The Correct Staffing Profile for an Aerospace Company Post-COVID 19 Through the Five Frames

Wade Westwood

ORGL 600 Foundations of Leadership

Gonzaga University

Dr. MICHAEL Carey

13 June 2021

Organizational Problem

2020 saw a decline in air travel that was reminiscent of post 9/11. For the commercial aerospace structure programs in our company’s portfolio, customer demand dropped by around 70% from highs in 2019. The organizational problem in 2021 is determining what the organization’s staffing level should be. Some things to consider are future demand rates, the potential loss of skilled employees, the need to drive shareholder value year over year, and the expectation of being a good corporate citizen within our community. The five frames of leadership all view the problem and the solution differently.

Rational Frame

The leader that has his or her thinking rooted in the Rational Frame would simply be guided by basic business math, Profit = Sales – Cost. The leader would come to the conclusion that in order to be competitive, they must investigate the income statement and find opportunities to reduce the cost of goods sold. The Rational Frame leader would consider all costs and structures, because, as Carey (1999) states, “organizational problems usually reflect an inappropriate structure and can be resolved by redesign and reorganization” (p. 52).  The Rational Frame leader would likely start by examining the biggest cost drivers and work their way in descending order, including material costs, direct labor, leasing the production facility, benefits and wages, maintaining equipment and utility costs.

The de-humanizing side effect of the Rational Frame is highlighted by the fact that the calculation for the right amount of heads can be determined by dividing the rate of customer demand by the Total Cycle Time to produce a product; any additional heads would be considered management discretion to cover for things like vacations or sick leave. These excesses would likely be viewed as waste by the Rational Frame leader.

Human Frame

The Human Frame leader “focuses on the people who do the work, and on their emotional, psychological, and physical health” (Carey, 1999, p.59). The Human Frame can be further subdivided into two major viewpoints, Theory X and Theory Y, both unified by the view that “the organization is a vehicle for satisfying healthy human needs” (Carey, 1999, p.57).

The Theory X Human Frame manager believes that their employees want security above anything else (Carey, 1999). If employees value security the most, a reduction in force will send shockwaves through the remaining workforce. People will witness that the organization’s responsibility to maintain its employees’ emotional and psychological health is not greater than the other responsibilities of the organization, like delivering a profit to the shareholder.

Carey (1999) observes the Theory Y Human Frame manager believes “Commitment to objectives is a function of the rewards associated with their achievement” (p.60). If this is the case for a struggling business, then the employees will recognize their reward as the ability to keep their job. This will not work. The employee will “exercise self-direction and self control in the service of objectives to which they are committed” (Carey, 1999, p.60). The problem is that the objective to which they are committed is the objective of keeping their job, not necessarily keeping the company profitable. This means working less efficiently, allowing the work to fill the time rather than the time to fill the work.

Both the Theory X and the Theory Y Human Frame managers view the world from a perspective of “the needs of healthy people and the goals of functional organizations must be integrated in order for both to be productive” (Carey, 1999, p.50).

Systems Frame

The Systems Frame leader wants the organization to auto-regulate itself similar to a living system, like how our bodies sweat when we become overheated. Carey (1999) states, “There should be a relationship between the organization and all aspects of its environment” (p.66).

The Systems Frame leader would probably recommend that no formal reduction in force take place. Rather, the organization will right size itself over time as attrition occurs. Thinking through the inputs and outputs of how this self-regulating process could work, an employee that shows up to work every day only to stand around due to low customer demand would likely have low job satisfaction, and would ultimately seek to correct this low satisfaction by applying for jobs at other organizations. Every time an employee left, the workload of the remaining employees would incrementally increase and job satisfaction would rise, until a stasis developed. 

The downfall of the Systems Frame in this scenario is the lack of timeliness. A public business must disclose their financials quarterly, and allowing the above scenario the time to play out could take too long. Everyone could be out of a job if the stasis was not found fast enough.

Political Frame

“The individual who uses the Political Frame embraces conflict as the inevitable consequence of organizational life” (Carey, 1999, p 73). The leader who views the world through the Political Frame will view the tensions caused by the question of right-sizing an organization’s staffing as just another opportunity for power to be wielded. For a leader in the Political Frame, if the question were not right sizing the staffing, it would be another question that allowed the opportunity for winners and losers to be established. 

“Organizations are made up of coalitions composed of individuals and interest groups who differ in their values, preferences, beliefs, information and perceptions of reality” (Carey, 1999, p. 75). The allies of a Political Frame leader regarding the staffing profile may also be his or her opponent regarding other organizational issues. The organizational interest groups are dynamic based on how power is being wielded at any given moment.

Cultural Frame

The leader who has a Cultural Frame of perceiving the world around him or her would point out that the company was originally founded to produce solid fuel rocket motors to government customers. The organization has a culture of technical problem solving through engineering and a cost plus business mentality. Business results have always been a by-product of good engineering. 

Carey (1999) states, “the key to understanding the Cultural Frame is that it explains the behavior not of individuals, but rather of individuals as members of a group” (p. 83).  A Culture Frame leader might argue that driving profitability is not a core competency of this organization’s structure, so potentially nothing should be done in terms of right sizing the staffing. Instead, the company should find more technically difficult problems that need solving to keep the organization’s people occupied.

The Organizational Challenges Created by the Five Frames

Palmer (2017) states, “it is our dominant mode of knowing, a mode promoted with such arrogance that it is hard to see the fear behind it – until one remembers that arrogance often masks fear” (p.51). If everyone has a dominant mode of knowing the world, rooted in one of the five frames presented in Heraclitean Fire, it is firstly due to their arrogance that they do not realize their own ignorance of the other four frames. If after becoming aware of the other four frames, they still do not seek to understand the perspectives of the other frames, it is out of fear. Their way of understanding, viewing and acting upon the world around them has gotten them this far in the organization, so why question themselves now?

Even if a leader has not read Carey’s Heraclitean Fire to know that there are five frames through which to view the world around them, their interaction and potential collaboration with other leaders and followers should at least inform them that other perspectives exist. Therefore, it is out of fear that a leader would think that their perspective is the only perspective worth considering. 

Just because a leader is fearful, and therefore conceited with regards to their interpretation of the organization’s problems and solutions, does not mean that the leader is ill-intended. Due to the additional pressures and workload associated with holding a leadership position in an organization, it is likely the exact opposite scenario – the leader is so well-intended that they are ignoring their fear in the spirit of progress. The ignorant leader will still try to direct the organization by depositing their knowledge. Freire (2018) asserts, “knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing” (p.72).

“One of the characteristics of oppressive cultural action, which is almost never perceived by the dedicated but naive professionals who are involved, is the emphasis on a focalized view of problems rather than on seeing them as dimensions of a totality” (Freire, 2018, p. 141). This miopic view of small problems and correspondingly small solutions comes at the expense of what is best for the organization, including all of the leaders and all of the followers and all of the problems and all of the solutions that are inherent to any organization.

The easy answer to the problems created by the fact that there are five frames present in every organization is to have one ultimate leader. The key is to put in place one executive leader, one ship captain, one head coach who has ultimate authority. The thinking is that this person will have the ability to minimize the problem-solving churn that is caused when many opinions are present. However, Friere (2018) states that, “conquered adherence is not adherence; it is ‘adhesion’ of the vanquished to the conqueror, who prescribes the options open to the former. Authentic adherence is the free coincidence of choices; it cannot occur apart from communication among people, mediated by reality” (p. 168). 

The only way the “one ultimate leader” approach works is if the organization has resigned itself to the entropy that Carey describes in Chapter Seven of the Heraclitean Fire, and Freire (2018) reaffirms, “as the oppressor consciousness, in order to dominate, tries to deter the drive to search, the restlessness, and the creative power which characterizes life, it kills life” (p. 59). Thus, the organization is ultimately doomed to fizzle out by stifling dialogue and creativity. The greatest objective then for the one ultimate leader is to delay the organization’s death as long as possible. 

How We Can Work to Resolve The Inherent Dysfunction

What is the catalyzing reason for leaders to want to resolve the inherent dysfunction that comes with different people being aligned with the different frames for viewing the world around them? As Palmer (2017) states, “True community in any context requires a transcendent third thing that holds both me and thee accountable to something beyond ourselves” (p.119). For leaders of an organization, this is probably a simple question with a complex, multi-layered response. For example, the first thing leaders of a business might be able to agree on is that their first goal is to make money. Over time, and once trust is established, the leaders may be able to give secondary and tertiary responses to which they agree, like being good citizens of the community, delivering a product or service that makes their customers happy, and even deeper still to leave the world a better place for generations to come. 

Palmer (2017) notes that, “Good education is more process than product” (p.96). Resolving the dysfunctions caused by the five frames is a process, and having one “third thing” is enough to get started. “Although trust is basic to dialogue, it is not an a priori condition of the latter; it results from the encounter in which persons are co-subjects in denouncing the world, as part of the world’s transformation” (Freire, 2018, p. 169). 

After a “third thing” is established to serve as a north star for the organization, the process of transcending one’s framework can begin. Palmer invokes physicist Niels Bohr to explain that, “the opposite of a true statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth can be another profound truth” (Palmer, 2017, p. 65). Comprehending this statement is the first step to the never-ending journey of transcendence through dialogue.

Dialogue is the opposite of what Palmer (2017) describes as the current state of pedagogy, “it assumes that the teacher has all the knowledge and the students have little or none, that the teacher must give and the students must take, that the teacher sets all the standards and the students must measure up” (p. 118).

Dialoguing as both leaders and followers involves struggling to understand a frame that is foreign and wrong to a leader’s native frame. Palmer (2017) states, “we will not be able to teach in the power of paradox until we are willing to suffer the tension of opposites, until we understand that such suffering is neither to be avoided nor merely to be survived, but must be actively embraced for the way it expands our own hearts” (p.88). To suffer the tension of opposites is not to acquiesce, but rather to challenge and to provide and receive the argument for and against. There is no learning if either party deems an authentic question too provocative or uncivil. “The notion of civility consistently establishes relations of power whenever it is invoked. Moreover, it is always the powerful who determine its meaning – one that, whatever its specific contents, demeans and delegitimizes those who do not meet its test.” (Cortina et al., 2019, p.  360).

Palmer (2017) agrees that cordiality can come at great risk to an organization, stating, “the conventional norm of “making nice” with each other, folded into the professional norm of competition, creates an ethos in which it feels dangerous to speak or to listen” (p. 155). Leaders, therefore, must embrace dialogical communication and foster an environment of co-learning, not only among themselves but for the entire organization. “One of the most important issues in effectively co-creating learning and teaching is good communication: clearly articulating what co-creation means and requires as well as outlining the broader benefits and complexities involved” (Bovill et al., 2016, Higher Education).

The Right Staffing Profile

To provide a headcount answer that is timely enough to ensure relevant business impact, the “one ultimate leader”, in this case the business unit Vice-President and General Manager, should rely on his or her Rational Frame employees to provide an exact number for what it takes to do the job.

This should help the executive leader to answer the question of “What should the staffing level be in order to be profitable?”, but before implementing the new structure, he or she should employ the dialogical process and use the views of the other frames from the leadership team to create the communication and implementation plan, answering “Who should remain an employee?”, “How are we communicating this to employees?”, and “What do the employees need to know about our staffing decision?”.

References

Bovill C., Cook-Sather, A., Felten, P., Millard, L., & Moore-Cherry, N. (2016). Addressing potential challenges in co-creating learning and teaching: overcoming resistance, navigating institutional norms and ensuring inclusivity in student-staff partnerships. Higher Education, 71(2), 195-208. 10.1007/s10734-015-9896-4

Carey, M.R., (1999). Heraclitean Fire: Journeying on the path of leadership. Kendall/Hunt.

Cortina, L., Cortina, M., & Cortina, J. (2019). Regulating rude: Tensions between free speech and civility in academic employment. Industrial and Organizational Psychology. 2019(12), 357-375. 10.1017/iop.2019.63

Freire, P. (2018). Pedagogy of the oppressed (50th Anniversary ed.). Bloomsbury.

Palmer, P.J. (2017). The courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s life. Jossey-Bass.