our response to 10h30 is to have tea!). It follows that it is just as easy to reward people for whom they are as for what they do.

Maeder has evolved over the years a Discretionary Award system against which people are rewarded for quality as well as quantity. They are rewarded for awareness of issues, for their specialness and their special accomplishments, in place of a dull count of tasks ticked off.