Letters from an old railway official (second series)/Letter 10
LETTER X.
THE LINE AND THE STAFF.
Chicago, June 10, 1911.
My Dear Boy:—You have asked me to tell you something about line and staff. The term line is used to indicate the direct sequence toward the active purpose of the organization. The line officer exercises a direct authority over men and things. He is the incarnation of administrative action. The staff is supplementary to the line as equity is supplementary to law. The staff officer is the playwright. The line officer is the actor. The actor is usually too much absorbed with the technique of his art to write new plays. The line officer, as such, seldom originates new methods, because he is too close to his everyday problems of administration to cultivate perspective. The ideal staff officer has had experience in the line.
The line with a railroad—its fighting force, so to speak—is the operating department. Because they are staff departments the offices of the other three, namely, accounting, traffic, and executive, legal and financial, can close from Saturday noon until Monday morning. The operating department, being the line, keeps the road open and the trains moving. Because of the poverty of our language, we now encounter some difficulties of expression in explaining all the various ramifications of line and staff. A staff department, because of its size, may exercise line functions within its own interior administration. Thus, the auditor organizes his office forces under appropriate chief and subordinate officers who, within the accounting department itself, exercise the authority of line officers. When such accounting officers get outside their legitimate sphere and endeavor to act as line officers in the operating department, expensive friction begins. This feature I shall discuss with you later. Suffice it to say that at present the hardest of all problems is to keep line and staff in economical balance. Staff departments then may within themselves exercise line functions. This grows rather from necessities imposed by size than from inherent nature of function. The first staff officer was an adviser and exercised no authority, except that of polite inquiry, because there was no one whom he could properly command. So the line, the operating department, soon grows so big as to require staff officers within itself, people who have time to think out improvements because they are not burdened with administrative responsibilities.
Hold tightly to this thought, my boy. The plane of differentiation between line and staff usually follows a cleavage based upon size rather than upon relative importance of function. The first line officer needed no staff, because he had time to think as well as act for himself. The first superintendent looked after the repairmen himself. The first master mechanic came into being not because he was so different from everybody else, but because the superintendent had become too busy to do it all himself. By and by the master mechanic forgot this basic fact and, unconsciously exaggerating his own specialty, began to feel that the railway is incident to shops and equipment rather than shops and equipment incident to the railway. The last five years have witnessed a decided improvement in this undesirable condition. Just at present the store department Indians are the tribe most in need of being rounded up on the operating department reservation for eye wash and vaccination against distorted perspective.
The operating department of a railroad is, or should be, a real department, complete and self-contained. It consists of such important component elements or branches as maintenance of way and structures, maintenance of equipment transportation, telegraph, signals, stores, purchases, dining cars, etc. Let us not waste any time discussing the relative importance of these components. Æsop centuries ago did that better than we can. His fable of the quarrel among the organs of the human body teaches us that while all are important each is useless without the others.
Individually the general superintendent, the chief engineers, the superintendent of motive power, the superintendent of transportation, the superintendent of telegraph, the general storekeeper, and the superintendent of dining cars, are line officers exercising direct authority in a defined sequence. Collectively they constitute, for consultation, the general manager’s staff. When all have the rank and title of assistant general manager, this duality of function is the more pronounced and valuable. For the feudal notion of unbalanced components is substituted the cabinet idea of comprehensive deliberation, unified administration and devotion to a common purpose. (Anvil chorus: “It’s that way on our road now”) Perhaps so, but if so, what assurance have your stockholders and the public that the same happy condition will obtain ten years hence? Each head of the nine executive departments in Washington is a line officer running his own department. At the President’s cabinet table he becomes a staff officer deliberating upon the problems of all. The attorney-general should be called secretary of law, and the postmaster-general secretary of posts. Then all nine would have the uniform title of secretary. The position of secretary to the president, an assistant to proposition, should be abolished—usually I prefer the gentler expression, “title discontinued.” His duties should be performed by the secretary of state, who is always the ranking member of the cabinet. In the first cabinet, that of George Washington, the secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, was in effect, though not in name, prime minister and chief of staff. Foreign affairs, then an incidental feature, are now so extensive for a world power that we should have another department under a secretary of foreign affairs, leaving the secretary of state as senior to be the able righthand man of the president. Here again the size of the proposition, the volume of business, is the proper determining factor.
On a small railway the chief engineer as a line officer may be able to do all the engineering himself. As the business grows he requires such special staff advisers as an office engineer, a locating engineer, a bridge engineer, a tunnel engineer, a signal engineer, etc. Some roads make such engineers line officers by giving them extensive authority over working forces. Usually I believe this is a mistake. It seems better for these engineers to be real staff officers, thinking, inspecting, warning, instructing (in the sense of lecturing), improving, designing and perhaps sometimes installing, but never directly operating or maintaining. The same general reasoning applies to the mechanical bureau when the business of the chief mechanical officer attains a volume necessitating the help of such valuable staff officers as a mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer, a testing engineer, etc.
When the telegraph came to supplement the railway, men stood in awe of its invisible effects. Soon the telegraph man said in effect, “This is a wonderful and mysterious specialty which you fellows cannot understand. Let me, the expert, handle it for you.” So he segregated unto himself a so-called department on the plea that it is so different. By and by the division superintendents woke up to find their telegraph hands tied. Appeals to the general superintendent or general manager proved fruitless. So the division linemen usually report directly to the superintendent of telegraph. They often stay around division headquarters until the chief dispatcher is able to jar them loose and get them out on the road. Then they go to the scene of trouble, look wise and get the section foreman to dig the hole and do most of the work. Why not, therefore, hold the section foreman responsible for ordinary wire repairs in the first place? Let every section house have a pair of climbers, a wire cutter and pliers with whatever simple outfit may be necessary. If unusual troubles develop or a line is to be rebuilt send the most expert help available, but while on the division let such help be under the authority of the superintendent. We need an expert at the top as chief telegraph and telephone officer to tell us all how to do it. The volume of business will usually warrant making him a line officer with the rank and title of assistant general manager. He should not deal directly with operators and linemen any more than a general superintendent under normal conditions should instruct an individual conductor or a chief engineer communicate direct with a section foreman. The integrity of the division as an operating unit should be respected.
By and by the signals followed the telegraph. Once more the management allowed the specialist to put it over at the expense of the good old wheel horses in the regular line organization. The embryo signal engineer said, “This wonderful and mysterious development is really something different this time. It is absurd to suppose these stupid old section foremen can learn anything about electricity.” So the signal engineer was allowed to build up a new department. He went out on the ranches or in the barber shops and hired signal maintainers. A new department is liberally treated because its activities are a fad for the time being. These signal maintainers in a few months absorb so much magnetism from the field of the signal engineer that they are qualified experts to whom the rest of us must not say anything. They have easier work, if not better pay, than the faithful section foremen of perhaps twenty years’ service. The old section foreman has a “savey” of the railroad business, an intuitive knowledge of the requirements of train movement that it will take the fresh young maintainer years to acquire. Then we wonder why it is so difficult to secure loyal section foremen. Sometimes a belated effort has been made to let in the section foremen on the signal game. It is difficult, however, to get the signal people to take an appreciative and sympathetic interest in men who are not in “my department.” Therefore, to prevent your track forces being thrown out of balance it will be better for a few years to keep the signal engineer on most railways as a staff officer without permitting him a line organization for operation and maintenance. Say to your roadmasters and section foremen that they will, at the company’s expense, be given instruction in signals. When the signal engineer, the expert, pronounces them qualified by examination or otherwise, let them understand that there is a small automatic increase in pay. Transfer to branch lines the few who prove hopelessly deficient. The track laborer who can qualify to look after a particular signal is worth a few cents more a day to the company and should be so advised. If you start with the presumption that the man below is too dumb to learn you handicap him and probably doom him to failure. If you make him believe that he can learn what men of the same class around him are learning, that you, his elder brother, are in duty bound to help him, you will be astonished at the response of his latent intelligence. The great managers of the feudal period were forceful drivers. The great managers of to-day and to-morrow are great teachers, the greatest of all experts, because they show the man below how to do it. Lots of men know how. A good many know why. Comparatively few have that rare and valuable combination of knowing both how and why. It is not a happen so, but a response to the law of supply and demand, that men of the Woodrow Wilson type are coming to the front in our political life.
Getting back to signals. On a road of more than one or two tracks, it may be advisable to segregate your signals from your track. Here again the dividing line is volume of business rather than fancied importance of function. Signals are important, but so is the track. Each is an incidental component of railway operation, not the whole operation itself. On most railways the section foreman should be the responsible head of a complete sub-unit for everyday maintenance and inspection, including track, bridges, fences, poles, wires and signals. This may involve giving him more help or a shorter section.
One of the problems of line and staff is to determine what is intelligent rotation between the two. The line officer, dealing with men rather than ideas, may get into a rut of practice which prevents his seeing the beauty of the rainbow which the untrammeled staff officer may be tempted to chase too far. Some officers succeed brilliantly at originating or developing ideas in the staff and fail miserably at handling men in the line.
True individuality about which men prate the most is that which is understood the least. Our Army and Navy are insisting that before being staff officers, all officers, except surgeons and chaplains, must first learn to handle men by serving in the line; that crystallization in the staff must be prevented by periodic rotation to definite tours of duty in the line. The railway of the future will probably carry extra numbers of line officials in the various grades that some may be available for detail to the staff, that we may better co-ordinate our studying and our working activities.
People say that our good friend, Harrington Emerson, able and sincere, will unconsciously give the staff the best of it; while your old dad, on an even break, will be found on the side of the line. If they are correct, it leaves plenty of room for the other fellows in between. One of the delightful foibles that make human nature so interesting and so lovable is the inborn conviction of the average man that, “though H be a conservative and K a radical, I am always the happy medium.”
Affectionately, your own,
D. A. D.