What Organizations Get Wrong about People
This is one of the world’s first org charts. From 1896.
The boxes and lines look remarkably similar to what we have now.
The organization chart hasn’t changed much in over a century!
A lot of our assumptions about people and work have also come from the 1800’s.
We have Frederic Taylor to thank for that. He’s fondly known as the father of scientific management.
Taylor revolutionized factories by breaking down work into its smallest components and optimizing each tiny task. We see this everywhere now, from our local McDonalds to factory field trips. Taylor transformed the world of work in many ways, improving efficiency and bringing order.
But his legacy also includes an assumption that people are essentially cogs in the machine, and that we needed to manage them through strict control and standardization.
This is where the legacy of timesheets, micromanagement, and rigid processes come from.
There’s a time and place for those things, but for the most part, that legacy is taking up more space than is wise for our current context.
Taylor believed that people cared only about money, that they would always do the least amount of work that they can get away with, and that they fundamentally can’t be trusted. So you needed managers who will control and monitor them to get the most of their time.
But we’re living in a fundamentally different time. It’s actually crucial to find people who you can trust with the work, and to foster their engagement so you do in fact get the best out of their time.
Ideas and innovation don’t follow a 9-5 schedule. We’re now relying on people to solve complex problems and create things that never existed before.
We’re relying on people’s creativity and courage, to try new things, to discover new solutions and insights.
We need people who deeply care. And most people actually do fall into that bucket!
It’s time we upgraded our systems and mindsets to reflect trust, foster engagement and actually get out of people’s way so they can do their best work.
There are all kinds of strategies to do that, but the foundation and the starting point is to build trust.
