Imagine if you tried to operate a car using only technology available in the early 20th century. Steam-powered cars? Early internal combustion engines (get out and crank, anyone)?
You'd have a hard time getting across town, let alone across the country. It's become more and more obvious to me lately that we're doing just this with people management: trying to manage people using approaches from 100 years ago.
The modern corporation - a big collection of people working together to make a product or provide a service - had its beginnings, in many ways, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But think about how different everything was then: the vast majority of employees at the turn of the 20th century were unskilled workers who needed to do a set of specific tasks over and over again, in a sequence that coordinated with others' tasks. There was little call for creativity, innovation - for independent thought of any kind, actually: sew the shirt; cut the metal to size; fill bottle after bottle with liquor or patent medicine or milk.
And here we are, in an entirely different work world with completely new constraints and requirements...still pretty much managing in exactly the same way. I rave about this a lot - many of my posts, I've noticed, tend to be some version of the question, "Why are managers still managing so badly?" like this one, and this one.
Then the other day, one of the members of our LinkedIn subgroup on Future Leaders posted this great Gary Hamel video - talking so eloquently about the situation and proposing some great solutions. Give it a listen:
When Hamel talks about how managers are still dealing with their employees as though they're "farmhands and housemaids" fresh from the country who need to be molded into cogs in an organizational machine, it resonated for me: that's the essence of command and control management. Hamel proposes that we need to re-invent management to align with the expectations of today's employees and the pace of today's change. (He also supplies a really clear and inspiring example of someone who's doing it: Vineet Nayar, president of India's HCL.)
This is a pretty big thing we're talking about: changing the way managers manage. So what can one person (you or I) do right now to manage employees in a modern way, a way that invites them to bring all of who they are to the work they do, so that our companies can keep up with the pace of change.
Here are two simple things you can do starting tomorrow morning to manage for the 21st century: to make it a pleasure to be managed by you and to call out the best in each employee:
Assume each employee has something unique and valuable to contribute, and that you just have to discover what it is. AND If you have someone working for you for whom you cannot make this assumption...fire that person. I mean it. Free them to find a situation that takes advantage of their gifts, whatever those may be, and a manager who appreciates them. It is soul-deadening to work for someone who can't see your value beyond the rote completion of assigned tasks - and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy; if you see people as automatons, you'll get automatons. If you assume, on the other hand, that each person has useful ideas, skills or knowledge, your attitude will shift to one of openness, curiosity and invitation. It will feel dramatically better to the other person, and you're much more likely to find that wonderful thing in them - whatever it may be.
Be the manager you'd like to have. Even though people have some individual preferences about how they like to be managed - at the core of it, I suspect that what you want from your manager is also what your employees want from you. For instance, I bet you almost anything you'd love it if your manager treated you with trust, respect and kindness. If he or she listened to your ideas, assumed that you want to do good work, acknowledged your contributions. If he or she seemed glad to have you on the team, and (see #1) acted as though you had something important to offer. Do that.
Let's move out of the industrial age, starting today.
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Erika Andersen’s latest book, Leading So People Will Follow, is now an international business bestseller. Booklist called it “a book to read more than once and to consult many times.”
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