What's the "One Best Way" to Lead? Trust Your People!

In one of my first articles, I defined the theme of this blog as: Frederick Winslow Taylor – NOT!

As I previously noted, Taylor was the consummate efficiency expert whose basic message for early 20^th Century organizations was:

Thinkers think. Planners plan. Workers work.

In other words, under Taylorism, the role of management is to define the “one best way” to perform any task through rigorous measurement, analysis, and planning, while the role of the worker is to perform the task exactly as designed – no questions asked, no suggestions accepted.

Since my earlier article, I’ve repeatedly noted how Taylor-influenced thinking stands in direct opposition to The YES! Leader’s practice in areas such as structuring work, influencing, motivating, rewarding, and collaborating. In his book Drive, Daniel Pink also notes some of the practices held over from Taylorism’s heyday that still underlie much current business thinking.

Pink notes that Taylor’s ideas might have been appropriate in an age when tasks were primarily algorithmic in nature. “An algorithmic task,” says Pink, “is one in which you follow a set of established instructions down a single pathway to one conclusion.”

Most 20^th Century work, says Pink, was algorithmic in nature – and not just manual, blue collar tasks:

“Even when we traded blue collars for white, the tasks we carried out were often routine. That is, we could reduce much of what we did – in accounting, law, computer programming, and other fields – to a script, a spec sheet, a formula, or a series of steps that produced a right answer.” (emphasis added)

Nowadays, however, problems (and the solutions needed to address them) are rarely so simple.  The complexity of the world poses continually unique challenges to anyone trying to define and perform a piece of work.  Because of this, says Pink, tasks are becoming more heuristic in nature - that is, no simple formula exists for carrying them out. Such tasks require the application of heuristics – general guidelines and rules of thumb – in a trial-and-error fashion in order to find a creative solution.  

If the approach to an algorithmic task resembles writing a script, then the approach to a heuristic task is more like performing improvisational theater. The performer of the task becomes thinker, planner, and worker all rolled into one. The performer must use a high level of creativity to craft the best solution for each unique situation.  And, as in improv, the performer doesn’t just create on a totally blank slate but can draw on heuristics (such as the ExploreFlexSupport model) to help inform his actions.

Pink notes that many organizations are still trying to apply Taylor-based practices to heuristic tasks, usually with ineffective or even counterproductive results.  Some examples are listed below.

Structuring work: Defining tasks (and the roles of the people who perform them) as narrowly as possible, rather than giving people a broader scope of task responsibility.

Decision-making: Reserving decisions about task performance for people in management roles, rather than allowing the people actually performing the task to make in-the-moment decisions about how they’ll achieve the objectives of the task. (Note also my earlier article on providing people autonomy in their roles.)

Providing incentives: Assuming that external motivators (primarily money and fear) are the only incentives to which people respond, rather than drawing on the inherent enjoyment of the work itself (and structuring the work accordingly) to connect with people’s internal, self-generated motivators.

REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER

What would happen if you were to do the following?

.·      Find opportunities to define work more broadly for your people – for example, by giving them more front-to-end responsibility in their roles.

·         Manage their performance of their roles with a light touch rather than a short leash – i.e., don’t rush in to penalize them for mistakes but provide them support and create an environment where they can learn from their successes and missteps.

·         Conduct coaching conversations with your people and ask them to reflect on what makes them leap out of bed each morning, energized and ready to tackle the day’s work. (And if they can’t answer, ask them what would make them do that.) Use their answers as a guide to their internal motivators. Then do what you can to help them create those motivating elements in their work and lives.

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