Tact

Extract from

Winfried Weber, Die Purpose-Wirtschaft, 2024, eBook (Amazon Kindle, http://tiny.cc/9eznzz) (Translation by the author)

“In answer to my advertisement, a motionless young man one morning, stood upon my office threshold, the door being open, for it was summer. I can see that figure now—pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn! It was Bartleby.”

Herman Melville, Bartleby, The Scrivener (1853)

In the first few days, Bartleby fulfills the boss's expectations. On the third day after his employment, however, Bartleby says the famous sentence in Melville's novel, "I would prefer rather not to" and from then on refuses to follow many of the unspoken instructions that apply in every working relationship.

Open conflicts between superiors and subordinates are rather rare and always imply a breakdown in power relations, writes Niklas Luhmann in "The New Boss".

"Power can be increased on both sides through trusting cooperation." This is why, according to Luhmann, the following applies in both directions: "The highest condition is tact: you have to treat the other person as the person they want to be, to absorb and reflect the self-representation in your own actions, so to speak. I have repeatedly tried to experiment with the limits of tactlessness, but it doesn't pay off." (Luhmann 2016)

Not even for Bartleby. His boss, a notary, has dismissed him. He becomes a vagabond and dies weakened in custody. Leaders and followers are caught in a web of communication that constructs face-saving and assumes tact. Bartleby's boss ponders whether he could have influenced the course of events and concludes, "It was his soul that suffered, and his soul I couldn't reach. ... Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!"

Bartleby, the anti-hero of the 19th century working world, took the non-influenceability of superiors to the extreme. Today, modern Bartlebys are hired as knowledge workers and take a more subtle approach in steep hierarchies. They have learned to be more tactful. They try to lead their bosses without them realizing it. They know that their bosses know that bosses can influence how they are observed. Sophisticated Bartlebys play this game in steep hierarchies, but are already looking at their colleagues in flat hierarchical organizations, in which the roles of leader and led dissolve and leadership is reciprocal. If you lead today, I will lead tomorrow, but the wording no longer fits here. Communication and leadership become a paradoxical game in organizations, even beyond questions of power and decision-making roles. There are still constellations in knowledge organizations in which talking, deciding and acting coincide (see also Brunsson 1989), even in this temporal sequence, and also by someone we call a leader. But such causal connections are lost due to the increase in ignorance, especially at the top of organizations.

A modern Bartleby then tactfully remains silent about the fact that unexpected successes are not the result of decisions, but of coincidences or chaotic actions. Organizations construct a narrative with the managers or spokespeople of the organization and talk about how everything was planned in a visionary way. Bartleby remains a critical observer and an organizational corrective, but tactfully helps outsiders to believe that everything in the organization can still be explained causally.