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September 2 - December 9, 2016
A creative worker is a person who creates or grows unique value within a network of people, or someone who creates or grows the network in an original way for others to share their value.
Dan Pink distinguishes between the algorithmic and heuristic types of labour. In the modern workplace 95% of work is heuristic, that is, it requires creative and independent thinking, which is incompatible with the command and control type of organizational structure.
The happiness of managers and other workers is crucial because happy people are more
I firmly believe we can only improve worker happiness when everyone feels responsible for management and learns to manage the system instead of managing each other.
The only reason people suffer from bad organizations is that they don't stand up to say, “I'm not taking this any longer; go boss yourself!” It troubles me that, when I ask people for their favorite moments in life, they usually only list things that happened in their personal time. But if your best experiences are all vacations, then maybe you shouldn't return to work tomorrow.
common sense is not common practice. Common practice for me is eating giant bags of M&Ms while watching a movie; common sense would be to watch my health and eat only the green ones.
For organizations, common practice is that they are managed like machines, with their workers treated as gears and levers. I call this Management 1.0. In this style of management, people assume the organization consists of parts and that improvement of the whole requires monitoring, repairing, and replacing those parts.
some writers suggest that “winner-take-all” organizations should rank employees using measurements of individual achievements and give more work to the organization's “best performers” while getting rid of the bad ones.8 These writers seem to assume that the community of employees is better served with competition and politics than with collaboration and a shared purpose. Other writers suggest that employees have a tendency to “slack off” when the boss is on vacation. After all, “When the cat's away the mice will play!” Therefore, the boss should return to the office regularly to peek around
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other writers suggest that bosses should continuously monitor whether people are actually using office tools to do work and not for Skyping with friends, Facebooking diary entries, or Photoshopping baby pictures. The crucial and ethical part of this practice, it is claimed, is to let everyone know that they're being watched.10 In this case, the assumption is that managers can keep everyone's trust only when they are honest about not trusting anyone.
treating employees like adult human beings might be common sense, but it is not common practice.
many managers don't see that they should manage the system around the people, not the people directly, and that they should leave micromanagement to the teams. Instead, they use one-on-ones for individual goal-setting, and they follow up later by asking people for status updates—both of which only reinforce the superior-subordinate relationship that is typical in all command-and-control organizations.
some people don't realize that the method they use to evaluate performance will influence that performance. And thus HR departments install electronic performance appraisal tools that require people to give anonymous feedback about each other. Trust breaks down completely because managers are allowed to know more about employees than employees are allowed to know about each other, which emphasizes that managers are more important than nonmanagers.
when managers continue to view the organization as a hierarchy, they usually try to impose goals and metrics on every part of the system. But in complex systems, performance is usually found in the relationships between the parts, and proper goals and metrics can only emerge from intelligent local interaction, not as part of a top-down target-setting framework.
They adopt good ideas but force-fit them onto a bad architecture. This is primarily why the good ideas rarely stick and why fads and fashions fail to deliver on their promises and will always be replaced one after the other.14 The only effect consistently achieved across all ideas implemented by bosses is that they reinforce the position of the boss. The essential flaw of TQM [total quality management] is that, when implemented, it tends to reinforce the mechanistic and hierarchical models that are consistent with the mental maps of most managers. Chris Argyris, Flawed Advice and the
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If a system is to be stable, the number of states of its control mechanism must be greater than or equal to the number of states in the system being controlled. Wikipedia, “Variety (Cybernetics)”
The Law of Requisite Variety requires that anything that controls a system must be at least as complex as the system being controlled. When we translate this to management work, it means the manager of a system must operate at a similar or higher level of complexity than the system, in order to fully control it.
The problem here is the word control. We shouldn't use it in a social context. People are not thermostats! Instead, we should use terms such as lead, coach, inspire, motivate, constrain, govern, and help. By using these words we work our way around the law of requisite variety because we choose to ignore part of the system's complexity.
what about the hospital director? Does she have a “higher role”? Is her work “more complex” because her scope of concern is the entire hospital, including lots of surgeons, doctors, nurses, and patients? Does the role of the director require a smarter brain?
Nobody can ever claim to “control” the hospital, because indeed the law of requisite variety would demand that there be at least as much complexity in the director's brain as the complexity of everyone else combined!
The director ignores a tremendous amount of complexity and only focuses on the things she considers important.
I see this classic image of “the boss” as a total anachronism. It may work in certain connotations like “organized crime boss,” “union boss,” or “pit boss,” but being bossy per se is not an attribute that I have ever seen as desirable in a manager or anyone else for that matter. Richard Branson, Like a Virgin, loc:2400
including agile, lean, scrum, kanban, beyond budgeting, lean startup, delivering happiness, design thinking, real options, scenario planning, conscious capitalism,
They all share the same DNA, which they received from their parents: systems thinking and complexity theory.
many creative workers find it hard to implement such big ideas in their organizations because they always encounter obstacles. The barriers most often mentioned are organizational culture, organizational structure, change management, people management, command-and-control hierarchies, and other topics usually directly associated with
You can optimize all you want in development, design, testing, finance, marketing, human resources, or anywhere else. Ultimately, management always needs to change as well, or else your improvement efforts will run into a wall.
no matter whether you have testers or not, everyone should feel responsible for testing the products they are working on. And when the product is bad, I hope nobody blames only the testers.
Such disollution of specialization is tied in with the transition from role based thinking towards value based thinking. This principle is implemented in Scrum as the requirement that all members of the team have but one title — Development Team Member.
management of the work is a crucial activity, but this could be done with or without full-time managers.
no matter whether there are managers or not, everyone should feel responsible for management.
In a similar manner, being more than a replaceable cog in a machine makes team members care and accept responsibility for success of the organization as a whole, while contributing to the best of their abilities. It eliminates any "us vs them" type of perspective, and with it many of the shortcomings resulting from competition, siloing, and other such counterproductive practices. Further, in such an organization, the higher-ups is no longer heaven for sociopaths.
Principles rarely change, but practices always depend on context. Therefore, it depends on how you interpret <insert method here>. If you associate the method with a collection of principles, you can always keep inventing new practices, as long as they adhere to the principles. But if you associate <insert method here> with a specific set of practices, you're doomed.
organizations are complex, adaptive systems and that good management means taking care of the system instead of manipulating people.
improving the environment so that it keeps workers engaged and happy is one of the main responsibilities of management; otherwise the organization fails to generate value.
a management practice is a good practice when: it engages people and their interactions; it enables them to improve the system; it helps to delight all clients.
stakeholders are often confused with shareholders, and clients are usually mistaken for customers.
In principle, it is good practice to offer both principles and practices.
“Be a servant leader” is abstract. “Bring the team some coffee” is concrete. “Make yourself dispensable” is abstract. “Take a six-month vacation” is concrete.
When it comes to management, most people are novices. They need concrete advice and step-by-step guidance in answer to their “how” questions. How do we measure performance? How do we replace performance appraisals? How do we decide on salaries and bonuses? How do we offer career paths and promotions? How do we motivate our employees?
Novice drivers need a bit more guidance than that. (I certainly did!) They need concrete tips on how to sit in the seat, how to hold the steering wheel, how to look at the road, and how to use the headlights and the turn indicators. In Europe new drivers learn how to use the gears, and in the United States they learn how to use the cup holders.
The mindless adherence to rules, combined with a steady loss of principles, is always a prelude to bureaucracy.
when I suggest that people give each other kudo cards as tokens of appreciation, I sometimes get questions such as “Should this be anonymous or public?” “Should I give them personally or should I put the cards in a box?” “Should this be on paper or can we do this electronically?” It's as if I tell them to bring the team coffee in the morning, and they ask me if the team needs milk and sugar, and if it's OK to add a cookie, and if it should be a cookie with chocolate or a healthy one; and what about that one person who only drinks tea? I refuse to be too specific because the danger is that
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Granted, tweaks in the use of office space can sometimes be purely cosmetic. But I believe the examples I witnessed were indicators of good management, which often doesn't require a lot of money or effort. In fact, the things I mentioned here are simple, cheap, and not very spectacular. But they work! I witnessed the happiness and pride of workers. I also saw people not waiting for managers to improve their work and taking responsibility for management in their own hands. Creative workers choose to boss themselves.
I sometimes like using the workout metaphor. Everyone understands that yoga and Pilates are just names for endless collections of painful useful practices based on guiding principles. They're not methods or frameworks. We all know that doing twenty push-ups per day is healthy, but it's not required. It's perfectly fine to replace this good practice with something else. In fact, as your personal trainer knows, every now and then you should!
Anything that has real and lasting value is always a gift from within. Franz Kafka,
There are many wrong ways to reward employees. A simple but effective approach is to install a kudo box, which enables people to give each other a small reward. The kudo box fulfills the six rules for rewards and works much better than bonuses and other forms of financial motivation.
Notice the parallels to the "$50 experiment" where each team member is given a weekly supplement that they must award (usually anonymously) to another team member.
bonus systems are still implemented all around the world “to incentivize performance,” despite the fact that experts have known for decades that there's no proven correlation between bonuses and
a large and growing body of evidence suggests that in many circumstances, paying for results can actually make people perform badly, and that the more you pay, the worse they perform. Nic Fleming, “The Bonus Myth
a common assumption among managers is that nothing works like money when you want to make people work harder, longer, or more effectively. Also, it is often assumed that extrinsic motivation works quite well when implemented as a financial bonus. These assumptions are both wrong.
Money is as important to knowledge workers as to anybody else, but they do not accept it as the ultimate yardstick, nor do they consider money as a substitute for professional performance and achievement. In sharp contrast to yesterday's workers, to whom a job was first of all a living, most knowledge workers see their job as a life. Peter F. Drucker, Management
research has revealed that incentives for performance actually work the other way around.5 The anticipation of a reward (either money or something else) works counterproductively, since it kills people's intrinsic motivation. The incentives ensure that people stop doing things just for the joy of the work. It is called the overjustification effect.6 Instead of expecting and feeling enjoyment, people expect a reward. Incentives ensure that people stop doing things just for the joy of the work.
rewards based on outcomes increase the risk of cheating, since people's focus is on getting a reward instead of doing a good job. When you reward employees based on outcome, they will take the shortest path to that
Influence masters first ensure that vital behaviors connect to intrinsic satisfaction. Next, they line up social support. They double check both of these areas before they finally choose extrinsic rewards to motivate behavior. Kerry Patterson
Don't promise rewards in advance. Keep anticipated rewards small. Reward continuously, not once.
