The Leaders We Need, And What Makes Us Follow Page 4
These qualities cited by CEOs belong to the bureaucratic-industrial age, in which the model of effective leadership is the good father, and leaders bind their followers with unconscious transferential ties. But for knowledge workers with an interactive social character, skeptical of father figures, these ties do not bind. Knowledge workers want to collaborate with a leader who makes their lives more meaningful, and that calls for more than the stellar personal qualities cited by the CEOs.
The need for meaning sets us apart from other primates, and it’s always made a difference to motivation. But what’s meaningful to me may be less or not at all meaningful to you. And what’s meaningful to either of us at one time might not be at another time. For example, people working at repetitive jobs in defense factories during World War II were highly motivated to do what they were told because they felt they were helping to win the war. The same job in peacetime might have felt just plain monotonous.
Many workers I interviewed in the 1970s didn’t expect to find meaning in their work other than getting a regular paycheck, being able to support a family, and being respected for it. However, in some companies, like AT&T, employees felt pride and found meaning in being part of a great company that provided valuable services. Yet, even then, frontline workers were not enthusiastic about their bosses. And while grudging followership might have been OK for low-level manufacturing and service jobs (although even that’s debatable), it won’t get great results from knowledge workers whose attitude toward a leader makes a huge difference. That’s because they can decide how much of themselves they want to put into their work. Unlike workers performing formatted factory work, knowledge workers can decide whether to just follow or to actively collaborate. So what makes knowledge workers want to follow and collaborate with a leader?
Much of the time those of us in knowledge work don’t need a leader; we work as independent professionals or collaborate with colleagues. But when you do join a project you probably have some of the same attitudes I had when I collaborated with Erich Fromm on the village study. I was highly motivated because the project was meaningful, I was learning a lot, and Fromm listened to my ideas and sometimes accepted them. That’s essentially the finding from Thomas H. Davenport’s studies: “Knowledge workers don’t want to work toward a goal because someone else has set it, but rather because they believe that it’s right.”2
In the article “Genentech: The Best Place to Work Now,” Fortune quotes knowledge workers who joined the company not for the rich stock options, the free cappuccino, the parties, or other great benefits, but because they could do meaningful work. They were continually learning and on the cutting edge of finding cures for different types of cancer. They enthusiastically follow Art Levinson, their CEO, not just because he is passionate and has integrity and strong beliefs, although he has all those qualities, but because he champions science and focuses on “significant unmet needs” in the fields of oncology, immunology, and tissue growth and repair.3 Clearly, Genetech’s workers are Levinson’s collaborators, not just followers.
Although we need a new theory for the age of knowledge work, this doesn’t mean we can’t learn from past thinking about leadership. I find useful nuggets of wisdom about leadership from the Old and New Testaments; ancient Chinese thinking, especially Lao Tzu and Confucius; Machiavelli; Shakespeare; histories of great leaders like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and exceptional military leaders. I also find some of the present-day advice for leaders useful: communicating well and often, listening to people and seeing things from their point of view, giving people proper recognition and recognizing their strengths, accepting responsibility for mistakes, and so on. Some of this advice, like walking the talk and self-control, fits as well in our time as it did when Confucius gave it twenty-five hundred years ago. But much of what I read by leadership gurus would be misleading if I didn’t understand it in historical context.
FROM TAYLOR TO MAYO
A great deal of what has been published and taught under the banner of leadership studies during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries turns out to be theories about how to motivate workers in an industrial bureaucracy. We’ll see that these theories may fit bureaucracies and the bureaucratic personality at least in part, but not the emerging diverse types of organizations, roles, and followers in the knowledge workplace. What follows is a brief and highly selective review of theories set in their historical context.
Let’s go back to the beginning of the twentieth century, when Frederick Winslow Taylor propounded the theory of “scientific management” to make industrial bureaucracies into smoothly running machines. Observing workers shoveling iron ore at Bethlehem Steel, Taylor found that they used a variety of methods. Some workers had long shovels, some short ones. Some bent their knees, others bent their backs. Some lifted five pounds of ore at a time, others ten or fifteen pounds. By studying these different approaches and timing the tasks, Taylor discovered what he claimed was the one best way to shovel ore to increase productivity and minimize backaches. According to Taylorism, the industrial engineer should design jobs, and workers should follow instructions—no deviations from the script. By doing tasks Taylor’s way, the one best way, both company and worker would benefit, particularly if the worker shared in productivity gains.
What motivated workers to do such monotonous work? Unless it was a war effort, it was essentially keeping a job and getting paid. But this was a case of having to, not necessarily wanting to, follow a leader who might be either a process designer or a dictatorial foreman who made sure the workers stayed on task.
While many auto and steel workers at the beginning of the century were immigrants from eastern and southern Europe who hardly spoke English or farmers migrating north who were glad to get a steady wage, eager to please the boss, and satisfied to be told the one best way, their children in the 1920s were more educated, less malleable, and more responsive to union organizers. These workers learned how to fool the industrial engineers by slowing their pace when the job was timed and ostracizing those workers, called “rate busters,” who worked too fast when the engineers were timing their work.4
To go beyond Taylor and make workers into better followers, a new theory of leadership was needed. Starting in 1924, a famous series of studies was carried out at the Western Electric Hawthorne factory in Chicago, led by Elton Mayo and Fritz Roethlisberger of the Harvard Business School. A stated purpose of the studies was to counteract unions by helping managers gain worker loyalty as well as increase productivity—to make managers more effective leaders.5 Two main findings on how to lead workers emerged from these studies. One was widely adopted, while the other was misinterpreted and generally ignored for some thirty years because it didn’t fit the prevailing context.
The first finding was that workers were motivated not only by money, but also by a caring boss. Mayo, a psychologist and anthropologist, believed that first-line supervisors should get human relations training. The idea, which was subsequently taught in business schools and corporate training courses, was that workers would be motivated to do monotonous jobs if they had a boss who could listen to their problems with empathy. In other words, you didn’t have to change the Tayloristic theory of one best way. You just had to change the boss’s attitudes toward workers.
This idea became widely accepted by managers. In 1978, when I asked Jim Olson, then vice chairman of AT&T, why he thought company surveys showed that workers were unhappy, he repeated Mayo’s teachings: first-line supervisors didn’t know how to listen and talk to their people. Olson ignored the fact that AT&T managers had been trying human relations techniques for some thirty years and this hadn’t solved the problem.6
This idea, that a supervisor should be a kind of psychotherapist, was linked in minds of AT&T managers with their belief in the so-called “Hawthorne Effect,” an oversimplified interpretation of the study’s findings. They often cited this effect to explain a sudden rise in productivity. Supposedly, if you pay attention to workers
and experiment with different working conditions, productivity will go up. It hardly matters what you do, you can change their routines, even the lighting in the room, and workers will work harder. Managers at AT&T and many other companies have explained to me that the Hawthorne Effect means that any new workplace experiment will result in short-lived productivity gains that last only until the novelty wears off.
But both of these conclusions were misleading. The workers who were studied at Hawthorne—five women assembling relays—told the researchers that, yes, the supervisor made a difference, but not because he was an empathic kind of psychotherapist. Richard Gillespie, who studied research notes that were left out of the book, found the following comment about the supervisor: “It was he who injected a spirit of play in the group by his comic antics, encouraging them to call everyone by his first name, to take strangers into their facetious conversations, to ‘ride’ supervisors and fellow operators alike.”7 This isn’t psychotherapy, and it’s a lot more than paying attention to the workers. It’s adding a bit of play to otherwise boring tasks. It’s making work fun.
There is also a factor, which neither Mayo nor Gillespie mention, that explains why both the therapeutic and playful managers succeeded in motivating the workers, and that’s an unconscious transference to a manager who’s idealized, even loved, because he’s experienced as a good parent.
However, there was another factor that differentiated the therapeutic and playful manager: with the playful leader, productivity increased even more because workers were allowed to decide among themselves how best to do the job. Pay incentives were also a big motivator; productivity rose when workers were paid for the number of pieces they produced. But to admit the efficacy of participation and pay incentives would have undermined the Tayloristic foundations of prevailing thinking that industrial engineers rather than workers could always determine the best way to do a job. And it would have ruined Mayo’s theory that it was just the caring manager that made the difference.
It took more than thirty years for management training to begin to shake off the message that Taylorism plus a caring boss, a combination of hard and soft management, was the best formula for effective industrial-bureaucratic leadership.
THEORY X AND THEORY Y
The human relations approach did not prevent unions from organizing between six hundred thousand and seven hundred thousand of the one million employees of AT&T. How did that happen? Executives like Olson believed that managers had simply failed to develop human relations skills. But workers told me they needed a union to protect them from the rigid rules set by the Tayloristic industrial engineers who didn’t understand their resentment at being treated like parts of a machine. Telephone operators even needed a union to demand the right to take a potty break, and the first union victory at the Hawthorne plant was getting doors put on the men’s room stalls.
Some managers began to question the combination of Taylor and Mayo. They latched on to new theories, especially Douglas McGregor’s Theory Y, based in part on Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs.8 I find that Theory Y, like so much psychological theorizing, is also poorly understood by many managers. But that’s partly because McGregor failed to put it in historical context, so it’s incomplete and misleading.
In brief, the theory recognizes that workers are turned off by Taylorism, and adding human relations doesn’t motivate them. They’re still being treated as though they’d be passive or resistant to change without management control and paternalistic direction. They are still powerless to make changes in their work even when they see ways to improve it. McGregor sees Taylorism as fitting Theory X, that people need to be forced to work. What it misses, he writes, building on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, is that when people satisfy their lower-level needs for sustenance, employment, and security, what emerges are higher-level ego needs for self-esteem, status, and recognition, and beyond that, for self-fulfillment through creative expression. According to McGregor, employees who feel relatively secure get turned off because their work doesn’t let them satisfy their higher needs.
Some managers mistakenly think that Theory Y is soft management, another type of human relations. Not at all. McGregor, a psychologist at MIT, was in touch with new management initiatives in technology companies and service industries. He recognized that if jobs requiring initiative or teamwork—what we now call knowledge work—are designed according to Tayloristic methods, workers will be frustrated and productivity will stagnate. For example, salespeople or telemarketing operators should be empowered (a term not used until the 1980s) to explain products and prices to customers, if need be deviating from their scripts. Employees should be allowed to use their brains, even to participate in how they do the job.
However, the importance of context—that Taylorism didn’t fit changing business needs—was often ignored by managers. And Maslow, who lacked McGregor’s knowledge of business, saw Theory Y only as a way of motivating employees who had higher-order needs, not of managing in a new way to meet the demands of these jobs. Maslow wrote that lower-level people would just take advantage of Theory Y, which he and others misread as soft management. Maslow wrote, “There are many places in the world [he gave Mexico as one example] where only authoritarian management, cracking the whip over fearful people, can work . . . Frequently it turns out that the profoundly authoritative person has to be broken a little before he can assimilate kindness and generosity.”9
Having worked with Mexican villagers, I find Maslow’s view just plain wrong. It isn’t based on any research, or even personal experience. This aside, he misses an essential point of McGregor’s theory—that knowledge and service jobs call for leadership that empowers workers, not necessarily leadership that treats them with kindness and generosity.
THE MANAGER AS EDUCATOR
Maslow and McGregor missed the point that preparing workers for more complex tasks without a one best way of doing things was not a matter of boosting them up a needs hierarchy, but teaching them to develop new skills and preparing them to take more responsibility. Gratifying ego needs for recognition and status is always a good idea. But more important, to motivate workers to want to follow them, managers had to become teachers and coaches.
I first saw an example of this in the early 1970s. On his own, a foreman began to teach machine operators to share some of his management tasks, like job assignments, inspection, and simple maintenance. During his experiment, which raised productivity, a company vice president cited Maslow to explain why he was skeptical about this initiative. After questioning whether the workers would be responsible enough to take on these tasks, he warned the foreman that he would lose control by being too soft. He said “Aren’t you afraid to lose your authority, if everyone can do your job?” The foreman thought about it and said, “Since I started giving it away, I never had so much authority.”10 The workers wanted to follow him not because he was caring, but because he was teaching them new skills and he trusted them to take more responsibility.
By the late 1970s, a number of companies like AT&T, Volvo, Procter & Gamble, and the Cummins Engine Company were forging ahead of what was being taught in business schools, training managers to be coaches so that employees would gain new skills, not new needs. At the Volvo marine engine plant at Vara, Sweden, all the assemblers were coached to work in teams without a supervisor, sharing the management tasks among themselves.11
In the 1980s, total quality management (TQM)—sometimes called Six Sigma because the goal was an infinitesimal number of product defects six standard deviations from the original mean number of defects—finally left Taylorism in the dustbin of history. As preached by W. Edwards Deming, first in Japan and then in the United States when Deming was in his eighties, TQM made workers internal consumers in a production process, empowered to reject any defective product handed to them rather than adding value to it and passing it on. The role of management was not to give directions but to design good processes, coach workers, and resolve system problems that
caused defects.
But Deming’s view of good leadership was more than that. In one of the many conversations I had with him when he was in his nineties, I asked what he considered most important in his work with the Japanese after World War II. He emphasized a context in which the Japanese needed inspirational leadership. “They had lost the war, their products were viewed as inferior, they were depressed,” he said. “I made them feel they could be the best in the world.” Japanese as well as American managers wanted to follow Deming because, with TQM, he infused new meaning into their work, giving them the conviction that they could surpass themselves, become world-class producers, achieve what they had not thought possible.
But despite his genius, Deming’s thinking remained in the context of the industrial age. In our conversations, he brushed aside my attempts to point out that his concept of TQM didn’t fit the knowledge workplace. To be sure, TQM is the ultimate method for making products that fit the specs exactly. That’s essential if the parts have to fit together, as in a car. But what if there are no specs? What if the worker faced with a customer problem can’t refer to a formatted process or solution? A dramatic example of the limitation of TQM is the history of Florida Power and Light (FP&L), which in 1989 won the prestigious Japanese Deming Prize for its quality program. FP&L set up a business to teach TQM to other companies, but its service costs began rising alarmingly, and a few years later a new CEO stopped the whole TQM program. I found out why from an official of the IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers), which represented the service technicians. The techs were handed instructions for the exact processes to follow in fixing electrical outages. But in Florida, problems varied and called for different solutions. Based on their experiences, the techs had figured out how to deal with problems in urban areas like Miami, rural areas with thick vegetation, beachfronts, and so on. They had notebooks full of ways to do their work most efficiently and effectively. When told to go by the TQM book, they left their notebooks in their lockers, and the result was less efficient, more costly work.