Management as a Liberal Art Research Institute

Transformation of a Bystander

Michael Cortrite, Ph.D.

PUBLISHED:

May 16, 2022

What Do Being a Bystander, Moral Injury, and Purpose in Life, Have in Common?

 

In the 1960s, when I began my career as a police officer, I was initially shocked at the overt culture of racism, intolerance, and discrimination that I saw. My experience as a young police officer was that the “N” word was openly used and people of color were often victims of discrimination and excessive force. Women, gays, and other minorities could be the objects of jokes and disdain. Unfortunately, I believe this behavior continues to this day, although less overt and less often.

 

I put part of the blame for this culture on the word loyalty. Part of my unofficial training to become a police officer was that law enforcement officers are a “thin blue line” who protect society from chaos. We have to be loyal to each other; “have each other’s backs”; and “take care of our brother officers”. The effect of this “training” was that if a “brother officer” got carried away and used excessive force on an arrestee or other misconduct, other officers witnessing this excessive force would be “loyal” and not intervene or report this conduct to anyone.

 

Personally, I was programmed growing up to think of loyalty as an absolute moral value. It was only later in life that I realized that loyalty is a good value only if one is loyal to an ideal or loyal to an ethical organization. When I first heard the Samuel Johnson quote, “Patriotism, the last refuge of the scoundrel”, I realized that the same can be said of loyalty. Police culture was using the “value” of loyalty to cover up illegal activity.

 

The unwritten rule that a police officer should not turn in a fellow officer for misconduct was enforced by the knowledge that an officer who did report misconduct would be ostracized, potentially terminated, or force to resign. The movie, Serpico, directed by Sidney Lumet, based on the true story of an idealistic New York City police officer, Frank Serpico, was released in 1973. The story describes how Serpico tried to fight bribery and excessive force corruption and was forced off the department. My experiences as a police officer lead me to believe that the events depicted in the movie are accurate. One of the last lines in the movie was a statement from Serpico: “The problem is that the atmosphere does not yet exist in which honest police officers can act without fear of ridicule or reprisal from fellow officers”. Serpico believed that the majority of police officers are not corrupt, but that this majority is afraid of exposing the few officers who are corrupt.

 

My experience is that very few officers engage in misconduct, but the corrupt officers are allowed to continue their illegal activities because the rest of the officers choose to be bystanders, rather than report the few corrupt officers. At the Museum of Tolerance, where I am a facilitator, one of the main lessons we pass on to people is that being a bystander is not a benign act. Adolph Hitler could not have perpetrated the Holocaust if the majority of the citizens of Germany did not choose to be bystanders. They chose not to protest when their Jewish neighbors were brutalized and killed. Albert Einstein said, “The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing”.

 

So, when I was a police officer, where did I stand on reporting officers for misconduct? I’m sorry to say that for most of my career I chose to be a bystander. After I got over my misplaced ideas about loyalty as a value, I believed that If I reported misconduct by a fellow officer, that I would not be allowed to remain employed as a police officer. I chose to remain a police officer.

 

A tipping point for me about exposing misconduct by police officers started when I was testifying in a civil lawsuit for police excessive force in the mid 1980s. I was asked by the plaintiff’s attorney if I ever witnessed excessive force by police officers. I said “yes”. I was asked when was the last time I witnessed excessive force and after some thought I answered that it was in approximately the year 1979. The next question was what did I do about it. I, sadly, had to answer, “nothing”. This exchange caused me to rethink my stand on police excessive force. I came to the realization that in the several years since I was promoted to be a supervisor in 1981 I hadn’t witnessed any excessive force. I hadn’t realized that since I never witnessed excessive force any more, I had been assuming, possibly erroneously, that it suddenly stopped for some reason. Actually, I think the reason for this is that after being promoted, I was no longer trusted to not report officers who might use excessive force. No one would use excessive force while I was there. The only good news of all this was that just by my presence I was stopping any misconduct.

 

I was encouraged by this positional power I had, to influence whether or not officers used excessive force and decided that now was the time to take some action against it. I started speaking to officers at pre-shift roll call meetings on subjects such as respect and ethical behavior. Eventually, I organized department-wide workshops on diversity, ethics, and leadership. At a 16-hour workshop on diversity in 1993, I used the newly opened Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles for a 4-hour field trip. The Museum uses the Holocaust as an example of what can happen when people are intolerant and disrespectful of people who are different from them and how being a bystander only encourages evil acts.

 

After my diversity workshop was finished, I remained at the Museum as a volunteer and helped them create a statewide program for all police officers. This is now called Tools for Tolerance for Law Enforcement. It is funded by the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training and is one of the largest police training programs in California. 30 years later I still work there as a facilitator.

 

Maybe it’s wishful thinking or a rationalizing of my decision to be a bystander many years ago, but I would like to think that my almost 40 years of working with police officers to be more tolerant has made a difference. And I don’t think that would have been possible if I had chosen to do the right thing and violate the unofficial loyalty rule I was taught as a new police officer. I’m pretty sure I would have been terminated and forgotten.


Epilogue


A few years ago a friend told me about a new psychological field, Moral Injury, that was introduced in the 1990s. After researching this field, I began to realize that I had suffered a moral injury from all those years of being a bystander to police corruption. This injury is common among soldiers and police officers (Williamson, et al. 2018).

 

Moral injury is when one feels they have violated their conscience or moral compass when they take part in, witness, or fail to prevent an act that disobeys their own moral values or personal principles. The effects of moral injury can include feelings of guilt, shame, anger, sadness, anxiety, and disgust; beliefs about being bad, damaged, or unworthy; self-handicapping behaviors; loss of faith in people and avoidance of intimacy; and loss of religious faith; or loss of faith in humanity or a just world (Papadopoulos 2020).

 

I also realized that by serendipity or dumb luck, I had intuitively done something that gave my life a new purpose and meaning, and also allowed me to begin to heal from the moral injury I had suffered—I began working at the Museum of Tolerance. I didn’t realize it then, but I now realize that my meaning or purpose in life is to help improve law enforcement effectiveness through dialogue with police officers.

 

Peter Drucker, a management consultant known as the father of modern management, besides advising corporations, also advised people to manage themselves. In his essay, Managing Oneself (1999), Drucker said that people now stay in the workforce for 50 or more years and that people find the same occupation boring after 30 or 40 years. He proposed that people need a second career in order to stay engaged and active. He felt that workers should develop expertise in an area other than their primary occupation while they are still working in their first career. If they do this, they will be ready for a second meaningful and worthwhile career when the time comes. Drucker also talked about the importance of purpose in life and in business.

 

In an essay titled, How Will You Measure Your Life?, Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christiansen says, “Knowledge on the purpose of your life…is the single most important thing to learn. If a student doesn’t figure it out they will just sail off without a rudder and get buffeted in the very rough seas of life.” And, “Had I spent an hour each day learning the latest techniques of autocorrelation in regression analysis, I would have badly misspent my life. I apply the tools of econometrics a few times a year, but I apply my knowledge of the purpose of my life every day. It’s the single most useful thing I’ve ever learned.” (Christiansen 2010 p.5).

 

In my case, I started developing expertise in diversity, equity and inclusion in 1992 when I developed a 16-hour diversity workshop. I then helped the Museum of Tolerance develop a program to teach tolerance to police officers and stayed at the Museum as a volunteer to facilitate this program. By the time I was ready to retire from the police department, I had much expertise in facilitating diversity, equity, and inclusion workshops and made a smooth transition from the police department to the Museum of Tolerance.

 

Drucker was absolutely right about developing a new expertise and starting a second career. It helped me to stay engaged, active, and relevant after retirement and also helped me to start to heal from my moral injury of being a bystander fifty years ago.

 


References

 

Christiansen, Clayton M. 2010 How Will You Measure Your Life? HBRs 10 Must Reads On Managing Yourself Harvard Business School Publications

 

Drucker, Peter F. 2008, Managing Oneself, Harvard Business School Publications

 

Papadopoulos, Renos K. 2020, Moral Injury and Beyond: Understanding Human Anguish and Healing Traumatic Wounds, Routlege

 

Williamson, Victoria; Stevenlink, Sharon; Greenburg, Neil 2018, Occupational Moral Injury and Mental Health: Systematic Review and Meta-analysis British Journal of Psychiatry Vol. 212 Iss. 6

The Future of Knowledge Work: What Drucker can teach us

By Karen Linkletter Ph.D. • November 19, 2024
Interview with Karen Linkletter at the 16th Global Peter Drucker Forum 2024  Video Interview

The Specifics of Management of the Knowledge Worker

By Ryan Lee • November 7, 2024
Nowhere is management theory demanded more than in managing the knowledge worker, and yet nowhere is management theory more inadequate in addressing a field’s issues than in knowledge work. This is the point Peter Drucker posited in his work Management Challenges for the 21st Century (1991), and to resolve it he came up with six factors that determine the productivity of the management worker. Among these, his final point that management workers “must be treated as an ‘asset’ rather than a ‘cost’” by any given organization is an important concept1. While it only gradually emerged within management theory over the century, it is crucial for any employer and any government to understand and apply if they are to retain a competitive advantage going into the future. Historically, management theory has been about improving the output of the worker through banal efficiency: how to increase the production of steel per head, how to increase the production of cars per hour, how to minimize deficient products, etc. In all these considerations, the worker is a disposable resource. When he is hired, he is set to a particular task that is typically repetitive and thus easily taught, and when he is not needed because of shortcomings in his work, company difficulties, or automation, he is laid off. Referred to as “dumb oxen”, workers were seen in management theory as machines to have productivity squeezed out of. The shift from a majority manufacturing to service-based economy during the first half of the twentieth century changed this dynamic to some extent. The American postwar economic boom introduced the office worker as a common source of employment. This trend continued throughout the conglomerate era of the 1960s and was helped by the decline of the American manufacturing industry in the 1970s. Now in a stage dominated by service and knowledge work, the American economy must approach management differently. The aforementioned cost-asset shift is a demonstration of why this is so, as Drucker’s emphasis on the knowledge worker’s autonomy means that they wield control, not only within their job but over who they should work for as well. This in addition to the high-capital nature of knowledge workers means that the old management theory approach to labor as disposable will backfire catastrophically for any company that tries it with their knowledge workers. It is also important to remember the demographic trends of the United States, and more so the world, in considering why the cost-asset shift is vital. For all of human history until some fifty years ago, population was considered to be in tandem with economic power, given larger populations yielded larger labor forces and consumer markets. Economic growth was thus also correlated with population growth, demonstrated by the historic development of Europe and the United States and the more recent examples of the developing world. Consequently, the worldwide decline in fertility rates, and the decline in population numbers in some developed countries, signals economic decline for the future. In the labor market, smaller populations mean fewer jobs that produce for and service fewer people. Although the knowledge worker has grown in proportion to the total labor market, these demographic declines will affect knowledge workers as well, meaning employers will have a vested interest in retaining their high-capital labor. To enforce this, the cost-asset shift will have to come into play. The wants and needs of the knowledge worker pose a unique challenge in the field of management. Autonomy, for the first time, can be regarded as a significant factor affecting all other aspects of this labor base. What good does a large salary provide a knowledge worker if they don’t feel that they are welcome at an institution? How would they perceive that their work is not being directed towards productive pursuits at their corporation, especially given the brain work and dedication given to it? Of course, the fruits of one’s labor has been a contentious issue in management ever since compensation and workers’ rights became a universal constant with the Industrial Revolution, but this is augmented by the knowledge worker’s particular method of generating value. Given that Drucker poses their largest asset and source of value as their own mind, they will intrinsically have a special attachment to their work almost as their brainchild. Incentivizing the knowledge worker is also only one part of this picture. Per Drucker, the knowledge worker’s labor does not follow the linear relationship between quantity invested and returned. The elaborate nature of knowledge work makes it heavily dependent upon synergy: the right combination of talent can grow an organization by leaps and bounds, while virtually incompatible teams or partnerships can render all potential talent useless. And the human capital cost of the knowledge worker, both in their parents and the state educating them and in cost to their employers, is astronomical compared to all previous kinds of labor. In conclusion, the needs and wants of the knowledge worker must be met adequately, especially in the field of management. Management must almost undergo a revolution to adapt to this novel challenge, for the knowledge worker is the future of economic productivity in the developed world. Those employers that successfully accommodate the demands of this class of talent will eventually reign over those that do not accept that this is the direction economic productivity is headed.  References Drucker, P. F. (1991) Management Challenges for the 21st Century. Harper Business.

The Wisdom and Continuing Relevance of Peter Drucker

By Michael Cortrite Ph.D. • November 7, 2024
What is wisdom? The dictionary says it is knowledge of what is true and right coupled with just judgment as to action. Jennifer Rowley reports that it is the “ability to act critically or practically in a given situation. It is based on ethical judgment related to an individual's belief system.” (Rowley 2006 p. 255). So, wisdom seems to be about deciding on or doing an action based on moral or ethical belief in helping other people. This clearly describes Peter Drucker and his often prescient ideas For the 100 th anniversary of Peter Drucker’s birth, Harvard Business Review dedicated its November 2009 magazine to Drucker. In one of the articles about Drucker by Rosabeth Moss Kanter (2009 p. 1), What Would Peter Say? Kanter posits that, Heeding Peter Drucker's wisdom might have helped us avoid—and will help us solve numerous challenges, from restoring trust in business to tackling climate change. He issued early warnings about excessive executive pay, the auto industry’s failure to adapt and innovate, competitive threats from emerging markets, and the perils of neglecting nonprofit organizations and other agents of societal reform. Meynhardt (2010) calls Drucker a towering figure in Twentieth Century management. He says no other writer has had such an impact. He is well-known to practitioners and scholars for his practical wisdom and common sense approach to management as a liberal art. Drucker believed that there is no how-to solution for management practice and education. Doing more of “this” and less of “that” and vice versa is not how Drucker suggests managers do their work. Rather, Drucker relies more on morality and the virtue of practical wisdom to solve problems related to organizations. The virtue that Drucker talks about cannot be taught. It must be experienced and self-developed over time. A good example of this is Drucker’s Management by Objectives (MBO). Drucker does not give technical advice on how to initiate MBO. Rather he wisdomizes his moral convictions that integrating personal needs for autonomy with the quest of submitting one’s efforts to a higher principle (helping people) ensures performance by converting objective needs into personal goals. (Meynhardt, 2010). Peter Drucker published thirty-eight articles in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) and seven times won the McKinsey Award presented annually to the author of the best article published during the previous year in HBR. No other person has won as many McKinsey awards as Drucker The former editor-in-chief of Harvard Business Review, Thomas A. Stewart, quotes Peter Drucker; “The few of us who talked of management forty years ago were considered more or less deranged.” Stewart says that this was essentially correct. Harvard Business Review's very mission is to improve management practice. Stewart says this mission is inconceivable without Drucker’s work. Drucker’s work in management planted ideas that are as fruitful today as they ever were. Stewart posits that each year, managers discover extraordinary and immediate relevance in articles and books that were written before they were born or even before their parents were born. Stewart (2016) tries to answer the questions: Why does Drucker’s work endure? and Why is Drucker still relevant? First, was Drucker’s talent for asking the right questions. He had an instinct for being able to not let the urgent drive out the important, for seeing the trees, not just the forest. This allowed him to calmly ask pertinent questions that encouraged clients to find the proper course to take. Secondly, Drucker was able to see whole organizations. Instead of focusing on small particular problems. Ducker had the ability to find the overarching problem as well. Stewart uses Drucker’s 1994 HBR article, The Theory of the Business to make this point. Many people were trying to analyze the problems of IBM and General Motors by looking for root causes and trying to fix the blame. Drucker, on the other hand, argued correctly that the theories and assumptions on which they had managed successfully for many years were outdated. This article is as relevant today as it was in 1994 because Drucker took the “big picture view.” And no one else has ever been so skillful at describing it. Thirdly, starting in 1934, Drucker spent two years at General Motors with the legendary Alfred P. Sloan, immersed in the workings of the automaker and learning the business from within. This allowed him to talk with authority, but he has always stayed “street smart and wise.” This mentoring helped give Drucker the gift of being able to reason inductively and deductively. He could infer a new principle or a theory from a set of data or being confronted with a particular problem; he could find the right principle to apply to solve it. Drucker’s first article published in HBR, Management Must Manage, challenged managers to learn their profession not in terms of prerogatives but in terms of their responsibilities, to assume the burden of leadership rather than the mantle of privilege. Many in the management/leadership field probably found Drucker to be “deranged,” but in 2024, this is important advice for leader (Stewart 2006). Just a few more of Drucker’s ideas that seemed well outside the mainstream when he proposed them but are standard practice today include: Managing Oneself, Privatization, Decentralization, Knowledge Workers, Management by Objectives, Charismatic Leadership Being Overrated, CEO Outsize Pay Packages, and Enthusiasm of the Work of the Salvation Army (Rees, 2014). Clearly, Drucker remains relevant! References: Kanter, R. 2009. What would Peter say? Harvard Business Review. November, 2009. Meynhardt, T. 2010. The practical wisdom of Peter Drucker: Roots in the Christian tradition. Journal of Management Development Vol. 29. No. 7/8. Rees, M. 2014 The wisdom of Peter Drucker. Wall Street Journal. Dec. 12, 2014. Rowley, J. 2006. Where is the knowledge that we have lost in knowledge? Journal of Documentation. Vol. 62, Iss. 2. 251-270. Stewart, T. 2006. Classic Drucker. Editor Thomas A. Stewart. Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation.
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