Here is a great post by Seth Godin on how scientific management, which created many efficiencies in manual work but also turned it into a grind by eliminating individual initiative, is now coming to white collar work.
That is, unless you focus on doing your work as art, with remarkability and excellence, rather than just doing what you do to get it done.
Then you can truly stand out and do work that cannot be treated as a commodity.
It’s from a few years ago, but it remains very solid stuff. This is a quick, excellent summary of what good management is.
In his book Principle-Centered Leadership, Stephen Covey summarizes well the four stages of management thinking.[1] Understanding the history of management is helpful not only for avoiding wrong turns, but also for shedding light on what it means to manage people holistically.
First was the scientific management paradigm. It viewed people primarily as economic beings who don’t want responsibility but instead must be motivated through “the great jackass method, the carrot and the stick.” This method managed through authoritarian, command-and-control methods.[2]
Two key figures here are Max Weber and Frederick Taylor. Weber “postulated the view that bureaucracy—order by rule—was the most effective form of human organization.”[3] Taylor, then, “put Weber’s theories to the test” with his famous time and motion studies.[4]
“The thrust of the Weber-Taylor school was to suggest that if a finite body of rules and techniques could be learned and mastered—rules about breakdown of work, about maximum spans of control, about matching authority and responsibility—then the essential problems of managing large groups of people would be more or less solved.” (92)
Another component of the scientific paradigm was that it viewed organizations as primarily rational, as opposed to social. “Rational, in this context, means that clear purposes and objectives for organizations exist, and that these can be determined rather straightforwardly.”[5] On this view, decisions about objectives are almost mechanical and rise straightforwardly from analysis.
On the social view, on the other hand, it is recognized that determining purpose can be messy and is not always “very straightforward or deductive.” Decisions about purposes and objectives are ultimately value choices, although they are informed by analytical considerations. These decisions therefore need to be informed as much by social coalition as by clear-headed thinking.
The second management paradigm was the human relations paradigm which acknowledged that people also had hearts as well as stomachs—they were social beings. It was recognized that people had feelings, and thus the principle of management here became kindness. But the assumption here still left management in charge—except that instead of acting as an authoritarian, the manager was a benevolent authoritarian. Managers in this paradigm could become overly soft and lax in imposing any firm standards and expectations.
Douglas McGregor is a key figure here. He first developed the Theory X and Theory Y model. According to theory X, most people are lazy and seek to avoid responsibility. It is “the assumption of the mediocrity of the masses.”[6] According to theory Y, however, work is as natural as rest and people want to seek out greater responsibility.[7] McGregor argued that the theory a company holds affects how it manages and treats is people. In fact, “the theoretical assumptions management holds about controlling its human resources determine the whole character of the enterprise.”[8]
Organizations that hold to theory X tend to focus on command and control, whereas those who hold to theory Y seek to empower their people. McGregor argued that most organizations of his day held to theory X—and that even if they spoke as if they held to theory Y, their practice in reality accorded with theory X.
McGregor also pointed out, consistent with the fact that most organizations held to theory X, that in most organizations of his day authority was the “central, indispensable means of managerial control.” But authority, McGregor pointed out, is really just one of many forms of social influence and control, and that organizations—consistent with theory Y—should utilize many of these other means. But this was unlikely to happen as long as organizations regarded authority as an absolute concept, as the primary guiding means of control, rather than a relative concept.
McGregor’s insights are right on. However, the school of management that took his principles fell into disrepute because many took things to an equally silly excess on the human relations side as scientific management had gone on the rational side. Some companies, for example, focused simply on making everyone happy and threw out all forms of top-down authority. As Peters summarizes:
Whereas the rational model was a pure top-down play, the social model, as produced by McGregor’s misguided disciples, became pure bottom-up play, an attempt to start revolutions via the training department. McGregor had feared that all along and said, ‘The assumptions of Theory Y do not deny the appropriateness of authority, but they do deny that it is appropriate for all purposes and under all circumstances.[9]
The third phase in management thought is the human resource paradigm, which came to work “not only with fairness and kindness, but also with efficiency.” Now contribution began to matter. People were seen not only as economic and social beings, but also thinking beings.
Covey notes that “with this larger understanding of man’s nature, we begin to make better use of talent, creativity, resourcefulness, ingenuity, and imagination.”[10] There is more delegation, and people are not longer seen merely as machines or physical properties, but people. The aim becomes to “create an environment in which people can contribute their full range of talents to the accomplishment of organizational goals.”[11]
Finally, this leads us to the principle-centered leadership paradigm, which acknowledges all of the dimensions of a person. It deals with fairness, kindness, efficiency, and effectiveness. As Covey notes, “we work with the whole person.”[12] People are not just assets, “not just economic, social, and psychological beings. They are also spiritual beings; they want meaning, a sense of doing something that matters.”[13]
Meaning, then, becomes the fundamental management and motivational principle—not in exclusion from the other dimensions of a person, but in conjunction with them and as a necessary component. “People do not want to work for a cause with little meaning, even though it taps their mental capacities to their fullest. There must be purposes that lift them, ennoble them, and bring them to their highest selves.”[14]
The proper way to manage people given this paradigm is not through control but through principles. What are principles? They are “the natural laws and governing social values that have characterized every great society, every responsible civilization, over the centuries. They surface in the form of values, ideas, ideals, norms, and teachings that uplift, ennoble, fulfill, empower, and inspire.”[15]
Principles are what fundamentally tap into the level of meaningfulness and also, by their very nature, are inconsistent with management by control. For with principles, detailed control is not necessary. Instead, the key to managing people by principles is to make the values clear and provide the conditions for people to manage themselves. The role of the manager then becomes one of help and support, and of helping the employee align his role with his strengths. This arrangement becomes possible by setting up win-win performance agreements. These agreements make expectations clear (which is necessary for empowerment) without prescribing the methods in detail, while also outlining key guidelines and resources available. With this clarity in place, an employee can then evaluate himself, which is far more effective anyway.
Principle-centered managers realize that people are more creative and resourceful and filled with more initiative than most of their jobs require right now. People are spending their creativity and energy on their own goals and dreams—and much of this is lost to the organization. But if you can align what you need from the employee for the sake of organizational performance with the goals and initiatives he naturally wants to pursue, then you will tap into this energy that is lost to the organization—and amplify the employees effectiveness in achieving his own goals as well.
On the PCL paradigm, the center of power thus shifts away from the “elite authoritarian group” to every person in the organization. This is because it recognizes that people want to be treated as whole people. They “want to contribute to the accomplishment of worthwhile objectives. They want to be part of a mission and enterprise that transcends their individual tasks. They don’t want to work in a job that has little meaning, even though it may tap their mental capacities. They want purposes and principles that lift them, ennoble them, inspire them, empower them, and encourage them to their best selves.”[16]
In sum:
The scientific management (stomach) paradigm says, “Pay me well.” The human relations (heart) paradigm says, “Treat me well.” The human resource (mind) paradigm says, “Use me well.” The principle-centered leadership (whole person) paradigm says: “Let’s talk about vision and mission, roles, and goals. I want to make a meaningful contribution.”[17]
Finally, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman propose a theory as well in In Search of Excellence. It is not necessarily contrary to principle-centered leadership, and has much in common with it.
The main components of the theory are:
Peter’s first four points have been discussed in detail in some of the other documents. A few notes can be made on the last two.
First, the centrality of culture means that “the process of shaping culture [is] the prime management role.”
Second, culture allows for the “lose-tight” dynamic of the excellent companies. Culture shapes behavior and provides meaning (through the “tight” dimensions), but also allows people to stick out (because everything that is noncore is adaptable). “The culture regulates rigorously the few variables that do count, and it provides meaning. But within those qualitative values (and in almost all other dimensions), people are encouraged to stick out, to innovate.”[18]
Third, culture allows you to sidestep the complexity of large organizations. This is because it allows you to manage by a few core values rather than detailed rules. Big institutions are too complex to manage by rules; so the excellent companies have simplified, and instead they use a few transcending values to shape behavior.
Peters argues that “managed evolution is important to keeping a company adaptive.”[19] But adaptation is also too complex to manage by rules. Thus, instead of creating rules to manage adaptation, great managers instead make sure that there are enough tries to satisfy the laws of probability. The result is that there will at least by lots of singles and doubles, and the ability to rapidly learn from the market and continually make improvements that build on one another.
But in order for this to happen, the organizational culture has to have the loose-tight properties that are characteristic of the culture of the excellent companies. Most current theory, however, cannot enable this because it is “neither tight enough nor loose enough.” It isn’t tight enough “to consider the role of rigidly shared values and culture as the prime source of purpose and stability” and thus proposes “rules and goal setting to cover these bases.”[20] On the other hand, it is not loose enough to acknowledge the “relative lack of structure” and the need for a “wholly new management logic” that is needed to ensure continuous adaptation in large enterprises. Instead, it proposes structural rules and planning exercise—both forms of rigidity—to hurdle this need.
What we see in the development of management thought is an ongoing trajectory toward freedom and meaning as the ultimate guiding principles of management. Freedom and meaning, however, do not mean that there is no structure. Rather, organizations must have both loose and tight properties. There must be clear and fundamental core values (tight properties) in place in order to enable freedom to flourish and in order to provide the meaning that is ultimately motivating to people and the direction that enables them to manage themselves rather than operate within the command-and-control framework of earlier generations of management thought.
Extension: Biblical Connections. It would be useful to explore the biblical connections here. A few initial thoughts are:
[1] See also chapter 4 (chapter 2 in the 2010 edition) of Management for Productivity for an excellent, clear, and comprehensive overview of the history of management in the 20th century and what we learned from each school of thought, as well as Tom Peters overview in In Search of Excellence, pp. 89-103.
[2] Stephen Covey, Principle-Centered Leadership, p. 176.
[3] Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, In Search of Excellence, 92
[4] Ibid, 92.
[5] Ibid, 91.
[6] He summarized Theory X in three tenets (see Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise, updated and with commentary by Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, p. 43):
[7] McGregor summarized Theory Y in this way (McGregor, pp. 59-60):
[8] Peters, p. 94.
[9] Peters, p. 96. Peters and Waterman also note, by the way, that in their study of excellent companies, the best companies hold together both authority and empowerment. They have both a caring side and a tough side. “Like good parents, they cared a lot—and expected a lot” (96).
[10] Covey, p. 178.
[11] Ibid, 178.
[12] Ibid, 178.
[13] Ibid, 178.
[14] Ibid, 179.
[15] Ibid, 179.
[16] Ibid, 179-180.
[17] Ibid, 180.
[18] Peters and Waterman, 105.
[19] Ibid, 106.
[20] That’s a key point: When the values are clear and the culture embodies them, you don’t need detailed rules.
Increase the scope of freedom in which people are self-directing, while providing feedback and accountability on results, plus helpful systems and structures.
This is holistic, ecological (everything is related), developmental (you have to do some things before other things), and people-oriented (rather than thing-oriented).
Is this:
Everyone doing what they’re best at, in support of organizational goals, free of ill-conceived organizational barriers, with the full encouragement and support of their managers and the overall organization.
For more on what this looks like, including the theological foundations, see my article Management in Light of the Supremacy of God.
This is a guest post by Ryan T. Hartwig and Warren Bird, authors of Teams that Thrive: Five Disciplines of Collaborative Church Leadership, which is out today.
Certainly meeting advice is ubiquitous; our goal is not to repeat that here. Instead, we just want to report the meeting practices that differentiated thriving teams from underperforming teams in our recent study of nearly 150 church leadership teams. As you read what follows, notice what’s missing: the number of meetings or the number of hours spent in meetings. Thus it appears that “too many meetings” or “too much time spent in meetings” aren’t the scapegoats for poor team performance. Our data shows that there are many different ways to do effective meetings, but a few key practices make a great difference.
1. Teams do more than formally “meet” together. They collaborate continuously.
On top teams, meeting times don’t bound their teamwork. Instead, senior leadership teamwork is ongoing, not just occurring during meetings. In fact, we found that meeting informally for more than one hour per week was a contributing factor to differences between top and mediocre teams.
Two key strategies best enable continuous teamwork. The first is to fight like crazy against overwork and busyness. The second strategy is to develop office environments where it is easy for team members to bump into one another. Shared conference rooms and break rooms, stocked fridges, shared administrative support staff members and offices in close proximity to one another encourage team members to frequently bump into one another, creating additional opportunities to continue the team’s important work outside of the boardroom. This active engagement carries over in the boardroom as well.
2. Meeting agendas are distributed to all team members, preferably at least one day in advance.
Distributing meaningful agendas is so powerful for several reasons. First, it forces the meeting facilitator to spend time planning out the priorities and flow of the meeting beforehand, to an extent that it can be shared with others. Second, it informs all participants of the meeting’s purpose and content, which enables each participant to come prepared. Third, it provides structure to the meeting that encourages the team to stay on task and focused throughout the meeting.
3. Meeting agendas are not solely developed by the lead pastor.
Top teams get the whole team involved in setting the agenda. While most senior team meetings were convened and facilitated by either the senior pastor or executive pastor, top teams offered opportunities for other team members to shape the team’s agenda.
This input can be offered in a few different ways. First, meeting conveners can directly ask team members for items to include on the agenda several days prior to the meeting. Second, conveners can offer a standing invitation to send agenda items. Third, conveners can develop the agenda in such a way that a place to discuss the typical issues is slated on the agenda each week.
For instance, each week an agenda may have a slot for “personnel issues,” during which each team member is invited to broach discussions or to bring a decision to the group regarding personnel matters. To make this option work, however, conveners must create space for team members to bring up and discuss important issues, rather than overwhelm the meeting time with other agenda items.
4. Agendas clearly delineate the work for the meeting.
For top teams, the agenda is thoughtfully developed enough to truly guide the team’s discussion and progress through the meeting, rather than agendas that are so vague and routine that no one pays attention to them. Such agendas include:
Agendas provide a forum to capture what has been decided during the meeting, individual expectations for followup and a framework to develop the agenda for the next team meeting.
———–
Excerpted with permission from chapter 12 of Teams That Thrive: Five Disciplines of Collaborative Church Leadership by Ryan T. Hartwig and Warren Bird, InterVarsity Press, 2015. Visit www.TeamsThatThriveBook.com for the book itself, exercises, and other tools to help your team.
That’s the question asked by a new Gallup study.
If you read this blog much, you probably know that I think legislating behavior is a really, really bad idea. It usually doesn’t work, and on most non-ethical matters, it is generally a failure to treat people with dignity and respect. It is, in other words, parental. It is failing to treat employees like adults, which is far more significant issue than whether the policy is intended for employee’s “well being” or not.
So, what does the Gallup research say?
When you read the first page, it initially sounds like employees would be better off if employers did ban work email after work hours.
But then if you continue reading, you see that this conclusion results from a superficial look at the findings which fails to take into account employee engagement.
Employee engagement is one of the most important things to manage for, and it is a wonderful thing that the Gallup study has, once again, born this out. If you have engaged employees, most other issues that companies often try to “fix” through intrusive and byzantine policies go away.
Here’s the gist of their conclusion:
These findings suggest that workers will view their company’s policy about mobile technology through the filter of their own engagement. Thus, instead of tinkering with their policies, companies would be better off developing a strategy to engage more of their employees.
And it’s worth reading the whole thing.
Important words from Jim Collins in Good to Great:
The good-to-great leaders were rigorous, not ruthless, in people decisions. They did not rely on layoffs and restructuring as a primary strategy for improving performance. The comparison companies used layoffs to a much greater extent.
I’ve heard some people say that Jim Collins’ metaphor of “get the right people on the bus, and the wrong people off the bus” is advocating lay-offs as a central tool the managers strategy. That is an utter and complete misunderstanding. A careful reading of his chapter on “First Who, Then What” in Good to Great reveals the exact opposite. (Note: This misunderstanding does not just, or even mainly, reside with folks that are trigger-happy with layoffs; it also comes from sincere people that I’ve heard express concern about business ideas being wrongly used in the church. The great news here is that this is a misunderstanding of Jim Collins’ metaphor, and his teaching coheres with and upholds a biblical view.)
Further, and just as importantly, you need to correctly define who exactly are the people that need to be sent off the bus. It’s not people that are in a department you might be downsizing (which is a bad strategy most of the time in itself, but sometimes happens), for he says “If you sell off your problems, don’t sell off your best people.” (Translation: If you do have to close a department or division, keep the talented people who were working in that department, and are committed to the vision.)
The people you fling off the bus are the people that are not on board with the values of the organization. The people that are passionate for what the organization stands for are to be kept at all costs. You simply cannot have enough of such people.
Yet, so many organizations do the reverse. Their leaders see people, including those most passionate for the vision, as expendable based on how they as leaders are seeking to conceive of the strategy. They have failed to grasped Jim Collins’ core point: first who, then what. That is, you get the right people on the bus first (that is, the people who love the mission and values of the organization) and then, through an empowering management model (rather than top-down approach), you decide where to go.
Or, as John Wooden, one of the best coaches in history, had to say: you move from the people to the plays—not the reverse.
Lay-offs and top-down leadership are absolutely contrary to good to great management.
Jim Collins’ book Good to Great is widely regarded and used by businesses and non-profits around the world, and with excellent reason. I regard it as one of the most important books ever written.
However, understanding the principles of Good to Great is not enough — and I think Jim Collins would agree. This is because Good to Great is about taking a good organization and making it great. It’s about principles of excellence. As such, it does not focus on or go into detail on the basics of how to run an organization at all. It assumes those things. Its focus is the next level — namely, once you know those things, how do you take a good organization and make it great?
Let me say this again: Good to Great assumes you know the basics of how to run an organization. Hence, it’s not enough simply to read it or even implement it. You also need to actually understand those basics.
To get those basics, here are the three chief books I would recommend. Interestingly, the first two are about entrepreneurship, or starting an organization. They’re on the list because knowing how to start an organization familiarizes you with the basics of how to run an organization at all (even though the start-up phase is very different from the ongoing phases). The third, on the other hand, is about the central concepts you need to know for understanding and running an organization.
Here they are:
Michael Raynor and Mumtaz Amhed nail it in their article in the April Harvard Business Review:
I disagree with their critique of Jim Collins’ Good to Great and Tom Peters’ In Search of Excellence, but it’s noteworthy that their conclusions are essentially the same. That is, the findings of Collins and Tom Peters can be boiled down to these three things. Or, perhaps better, these three rules are derivatives of the even deeper and more foundational realities that Collins and Peters show.
The extent to which these three rules are violated is truly breathtaking!
