Article 65 of the Basic Law lets the Chancellor set the guidelines of policy. Then it says: Innerhalb dieser Richtlinien leitet jeder Bundesminister seinen Geschäftsbereich selbständig und unter eigener Verantwortung. Within these guidelines, each federal minister runs his portfolio independently and on his own responsibility. German government calls this the Ressortprinzip, the portfolio principle. When two ministers disagree, the federal government as a whole decides. The principle goes back to the Prussian reforms. They abolished the old cabinet system and created a state ministry nach dem Ressortprinzip klar gegliedert, clearly organized by portfolio. The ministers for the interior, foreign affairs, finance, justice and war each answered to the king.
Management by Job Description
The Harzburger Modell was taught at the Akademie für Führungskräfte der Wirtschaft in Bad Harzburg, founded on March 26, 1956, by Reinhard Höhn. Its motto was Führung durch Delegation, leadership by delegation. Responsibility was delegated to the level of the hierarchy that held the authority to decide. Each employee’s area of tasks was in Stellenbeschreibungen fest umrissen, firmly outlined in a job description. By Höhn’s death in 2000, about 600,000 managers and junior managers had been trained at the academy. From around 1972, American management systems gained ground and the model lost importance. Critics said it favored an authoritarian and bureaucratic style. Höhn was a former SS-Oberführer, and his prominent role in the Third Reich also damaged the model once it became known.
Board Portfolios
Under § 77 of the German Stock Corporation Act, the members of a management board run the company together: sämtliche Vorstandsmitglieder nur gemeinschaftlich. The articles or the board’s own rules may provide otherwise, and in practice they assign portfolios to individual members. The member who holds a portfolio is then fully liable for the decisions in it.
The other members keep their part. In the words of one law firm, the principle of overall responsibility nicht durchbrochen, sondern vielmehr modifiziert, is not broken but rather modified.
Letting the specialist work
Freie Hand lassen — to leave a free hand.
Das ist Sache des Fachmanns — that is the specialist’s affair.
Da rede ich ihm nicht rein — I don’t talk into that.
Machen lassen — to let someone get on with it.
Four ordinary German expressions, all approving, all describing a client who has stepped back.
The expert works alone
Dafür haben wir Sie ja geholt — that is what we brought you in for. Said in German when a supplier asks the client how to proceed on a matter within the supplier’s own expertise. It is not impatience. It is a statement about where the responsibility went when the contract was signed.
The target agreement
Die Zielvereinbarung. German employment practice fixes objectives for the year in a documented conversation, often with a bonus attached, and reviews them at the year’s end.
Agreed once, assessed once. Between those two points the manager is not scheduled to ask how it is going.
The word is an agreement rather than an assignment — the objectives are negotiated and signed by both, which is part of why they are not revisited every fortnight.
Working to rule
Dienst nach Vorschrift — service according to regulation. Doing precisely what the rules require and nothing beyond.
In Germany this is a recognised form of industrial action. Following instructions exactly is understood to damage the employer, because the organisation depends on people exercising judgment the rules do not describe.
It is also used as an insult about an individual. To say somebody does Dienst nach Vorschrift is to say they have stopped thinking.
Mission tactics
Auftragstaktik. Helmuth von Moltke the Elder set it out in his 1869 instructions for large-unit commanders and it was codified in the 1888 drill regulations: higher command defines what must be achieved, and subordinates decide how to achieve it when orders no longer match conditions on the ground.
Moltke defined it as the actions a subordinate takes in the absence of orders that support the senior commander’s intent. Officers were educated to think for themselves and to keep going when communication failed.
The doctrine passed into NATO practice and into US Army doctrine as mission command. Its origin is a German answer to a specific problem: the person on the ground can see something the person issuing the order cannot.
“No!” to top-down
Although Germans are known to follow written laws and directives, they reject almost instinctively any and all top-down decisions, directives or commands where management has not involved them in their formulation.
Especially when it involves the details of their daily work, Germans are very sensitive to outside influences which limit their freedom of decision making and action. Germans at all levels reject top-down decisions, based on hierarchical authority and not on persuasive arguments.
Angela Merkel
Sunday. September 26, 2021. Federal elections in Germany. Angela Merkel, after sixteen years in office, four consecutive terms, had decided not to run for re-election. In a few weeks we’ll know who her successor is.
Serge Schmemann, one of the world’s sharpest observers and analysts of events in Germany, and in Europe, wrote about Frau Merkel:
“These traits of honesty, modesty, discipline, persistence and reserve would seem almost quaint elsewhere, in New York City, say. But when someone facing almost insurmountable political odds — as a woman, an East German and a scientist — rises to the pinnacle of German power and stays there for four terms, there’s something for America and other democracies, where decent people are increasingly shunning politics, to learn and emulate.”