Global Policy Forum

By Michael Littlejohns

For all its democratic pretensions, the United Nations is a caste-conscious institution with a rigid hierarchical structure in which a poor clerk in General Service is relegated to a windowless cubicle while the professional, higher up the salary scale basks in room with view, its number of windows depending on the occupant's status in the system. Plus other perks.

Not too different, you may say, from the way things are done in the corporate world, with the bosses in their well-furnished corner offices on the high floors and the minions slaving below at stripped-down work stations or in airless, subterranean mailrooms. Upstairs, downstairs; 'twas ever thus.

Well, what used to be called Personnel when Kofi Annan ran the division before his extraordinary (and deserved) ascent to the very top of the UN heap, and that now rejoices in the title Office of Human Resources Management has come up with a "Career Support Guide" that aims to assuage the hurt feelings of underlings and transfuse a shot of humanity into stony managers. The twain can and should meet is its message.

"It is written at a time when the world of work both inside and outside the United Nations is changing rapidly," the anonymous authors write in their introduction, "and draws on lessons learned from experiences of staff within our Organization and those of organizations throughout the world." The Guide, they emphasize, "is based on the Secretary General's vision of a staff that is highly trained, versatile, mobile, well managed and integrated as a global team."

These words amount to a job description that should be welcomed by the many outside critics who profess to see a UN work force prone to bone idleness, wasteful and corrupt, rewarded in extravagant pay scales and overly generous benefits and overdue for a thorough shakeup. Javier Perez de Cuellar, a former secretary general, is said to have replied when asked how many people worked at the UN, "about half." One presumes this was said in jest, but the fiction persists even after both Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan slashed the number of staff, at the behest of the US Congress, and placed heavier workloads on the survivors.

The UN is still waiting for the check that was supposed to settle US dues on condition that staff and other reforms were instituted. Going back to the UN system's hierarchical tendency, OHRM provides a helpful reminder that "whether you call them 'coaches,' 'supervisors' or 'mentors', managers in today's organizations are expected to help staff achieve their personal best." To that end, managers should convey enthusiasm about future possibilities for their staff; serve as role models others would want to follow; encourage job challenges; support their workers' development and career hopes; and (this is important in an organization that does not discourage anonymous, job-threatening tittle-tattle) provide "an environment in which others can talk without fear of repercussion."

A "Tale of two offices" is instructive on how a good manager differs from a bad one. A woman in General Service speaks of her elation over the acknowledgement of the value of her work and the encouragement she received in one office, and of another office that she left each day "with the feeling of having participated in a Sisyphean exercise with no sense of purpose, nor of accomplishment with the work devoid of intellectual stimulation."

Filing documents all day is not rocket science, but it can be a first step toward high opportunities, as many UN workers, including Kofi Annan, Maurice Strong and a host of present-day managers who started humbly, may testify. In the corporate world, the mailroom is a traditional steppingstone to success, as the famed Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz and countless others have demonstrated.

There may be an inclination to treat publications like "Career Support Guide" as a bit of a joke (and the reaction of a journalist who saw one of the first copies was, "Should I make fun of this?") In truth, the authors have compiled a lot of sensible advice that the diligent manager and ambitious worker alike -- but more especially the less diligent and less ambitious -- may read, mark, learn and inwardly digest to their own and the UN's advantage.