What Is The Point?
OK, I admit it. Today I am very fed-up and wondering why I do what I do for a living.
I have just read this article in HR Review and thought ‘ho-hum’. It is headed ‘Businesses Urged To Give Employees ‘More Autonomy and Less Intensive Management’’ and comments on a new report from the Work Foundation, Knowledge Workers and Knowledge Work.
From the HR Review article:
“Ian Brinkley, co-author of the Knowledge Workers and Knowledge Work report, and associate director at The Work Foundation, said: “So far in this recession employers have been reluctant to lose the skills, talents and experience of their workforces. Yet at the same time they seem to be failing to make the most of them. Many people could be doing more but are denied the chance to do so.
He said that companies should be aiming to “give people more responsibility” and he suggested that they aim for “more autonomy for people and less intensive management”.”
Increasing autonomy was a key theme in the CIPD’s Smart Working: How Smart Is UK plc? report last year. This found that smart working was currently more of an aspiration than a reality. The call was for a move from command and control to greater degrees of freedom, flexibility and collaboration.
I did a doctorate on all this stuff fourteen years ago. One of the things I explored was how manufacturers balanced localised autonomy in decision-making on the shopfloor and simultaneous, centralised co-ordination. At that time, in among all the froth about employee empowerment there were people calling out hype for what it was. Chris Argyris, for example in an article in the Harvard Business Review in 1998 – Empowerment: The Emperors’s New Clothes. He said:
“The battle between autonomy and control rages on while the real potential for empowerment is squandered.”
The McKinsey Quartely 2009 Number 1 has on the front cover “The crisis: A new era in management”. Ah, some new thinking? Not a bit of it. Here we find an article entitled “From Lean To Lasting: Making operational improvements stick” by focusing on the ’soft’ side of lean. Listen, if there was no ’soft’ side there would be no lean. Process control is only possible because of operator tacit knowledge and their willingness to engage in continuous improvement and problem-solving.
We already know all this. A new era in management? Don’t hold your breath. Yep. I am fed-up 
Chris Argyris, for example in an article in the Harvard Business Review in 1998 – Empowerment: The Emperors’s New Clothes. He said:
“The battle between autonomy and control rages on while the real potential for empowerment is squandered.”
As you know, I share your frustration.
The tools and the environment are now clearly at hand.
I can point to these issues being written about, at length, in the 60’s and 70’s. It has taken me a long time to become deeply cynical, but today’s environment, what with the shenanigans and machinations of the banksters and politicians, makes it clear that these issues are fundamentally structural (job evaluation, compensation practices, etc.).
I have begun to think that the issues you point to may never change except for in the odd organization where the leaders take the issues seriously.
oops, did not close tag.
Hi Jon
As ever, you are kind. Thanks for commenting.
Your statement “The tools and the environment are now clearly at hand” is all that needs to be said.
I hope you are only temporarily dismayed by current shenanigans. I am feeling more like my old self and determined to get some action going.
Lloyd Davis wrote this on his latest blogpost:
“We’re just realising that we can do an awful lot for ourselves – both as individuals and members of corporations and organisations.”
This has always been my hope for social computing and have to date been disappointed. I was awake in the night thinking that social networking might be the new opium of the masses. Let them throw sheep! Let them entertain themselves into a stupour.
I know I am exaggerating and being unfair. I would love to know more about who is using these tools to bring people together for conversations and self-help, especially for first-line managers with responsibility for managing people, who have not been told how to do this and therefore make mistakes, and who get kicked from the top down and the bottom up. The unions? Are they doing it?
I would also like to see grass roots, a self-organised ‘business school of the internet’, where people can access all the stuff you and I know exists and where they collaborate to try to make sense of it in practice.
I shall continue to focus on working with senior executives responsible for articulating business policies and vision. I only have the bandwidth to focus on this work.
But I would love to be part of the sort of grass roots movement I mentioned earlier.
Hope your Sunday is restful
You might find this brief article interesting .. hedges the bet a bit, I think, but …
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/business/29unbox.html?hpw
This problem occurs when firms acquire a layer of management who don’t add much value, but do control the discourse in the boardroom about how work gets done in the firm. As long as there is a gap between the “espoused” and “enacted” view of the business, there’s an evolutionary niche where unproductive managers can live forever.
Or, as Hugh @gapingvoid just tweeted:
“Doesn’t matter how good my book on management is. Truth is, your people would rather not be working for you and your big, dumbass company.”
Hi Gordon
Thanks for your comment
Hugh as usual gets it spot-on.
Considering that many do have to work for someone else for a living, there are ways of organising that are so much more effective – good for business and for people, than the controlling parent/child relationships that exist in many workplaces.
What frustrates me is McKinsey trotting out ’soft’ stuff platitudes, which (in-capital-letters-but-I-am-too-polite-to-do-that) we already know about. To be in any way useful, they might use their influence to ask hard questions.
Like since we already know all this, including what the barriers are, which businesses are currently adopting high performance + lean work principles. Who are they? What are their stories?