Although HCO Policy Letter of 19 December, 1969, copy of which is on page 384, cancelled the concept of getting people to get the work done, as it was found to result in some Executives believing they were not supposed to work, this policy gives in detail how an executive should groove in personnel on post and related org board functions and for this purpose it is re-issued.

By definition an executive is one who obtains execution of duties, programs and actions in an organization to further the aims and purposes of that organization.

To forward dissemination of Scientology, to increase the income of Scientology organizations, and to accomplish what we are trying to do, it is vital that we have good executives who know what they are doing and who do it.

Basically, the work of the organization does not depend upon the executive. It depends upon his supervision. The work of the organization depends upon its staff personnel and their performance of duties in exact compliance with their hat folders to accomplish the purposes of their posts. However, it is very difficult for staff personnel to accomplish their duties when they do not have good executives to provide overall supervision and liaison amongst posts. Therefore, it is only necessary to have a bad executive who has a poor understanding of what his work is all about to reduce morale, cause turnover of personnel, to impede dissemination and to lower the income of organizations.

Understanding this I have completed a considerable study of the subject of being an executive. There is more to it than one would ordinarily suppose.

In the first place, an executive should be able to perform better every single job in the organization than the personnel performing it. In this way the executive will be effective, since he will know what these posts are doing. Thus, an executive is selected primarily for his knowledge of the organization. Another attribute of the executive is an ability to get along with people and to aid them to understand their duties, the whys and wherefores of their posts, and their relationships to other posts and the communication lines which connect them. Another attribute is the ability to get something done via another person. These three attributes are easily the most important. They are followed by the other side of an executive’s activities which consist of planning, organizing and promotion, as well as either setting up or gaining compliance with organizational policy.

The stable data on which most people operate in a Scientology organization is „Get the work done“. This is as it should be. However, this as a stable datum in an executive is fatal. His stable datum cannot be otherwise than „Get people to get the work done“.

Let us take a contrary view of this situation. Let us suppose we have an „executive“ who can himself work hard and who has the datum „get the work done“. This is what he does. He pulls off some odds and ends of organizational duties into his lap, sits at his desk and in a state of exasperation tries to do everything that comes his way. Under such an executive income will decline, morale will turn sour, and there will be a large staff turnover. This „executive“ simply regards himself as a workhorse who is too overburdened to pay attention to details. He makes mistakes, he does not execute policy, and no matter how hard and how well he works at these jobs he has cut out for himself he never heads up or runs an organization and he never builds anything of any size. At length, he will begin to discourage business and activity on the part of the organization, since the work is already too burdensome for him to handle. Now he was chosen as an executive because he could do the job better on any post in the organization given that post, than the people present. He takes this as a license to „show people up“ or to „show them how it really ought to be done“. Let us look at this closely. He would not be an executive unless he could work better than each and every person on staff. He would not be there if he did not know these posts better. But let us add up for him the following activities: Director of Training, Director of Processing, auditing all preclears, keeping all accounts, writing all of the dissemination materials, running the mimeograph machine and the printing company, building and painting all of the quarters, personally writing on a typewriter all of the letters received by the organization, and a long time before we get down to typewriting we see that one person on a Mest Universe time span could not perform all of these duties. Therefore, we draw the conclusion that we need many people to perform these actions. An executive who tries to perform many actions himself and does not „get people to get the work done“ creates a leaderless organization. He is overworked, he cannot cope, he eventually goes out the bottom. Even more importantly, the personnel around him go out the bottom, a thing he commonly fails to observe.

We see, then, that an executive makes a mistake every time he takes into his own hands any portion of any job in the organization. There are two ways a „bad executive“ can do this. The first way is quite obvious. He simply tries to do several posts, thus leaving many posts unsupervised and leaving many details uncoordinated and depriving staff of necessary liaison and supervision amongst the various posts. The other way is less obvious. He takes the juicy tidbits which require „command decision“ away from the posts and leaves each post a naked drudgery of petty detail; in other words, he scoops off the cream and does, to a slight degree, each one of the jobs around and thus brings about a state of irresponsibility on the various terminals.

Furthermore, an executive who is not doing a real job of executing, „get people to get the work done“, will not be in sufficient contact with the various posts in the organization and know which ones are underburdened and which ones are overburdened. Posts which are underburdened and do not have enough to do, who roam around inside the organization like billiard balls against the banks break up other work. Posts which are overburdened confront the personnel occupying them with such a tremendous pyramid of work that they go into apathy trying to regard their job at all, and so cease to function, and quite ordinarily leave the organization (this is the primary reason people do leave an organization: They cannot do their work well and become convinced that they are badly placed).

Chaos and confusion are the result of an executive’s (1) inability or unwillingness to simply supervise a post and do none of their work, and (2) inability to grant beingness or confront the good sense of other people.

Now let us see what a good executive really does and we will find that he is busy enough if he actually does his job. He does not call people into his office and have them stand in front of his desk while he explains their job to them. In fact, he spends very little time at his desk. In the first place, such a procedure has the earmarks of „being called on the carpet“ and makes for ARC breaks. Further, outside of the familiarity of the staff personnel’s surroundings the executive is not in effect running 8C. To know anything about the post he would have to see the actual equipment, materials, files, etc. connected with that post. And thus, any good executive spends much less time at his desk than he does in various parts of the organization. A good executive actually goes to the post and looks it over. He does not work with the post with the aim in mind of showing the post how much faster and how much more expertly the post can be done. Admittedly he is an executive and the person occupying the post is occupying that post because the executive can do the post better than the person occupying it. Thus, an impatience and an intolerance is too easy to demonstrate.

The executive looks over the post on the site of the post by going through the individual’s hat and finding out whether or not it really matches up to the exact duties of the post. He will find if he is patient and a good auditor, that the post is quite routinely confused about his duties and this confusion makes the duties look too big or too hard to do, or he will discover that the post is not covering all of its duties, that it is specializing in some of them. This last is particularly true in an overburdened post. The answer to an overburdened post which is actually overburdened is, of course, not for the executive to take on some of the duties or to try to whip up the person doing the job but to split the hat along some natural division and put another personnel on the post in addition to the one already there.

Just as any Director of Processing is always being bombarded by the auditors to give them a new, fast, wonderful technique which will solve all of their own goofs, so an executive is always being asked by some staff personnel to do something new, wonderful and strange with the post hat. The hat, of course, containing all of the duties of the post was usually written up with great care and any real re-arrangement of it or derangement of it will discover that some of the functions or liaisons of the organization will be lost. Therefore, a good executive does not succumb to the idea that something new, wonderful and strange must be done with the post simply because the personnel handling the post do not understand the procedure connected with it.

It is quite interesting to study the amount of explanation and the frequency of explanation necessary to put some personnel on post and to get them to understand and execute the exact duties as stated in the hat. Personnel usually try to run a more complicated post than is necessary. It is a natural instinct to complicate something which is simple. Therefore, the simplicities of the post, its purposes and goals, must be observed at all times in any smoothing or re-arrangement of the post. For example, it took three full days in one instance to put the Membership hat on a personnel. The personnel was willing-and you will discover that nearly all personnel are-wanted to get the job done, and was perfectly happy with the routine of the job. But-for three full days this personnel attempted to complicate the job of Membership, rearrange it or twist it about in some fashion so that it was more or less unworkable. This personnel could not understand the simplicity of the Membership routine until an executive had spent three full working days with him. At the end of that time it was possible to have good membership response and good membership handling. This condition continued from there on. If the executive in this case had simply said „Well, this fellow is stupid“ and if the executive had become impatient, the Membership job never would have gotten done. It required good ARC, it required good patience. If an executive doesn’t have three full days to spend putting on such a hat or if he cannot have in the next four or five weeks the equivalent time of those three full days, then he is never going to have a Membership hat worn promptly and properly for the simple reason that the personnel available to him is the personnel available to him. He should not think that he is going to get out of the brow of Jove, springing fully armed, perfect personnel. It is amazing, the confusion of many personnel on their post, particularly on a new job. They are being asked to understand the whole working principle of the organization at one gulp, as far as they are concerned. They cannot see their role, they cannot see how they fit into the scheme of things, they cannot see where their communication lines are going or what they are supposed to do. The executive, of course, being able to understand this, nevertheless has no license to do anything whatsoever but straighten up the post and get the hat worn straight, and get the work done.

In working around and about the organization it will be discovered that there are certain holes in the organization or there are missing communication lines or there are needful liaisons. But at this time Scientology organizations have been worked out to such a fine point that an executive would be much safer taking the posts as primarily put together on the original organization board and putting that structure back together again than in attempting to patch up some new and strange organizational pattern which has had no prior test. The patterns of Scientology organizations have been worked out over a period of many, many years. It is highly probable that we have made almost every mistake possible. We are a very complicated organization in that we have many posts. We have many communication lines. We have many functions. We have worked these out over a period of time and have come up with something closely approaching a perfect answer. Thus, it is only at this time that I can tell executives to follow that answer and to keep the organization running as it was planned to run. There is really not much reason for an executive to dream up something new, wonderful and strange to take care of some particular activity. However, a word of caution. All personnel on all posts will attempt to drive him into something new, wonderful and strange in the way they complicate their jobs and in their failure to understand those jobs.

Giving the inspection of a post a lick and a promise and passing on, with some impatience, to another post, is not being a good executive. One should view the organization or his department as a whole. He should see what it is trying to do. Then he should try to get it to do what it is supposed to do. To accomplish this, hats have already been written up for these various posts. If they are lacking in some respect, then he should have, in the case of a department head, consultation with his superiors and in the case of an Association Secretary correspondence or consultation with myself. He should then get the department running on some minimum acceptable basis by spending a short time with each one of the personnel and giving them that part of their job which they can understand to do and accomplish. Having done this, he at least has a partially going concern. Now he should go back through his department or organization and make sure that each set of duties is fully understood and appreciated by the personnel holding each post. He should not be impatient, he should not look for the same level of understanding which he himself has for the post and he should not look for the same level of performance with which he could execute the post. The primary mistake an auditor can make is failing to estimate the case he is trying to process. The only thing which can give an auditor errors is to fail to estimate the case he is trying to process. The only way an auditor can be wrong is to fail to estimate the case he is trying to process. Therefore, the only way an executive can be wrong is to fail to estimate the personnel he is trying to get to get the work done. With patience, with good ARC, with good understanding, he should repeatedly go round and around and around these posts and instead of making the decisions (and thus skimming the cream off the post), he should show how the decisions to be made stem from the actual activities of the job. He should make the personnel occupying the post make the decisions relating to that post. These decisions in the main are minor to the executive, but they may appear very major to a personnel occupying the post. Only by getting the person to make his own decisions will he ever have a responsible occupation of the post. By seizing little pieces of the post to do himself, by running the whole show, decisions and all, the executive will wind up doing all the work himself because he has gradually forced the person for whom he is making the decisions off post. Little by little that personnel has been pushed off into an irresponsibility for his post. This is exactly contrary to the actual function of an executive. For instance, the Dir of Processing, given a well-trained auditor should not go on forever and ever and ever dreaming new tricks and gimmicks which will „solve the preclear’s case“. In the first place, the auditor probably is not starting sessions, resolving pt problems, patching up ARC breaks and running a smooth session – that is why the case isn’t running. The Dir of Processing should just go on putting the hat – that general hat known as staff auditor – back on the staff auditor’s head. Auditors’ conferences are actually totally unnecessary if auditors have been placed on post and if they are supervised on post and if they are given some feeling of responsibility and understanding of their post.

If an executive finds himself doing some particular job, he must realize that this job is either missing out of a hat or that he doesn’t have a hat to cover that job. Where the idea of policy-making or enforcement becomes making all the decisions for the personnel, the executive has erred. Policy-making and enforcement is definitely his job, just as promotion and planning in general is his job. But if he finds himself doing some routine task, if he finds himself pinned down hour after hour, day after day, by some concern, then he is missing somewhere in putting hats on people’s heads. Occasionally an executive is called upon to put a hat on the head of some outside firm, as in legal work. With what glee an organization’s attorney will try to pass the hat back to the head of the organization. This is a task just as a staff post is a task of putting the hat on somebody’s head. The attorneys of the organization, even occupying an outside office, should have their hat put on with regard to the organization so that all legal matters are simply referred and routed to them. If they do not act on this basis, then he either puts the hat more firmly on their head or, as in any case, despairing of this, one finds some new attorneys just as he would find new staff personnel if, after an investment of 7 or 8 days of patient work he still cannot get somebody to go through the routine of the job.

There are certain approvals an executive has to give, as Advisory Council minutes. There are personnel changes which an executive has to make, and therefore there are personnel files which he has to keep. If he is the head of a department he still keeps personnel files for that particular department and he still handles the personnel for that department. If he is a higher level executive he certainly cannot do otherwise than handle personnel as a hat for the entire organization. But the personnel for an entire organization hat is actually not as big a hat as personnel for a single department since it doesn’t include procurement. Any department head has the right to do personnel procurement; this has to be okay’d by the executive, of course, and to be posted on the Org Bd actually requires my okay.

Now, in a small organization it will be found that three or four or five people working together can get quite a bit accomplished. The moment this goes up to 8 or 10 people, you have need of an executive. That executive, if he does not know his job as it is set down here, and if he thinks his job is something else than getting people to get the work done, will actually restrict and impoverish the organization. He will not permit it to grow, since he is still trying to run an organization the size of that which can be handled by four or five people, while in actuality he has a much larger area.

An executive doing good promotion and planning will, of course, drive in a great deal of business. All he has to do is to make sure that his shipping department gets books out; that his PR places ads; that his organizational services are of a quality to invite public confidence. He doesn’t really need any bigger tricks of promotion than this. The big trick of promotion is to get everybody to do his job. If this is done, then you will see all manner of promotion being accomplished. Promotion dreamed of is not promotion accomplished. An executive dreaming up promotion and working hard himself is not nearly as effective as an executive getting promotion accomplished and getting people to take care of the resulting traffic. In a large Scientology organization, he cannot get business up to speed while trying to do all the work himself.

Naturally, there are executives who, by their personal presence, giving lectures, talking to people, can accomplish a great deal of promotion, just as I accomplish a great deal of promotion by writing a book. But my book-writing hat is not my executing hat and I do not get them confused. An executive can wear other hats than being an executive. But being an executive is an express and an explicit hat and its duties consist only and entirely of getting people to get the job done. If other hats are being worn along with the executive hats, then those duties should not be permitted to slop over and occupy and wipe out the executive hat since it’s the more important of the two.

An example of this in a central organization of Scientology on another continent shows us that some organizations insist on learning always by their own experience, not by already won experience. This organization presents the picture of Scientology organizations in the United States in 1952 – everybody was wearing all the hats, nobody was trying to put on any hats other than his own, but his own was all the hats. The resulting confusion, the lack of coordination, the failure to understand that an organizational pattern, orderly terminals and communication lines are vitally necessary to good progress of an organization, resulted in very low income and very hard work on the part of everyone. Contrast this with the 1958 orderliness and income of Scientology United States and we find the only great difference is that we have learned the proper pattern of organization necessary to carry on our job and that we are executing that proper pattern.

You can toss all this aside and work yourself to death and compliment yourself on believing you are getting the job done, but don’t wonder why the staff doesn’t give you a pat on the back or why I don’t give you a pat on the back, because I’m not interested in how many hours you put in. I am not interested in how many documents you handle. I am only interested in the executives who get people to get the work done. On a staff level I am perfectly content with people who take the easier course of simply getting work done. That is the simpler thing to do. These posts are interesting. To handle administration for an Academy is quite a job. Being a Receptionist in the front office is an interesting post – look at all the people you meet. These jobs which go many hours of the day and occasionally late into the night are interesting jobs, they are interesting and necessary terminals. Remember that they are the easier ones to do. Being an executive requires one to get the work done on a via, and that is one of the more difficult tricks demanded of a thetan in this universe.

Let’s see if we can do it.