Category Archives: Leadership

Now Hiring: Stupid Employees Wanted

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Two Swedish professors proposed in the Journal of Management Studies that companies with too many smart people risk having their workflow disrupted by workers who overanalyze everything and make repeated suggestions for alternatives. They conclude that the best team players are people who carry out their work without constantly questioning the processes or their bosses (Star Tribune, 6/2/13).

I don’t think so.

Frederick Taylor, an American engineer and the first organizational consultant, created “scientific management” in the early 20th century. Taylor’s principles led to detailed job descriptions for fragmented jobs. People created organizations with hierarchical, compartmentalized, and functionalized departments with rigid and impermeable boundaries. Managers “controlled” people with bribes and threats: performance appraisals; discipline procedures; incentive plans; and lies, abuse, and crazy making.

Conformity became the first rule of organizations. The only quality required of a worker was obedience. Leaders were separate from workers and creativity, initiative, and innovation came from the top or from outside the enterprise. Taylor’s message to workers was, “You are not supposed to think. There are other people paid for thinking around here.”

Taylor’s tragic mistake was to think that managers can control and engineer people like machinery. Treating people like pieces of equipment robs the workplace of spirit, ethics, purpose, values, emotion, and meaning.  I’m sure Taylor had no idea when he introduced the quest for efficiency without humanity just how many souls his approaches would crush, how much energy his methods would steal from creativity.

More than 100 years later, most organizations are mediocre monocultures that demand conformity. Everyone thinks and behaves the same. The discrepancy between the potential and actual life expectancy of corporations is greater than for any other species on the planet. Most people’s jobs are too small for them. Massive human potential goes unfulfilled. How’s scientific management working for us?

Smart people with great values fill our organizations. The problem with workplaces isn’t too many smart folks, and we don’t need more “dumb” workers: the problem is too many employees who comply with the demands for conformity and dumb themselves down to be accepted by disengaged colleagues and lousy leaders who fail to create conditions where every person can choose to be their best without fear of being ostracized, marginalized, or discarded like old appliances.

The best team players aren’t the sleepy, silent, and spiritless human robots of Frederick Taylor’s dismal workplace.  The best team players are alive, energized, and engaged. They’re hard to handle. The best leaders care about others and support and encourage authentic people at work.

The “stupid” people in this story are the two academics who have apparently never seen the walking dead that fill the kinds of organizations they endorse.

The Illusion of Control

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Always on the lookout for rare corporate authenticity, I listened to the group from a Fargo, North Dakota manufacturing plant as they spoke at an ethics luncheon sponsored by The Center for Ethical Leadership at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. Pete, the quality guy, was high-energy and exuded enthusiasm — a true believer in the work he did.  Walt, the president of the company, was humble and soft-spoken.

They talked of their workplace  and new tools like self-managed work teams, open book management, and continuous learning, along with the various methods of the quality movement they excelled in. I was more interested in their depth, passion, idealism, and human connection than in the tools they used to organize and express themselves — as interesting as those programs were.

Walt invited me to visit the plant. I talked with him and other plant leaders for two energized hours. Someone expressed concern for the sustainability of their innovative work. I told them they could think of their work as a beautiful garden that they nurtured with loving care. And I told them how a guy in a pickup truck could destroy their garden in a moment. Successful change efforts get destroyed every day in the corporate world by mindless and sometimes malicious executives.

The dominant culture of the corporation eventually pushed Walt out. Committed to ethics, authenticity, and employee engagement, Walt took over a plant in the middle of America. The plant owner had visited the Fargo plant and wanted Walt to transform his plant. As the plant turnaround took off, the owner complained to Walt that things felt out of control; he felt out of control.

Things felt out of control?

I think the owner wanted a feel-good quick fix: easy, fast, and comfortable. He apparently didn’t understand that fear, anxiety, and feeling inadequate and out of control go with organizational transformation and that deep change can’t happen without inner turmoil. Dealing with fear, loss, anxiety, and the loss of control evolves us as people and from the changes in us our organizations change. Under stress, people often try to return to an earlier state of comfort─a sure step towards decline. If people understood that their discomfort would pass if they embraced it, they would grow to a new level of understanding─a sure step towards sustainability.

I knew many executives over the years who said they supported employee involvement until the day came when they felt they were not in control─a sign that change was happening. Then their dark sides took over, and they sabotaged the employees who did what the executives had told them to do.

Our cosmos is not a vast machine that we control. She is a living system: chaotic, complex, and ever creative.

The belief that we are in control is an illusion.

Walt, a wise and resilient man, now leads a plant in the Eastern part of the country.