by Rod Collins
The recent mismanagement scandals that have plagued General Motors and the Veterans Administration are unfortunate examples of what happens when work cultures go awry. The silence that prevailed among the many who were aware of the deep problems in both of these organizations offends our human sensibilities. Why didn’t more people speak up sooner? How could so many passively sit on the sidelines while people literally were dying because of their organizations’ flawed operations? What caused these two organizations to create cultures that seemed to bring out the worst in so many people? And how can we make it better so organizations are designed to bring out the very best in all their workers?
For more than fifty years, we have known that participative management—where managers deeply respect their employees and empower them to do their very best work—is far superior to top-down, “keep your mouth shut and do what you’re told” command-and-control management. Beginning in the 1960s with Douglas McGregor’s identification of Theory X and Theory Y and with Abraham Maslow’s penetrating insights into the higher reaches of human nature, we have understood that when managers involve employees in defining the work to be done, the workers are more engaged in their efforts and more committed to excellent performance. Unfortunately, this knowledge has had little real impact on organizations. When it comes to implementing the insights of the human relations discipline spawned by McGregor and Maslow, management’s accommodations, until recently, have been far more about style than substance.
Creating Great Workplaces
Despite the recent misadventures of GM and the VA, substantive change is beginning to take hold in some management circles, and it’s not coming from the insights of the organizational specialists or the usual management players, but rather from the innovative practices of a rather unlikely group: engineers. The current #1 company on Fortune magazine’s list of the “Best Companies to Work For” was founded by two engineers, and the world’s first bossless company—W. L. Gore and Associates, a perennial presence on the Fortune list—was also started by an engineer. The Agile Management movement, which has revolutionized software development by leveraging the power of collaboration, was started by a group of software engineers. And it was an engineer who created the first wiki, which became popularized with the rapid growth of Wikipedia. How is it that engineers, who are not normally known as the champions of the “touchy-feely” have had more success than the human relationship experts when it comes to effecting real change in the way management works?
One group that may be interested in the answer to this question is the pioneers who have banded together to champion the Great Work Cultures initiative. Their mission is “to create deep, broad workplace culture change so that all workers can expect and experience a respectful work environment.” The group’s tagline is “Moving from Command and Control to Respect and Empower.” Their hope is that by banding together, they will create the gravitas that will result in a new norm for workplace cultures. Implicit in this notion is the expectation that this new norm will radically transform the way individual leaders think in leading the work efforts of their employees. As the group pursues its noble purpose of reinventing management on a large scale, it may benefit from understanding how the engineers have been successful in bringing substantive change to management.
Discovering the Key to Great Performance
About the same time that McGregor and Maslow were expanding our understanding about human motivation in organizational work, W. Edwards Deming was introducing systems thinking into the practice of management. An engineer by training, Deming recognized that the dysfunctional behavior that often plagues top-down organizations is more likely to result from the dynamics of the overall management system than from the behavior of individual managers. Thus, he cautioned managers that when most of the people engage in the wrong behavior most of the time, the problem is more likely the system not the people. This may explain why the engineers have been so successful in creating organizations known for their great cultures.
Engineers tend to think in terms of systems. They understand that system design is the key to great performance. When Sergey Brin and Larry Page started Google, they didn’t just build a great search engine; they also built a great company. As they designed their organization, they were very mindful that they were not going to build another top down bureaucracy that amplified the voices of the few and silenced the many. Instead, they would build an organization that, like their search engine, would leverage the collective intelligence of everyone in their organization.
Keeping Pace with Accelerating Change
Brin and Page also understood that the fundamental work of business leaders was being transformed by the sudden need to keep pace with the speed of accelerating change. The work of the business leader can be summed up in three words: strategy and execution. Whether business leaders succeed or fail depends on how well they perform these two fundamental management tasks. For over a century, strategy was accomplished by planning and the key to execution was effective control. Planning and control can be effective organizing principles when the world is relatively stable. They may not necessarily work best, but they usually work well enough when change is incremental.
However, when the pace of change accelerates, fixed plans and rigid controls are poor guides for navigating the turbulent waters of constantly shifting seas. Iterative adaptability and creative collaboration are better organizing principles in times of great change. In designing Google’s organization, Brin and Page shifted the fundamental dynamics of strategy and execution from “Plan and Control” to “Iterate and Co-create.” As a consequence, their new organization became more of a peer-to-peer network than a top-down hierarchy. With practices such as a 60-to-1 ratio of managers to workers and its well-publicized 20% rule—employees spend twenty percent of their time on self-managed projects—Google’s organizational system naturally reinforces iteration and co-creation.
Building Networks, Not Hierarchies
When organizations are designed as networks, advocating for respect and empowerment is unnecessary because, in networks, respect is earned rather than ascribed, and power comes from being connected rather than from being in charge. One of the problems with the notion of empowerment is that it assumes that hierarchies are a given. The voluntary delegation of power from a person in authority to his or her subordinates is something that can only happen in a hierarchy. In networks where power stems from one’s initiative to make connections, the notion that one has the capacity to ascribe power from one person to another is irrelevant.
Respect and empowerment are not the enablers of great cultures; they are the natural byproducts of a great management system. The true enablers of great cultures are the two dynamics that define the peer-to-peer network: iterate and co-create. As the leaders at GM and the VA seek to turnaround their troubled organizations and as the members of the Great Cultures Initiative pursue their noble cause, they might all benefit from the management wisdom of the engineers who learned that when you want most of the people to engage in the right behavior most of the time, you build a network, not a hierarchy.
