Maslow on Management
What does the famous creator of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Motivation say about motivating humans?
Maslow on chickens
In 1962, the famous American psychologist Abraham Maslow, PhD, left his faculty job at Brandeis University (near Boston MA) to spend a year embedded in the Silicon Valley electronics firm Non-linear Dynamics, founded by Andrew Kay. He published a journal about his experiences called Eupsychian Management (Maslow 1965), but nobody understood what the title meant and it had to be republished as Maslow on Management (1994) to persuade people to buy it.
Management guru Peter Drucker, PhD called it “Maslow’s most important and enduring book.”
I don’t know if that’s true, but it may be his most memorable. One of the lines I remember best is “Some chickens are better than others.”
Maslow wasn’t saying that some chickens (people) have some sort of elevated fundamental worth, or additional entitlements. He meant that when you feed all the chickens (people) the same, and raise them all the same, and treat each of them the same, they still exhibit differences in size, plumage, intelligence, and social dominance.
One way to think of equal is to conflate it with same, and this is a fallacy. Because chickens, like people, are different.
Those differences mean that we will notice what appear to be inequalities.
That doesn’t make any chicken (person) morally more worthy than another, but it does make some people better at some things than others. We are not all the same height. We are not all the same strength. We are not all the same intelligence.
As a teacher, I would do well to recognize that students come to my class at different developmental stages. Before reading Maslow on Management, I suffered from the misconception that my best teaching would liberate all of my students — i.e., give them the freedom to pursue their own curiosity, set their own deadlines, and structure their own learning activities.
Maslow convinced me that I was wrong.
Maslow on human motivation
Maslow is most famous for his 1943 paper called A Hierarchy of Human Motivation, and the revisions and refinements that improved it. He fashioned what is still called Maslow’s Pyramid to categorize different human needs.
At the bottom is found safety, shelter, food, sex, drugs, rock’n’roll — all the pleasures that Sigmund Freud seemed preoccupied with. Higher up, Maslow placed relationships with other people, including love, status, and a sense of belonging. These were the concerns that Freud’s contemporary Alfred Adler seemed preoccupied with. IIRC, it was Adler who said “All psychological problems are interpersonal problems.”
Higher still on his pyramid, Maslow put issues that relate self, such as self-esteem, sense of self-worth, and recognition. At the very top, he put self-actualization — i.e., a will to realize one’s full potential.
As a teacher, I used to think that creating a learning environment that allowed my students to work at the top of the pyramid was the best thing I could do for everyone. After all, that’s where intrinsic motivation resides.
But people make meaning of their experiences in different ways. Not everyone has achieved a feeling of safety in the classroom that permits them to work at higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy. Some people who have only experienced authoritarian environments will feel imperiled in the less authoritarian, self-directed management structure that Maslow calls “enlightened”.
Maslow wrote:
A certain portion of the population cannot take responsibility well and are frightened by freedom.
What shall I do with students who have only lived inside the fishbowl of authoritarian, hierarchical educational structures?
Maslow suggests I clout the authoritarian student on their (metaphorical) head “in some way that would show very clearly who is boss.”
In this way, I would be meeting these students where they are familiar, and only later challenge them to move into areas of personal growth.
Golden bullshit?
The famous Golden Rule, to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, is self-centered bullshit, because few people are like me. To project my own aspirations onto others is at best a failure of empathy, and at worst self-centered to the point of delusion. For example, just because I would prefer to be working in a self-directed, egalitarian work environment does not mean that’s best or works well for others.
The Platinum Rule is to do unto others as they would have us do, and even that suffers from a certain defect. In my relationship with my students, I am the Leader. I am the expert. My judgment is superior to theirs, insofar as my understanding what they need to learn and do to become professionalized in the career of their choice (civil engineering).
To adopt the Golden Rule suggests that I impose my own preferences on them, which makes no sense because we are different. And to adopt the Platinum Rule suggests that I allow them to dictate the terms of their education, which is foolhardy because they cannot possibly know what they must do to learn civil engineering.
There is an analogy in parenting. I’ve witnessed many of my faculty colleagues with young (3–5 years old) children, who somehow delegate the authority of bedtime, wardrobe, meal planning, or other decision functions to their kids.
The parent might say, “Time for bed, OK?” or “What do you want for dinner?”
If you ask a 4 year old to plan meals for herself, you’re going to wind up raising your kid on chicken nuggets, because the food scientists are much better at manipulating your child’s food preferences than you are.
Then, as you grow increasingly dissatisfied with her meal choices, you might do the same thing some of my colleagues have done: negotiate, cajole, coerce, blackmail, or attempt to bribe their young children into making different choices. But somehow it never dawns on these parents that 4 year olds are not qualified to make the kinds of decisions that the parents are asking them to make.
They don’t know when is a good time to go to bed. They don’t know what to wear to religious ceremonies, or a birthday party, or Grandma’s. They don’t understand nutrition and food preparation and healthy eating.
When parents thrust their children into the role of being the executives of their own lives, using either Golden Rule (“It’s how I want people to treat me!”) or the Platinum Rule (“It’s what she says she wants!”) they abdicate their responsibility to serve as Leaders.
Because I am in a hierarchical relationship with my students, I have a moral responsibility to attend to their personal and professional growth, even if they don’t like homework, or class presentations, or terms papers, or any other assignment.
Maslow taught me that as the Leader, my moral responsibility is to meet them where they are — to communicate in terms with which they are familiar enough to understand and only then to challenge them to encounter the unfamiliar, hopefully without making them feel stupid along the way.
Thank you , will return to reread this several times as reflecting will take time to work through. Appreciate your clear writing style.