Shell report 1967

Going through my archives, I came across a report from November 1967 produced by Shell that my father Bruno had passed down to me. At that time he was Shell’s Head of Worldwide Management Training, based in London, and this fascinating document must have acted as a powerful guide to him and his colleagues.

What was I up to at that time, now nearly half a century ago? A couple of months earlier I had obtained my undergraduate degree and I had just joined the British computer multinational that ten years later brought me here.

Here’s how Shell’s Group Personnel Coordinator (as such folk were called then) H.W. Atcherley opened his foreword to the report:

“We talk a great deal these days, and necessarily so, about more effective utilisation of manpower. In the course of this dialogue we will probably concede that management knowledge of motivation, attitudes and other factors which influence staff morale, job performance and personal satisfaction lags some way behind knowledge of the technical, financial and other aspects of the business.”

He went on to appreciate the increasing role being played by social scientists in building up a body of knowledge about human behaviour and the requirements for organising people to carry out a task. This knowledge was largely unfamiliar within the company, and so they brought in Dr. Hollis Peter to design and carry out a survey.

Atcherley then mentioned their reference to Douglas McGregor’s in his The Human Side of Enterprise, and also to the work of an MIT colleague of McGregor’s, Prof. Edgar H. Schein. These were the founding gurus of culture in the workplace and of organisational development, and I know they were a great influence on how my father put his management development programmes together.

I was delighted to see reference to one of my favourite frameworks, Blake and Mouton’s Management Grid, where they drew up a matrix between managers who focused on tasks versus those who focused on people – where the ideal of course is that it should not be either one or the other but both.

Survey participants were selected from 25 countries around the world (with over half of them expatriates), and included ones from the head-office functions in London and The Hague.

The following statements were laid out, for them to agree or disagree with:

1. Leadership skills can be acquired by most people, regardless of their inborn traits and abilities.
2. Generally speaking, people prefer to be directed, and wish to avoid responsibility.
3. The use of rewards and penalties is not the best way to get subordinates to do their work.
4. A good leader should give detailed and complete instructions to his subordinates, rather than depending on their initiative to work out the details.
5. If subordinates cannot influence their superiors, then they lose some influence on them.
6. Group goal setting offers advantages that cannot be obtained by individual goal setting.
7. A superior should give his subordinates only that information that is necessary for them to do their immediate task.
8. The superior’s authority over his subordinates is primarily economic.

It also identified four different management styles from among which the respondents were invited to select their preferred one: autocratic, paternalistic, consultative and participative. Sounds familiar?

I was introduced to these emerging management theories in an academic context when I was going through my Sloan Masters programme in the mid-seventies at the London Business School, and my whole point here – not for the first time in this column – is to provide an objective time-perspective on the evolution of management knowledge over the years. In particular to stress that whereas it is so commonly assumed that our preferred contemporary styles only emerged in this 21st century, that is clearly not the case – at least not for ahead-of-the-game organisations like Shell.

As I read through the report, I was not surprised to see that explicitly only men were involved, 100%. No mention of women at all. I also noted that computers were just entering the scene, with reference to this emerging technology.

I could write much more about the contents and conclusions of the survey. But suffice it to say that it made a big impact on me, recognising that when I was still in my twenties there were management thinkers and doers who would have fitted into today’s organisations as well as their succeeding generation counterparts.

I hope that what I have selected here makes you also reflect on the development of knowledge flows over time, and on how to get a feel for the relationship between an organisation and its staff.