Jun. 16, 2018 "Are managers capable of liberating their employees?": Today I found this article by Harvey Schachter in the Globe and Mail:
Frederick Winslow Taylor and Peter Drucker seem miles apart in their management approach. One was an industrial engineer, the other philosopher-like. One treated manual labour as mindless muscle for the industrial era while the other humanely viewed knowledge workers as volunteers who must be satisfied. But was their approach in fact the same? And are we suffering from that today?
That was the suggestion of Cal Newport in a recent blog post. The professor of computer science at Georgetown University and author of several productivity books, including Deep Work, says the two men delineate the two most important trends in management history.
Mr. Taylor exemplified the study of a production system, figuring out the most efficient way to run it, and then giving simple, repetitive tasks to workers – who might be timed, since it was known how fast the task could be performed. Henry Ford echoed that approach by creating the automotive assembly line. Both tried using salary and bonuses to motivate workers to operate at maximum efficiency.
But as knowledge work emerged, it was too unstructured to reduce to a set of optimized simple tasks. Mr. Drucker responded with management by objectives, getting employees to buy in to important objectives and then figure out for themselves how to achieve success.
But Mr. Newport argues both approaches had the same foundation, treating workers as a black box: a computing term for a system only understood by its inputs or outputs.
“Both philosophies conceive of workers as opaque vessels that receive instructions and incentives as input, then produce valuable artifacts as output. The key is to figure out which types of instructions and incentives produce the best output,” he writes. “Neither approach, however, is interested in the internal processes within the black box that actually perform the messy work of producing the output.”
That may seem highly theoretical – interesting, if not of much use. But guess again. It’s practical and vital, the cause of so much despair in workplaces today.
Mr. Newport says that to obtain the high cognitive performance required by modern knowledge we will have to open up the figurative black box to face the reality of how the human brain works. How does it take in information and provide valuable outputs?
If we turn our attention to this, we will find that overwhelming people with too much information as we’re doing these days and not allowing them sufficient time to focus on their work is counterproductive. We will need to listen to the wailing we hear, daily, from the people around us about being flooded with distractions – and the increasing concerns that our attention spans, if not our brainpower, is shrinking.
If we turn our attention to this, we will find that overwhelming people with too much information as we’re doing these days and not allowing them sufficient time to focus on their work is counterproductive. We will need to listen to the wailing we hear, daily, from the people around us about being flooded with distractions – and the increasing concerns that our attention spans, if not our brainpower, is shrinking.
I wrote recently about dividing the workplace between makers and managers, and how we favour the latter because they are the bosses. So we get jammed with meetings and e-mail – managers’ form of work. I wrote about what individuals can do .
Now, let’s flip it around, because too often these issues of balance and burnout are treated as only for individuals to solve with productivity tricks and techniques, when more systemic change is required. If you are a manager, particularly a senior one, you can continue to let people flail away in a climate non-conducive to focused work, or you can try to liberate them so they can produce more effectively for your organization.
There have been experiments in this vein over recent years, notably reducing e-mail usage on evening and weekends and trying to limit meetings to essential participants. Those are probably only starting points.
But, as with any issue you face as a manager, action begins by admitting this is a problem worthy of attention – call it black box management or the distracted, frenzied workplace. Mr. Taylor and the managers of his era have been attacked for treating people as expendable.
A century later, in a more humane era, we are essentially doing the same: a grand experiment in which people are left to cope like rats in a maze.
But, as with any issue you face as a manager, action begins by admitting this is a problem worthy of attention – call it black box management or the distracted, frenzied workplace. Mr. Taylor and the managers of his era have been attacked for treating people as expendable.
A century later, in a more humane era, we are essentially doing the same: a grand experiment in which people are left to cope like rats in a maze.
Investigate the problem, asking your staff for solutions. Instead of focus groups for customers, try them with staff. Listen acutely. Be open to change.
The manager-maker dichotomy is simplistic; it makes it seem as if the system works for managers, and often it doesn’t, as they suffer, too. And make change, experimenting with different approaches that liberate your staff to be more productive. Don’t treat the situation as inevitable and expect them to suck it up.
The manager-maker dichotomy is simplistic; it makes it seem as if the system works for managers, and often it doesn’t, as they suffer, too. And make change, experimenting with different approaches that liberate your staff to be more productive. Don’t treat the situation as inevitable and expect them to suck it up.
Cannonballs
· What’s your goal: Profit, purpose, service, or some blend of the three? It’s helpful to know.
My opinion: That's a good question.
· Managers try to avoid bad news or sandwich it between two slices of good. But a 2013 study shows that people prefer to begin with the bad news when offered a choice, notably when it’s something that the person can’t do anything about. You can follow that with some kind of good news to buffer the blow.
Research in the United States shows that banks with more materialistic CEOs – as determined by their possessions – take more risks than those with less materialistic CEOs.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/careers/management/article-are-managers-capable-of-liberating-their-employees/
"These women want to solve the pay gap": Today I found this article by Jordyn Holman in the Globe and Mail:
Claire Wasserman started Ladies Get Paid in 2016 to help women advance in their careers and get the money they deserve. Until recently, the organization put on events that taught women, trans and gender non-conforming individuals how to negotiate pay and be more confident in the workplace.
Then, the group got sued.
“I thought I could just help women get more money,” Wasserman told Bloomberg. “And now I see how this is threatened.” Three men filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against Ladies Get Paid last year for excluding them from events. In April, she settled for undisclosed terms and changed the group’s bylaws to allow all genders to attend its conferences, happy hours and meetups, including men.
In this week’s episode of The Pay Check—the last in our series—we take you to a Ladies Get Paid conference held in Seattle in March.
Get Money, Get Paid happened just before Ladies Get Paid went public with the settlement, and Wasserman worries that it’ll be the last of its kind. “Everyone can attend now,” Wasserman told Bloomberg. But the vibe has fundamentally changed. “I do think something is lost there. I think it's very special when women can come together—just them.”
The settlement wasn’t the end of the story. The suit almost put Wasserman out of business. In May, she announced in her weekly Ladies Get Paid newsletter that the group was launching a crowdfunding campaign to raise $100,000. They reached that goal in three weeks, and in mid-June, Wasserman extended the campaign to raise an additional $15,000 to “hit back harder.”
Even though women are almost twice as likely as men to say they experienced gender discrimination at work (according to a 2017 Pew Research Center survey) and men run 95 percent of S&P 500 companies in the U.S., there have been several recent cases of women-led organizations being sued or investigated for unequal treatment.
The New York-based co-working space the Wing is facing an investigation by the New York City Commission on Human Rights for not letting men join. Despite the scrutiny, it’s still opening new locations, including its first outside New York, in Washington.
The New York-based co-working space the Wing is facing an investigation by the New York City Commission on Human Rights for not letting men join. Despite the scrutiny, it’s still opening new locations, including its first outside New York, in Washington.
Since the gender-inclusive rule went into effect, just a handful of men have attended Ladies Get Paid events. Wasserman worries that women might not feel as comfortable speaking up about toxic workplace issues or instances of sexual harassment in the office if men are in the room.
"I think people need to understand that just because a group of women are coming together to better themselves does not mean that it is inherently anti-men," Wasserman said. "That's totally missing the point. We're seeking equality to all.
Want to hear more? Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Pay Check is a six-episode deep dive into the big, expensive, global mystery of why, in 2018, women still earn less than men.
