)
THE FUTURE OF WORK: ATTRACT NEW TALENT, BUILD BETTER LEADERS, AND CREATE A COMPETITIVE ORGANIZATION
Author: Jacob Morgan
Publisher: Wiley
Price: $25
ISBN: 9781118877241
The way we manage has virtually stayed the same over the past 150 to 200 years in many companies. In fact, most of the people who created and developed the management practices that we use today are no longer alive, yet for some reason we still subscribe to their outdated ideas and philosophies. These are ideas and approaches that have influenced everything from how we hire and onboard employees to how we run our companies. Here are just a few of the dated management practices today that are still considered the standard.
Hierarchies and org charts
According to Wikipedia, the first organizational chart was created by the Scottish-American engineer Daniel McCallum in 1854; for those of you keeping track that's around 160 years ago (however, hierarchies themselves go back thousands of years to ancient Egypt). These charts were widely adopted in the military to show the relationship between various personnel. They quickly made their way into organizations as well and have since become the standard for showing their structure. They were designed in a cascading way to show the senior level officers at the top and everyone else being depicted below them to show who reported to who. The assumption here is that information flows in a linear way "up or down the food chain."
Why it's now obsolete
Not only are new technologies making it easier for anyone within an organization to talk to anyone else but we are seeing a great push toward openness and transparency. Progressive organizations are trying to build cultures where employees are engaged, inspired, and creative. These organisations are also focusing on becoming agile and adaptable, which is completely contrary to the notion of a hierarchy.
Annual reviews
If you're lucky, your organization offers annual or semi-annual reviews. In many organizations this is still an annual review. We've all been involved in the process where we sit down one-on-one with a manager and basically have to justify and explain why we deserve to get more money for the following year. We try to think of everything we have done and spend an hour or so trying to justify our cause. These reviews are often painful. Depending on who you listen to, this practice of annual/semi-annual reviews goes back from 70 to 200 years.
For the past 5 to 10 years we have been living in a connected and engaged world where providing feedback can now happen in real time with the click of a button. If an employee is working on something or requests feedback on something there is no reason why they need to wait six months or a year to have that discussion. New technologies and behaviors have made the notion of the annual or semi-annual review completely pointless. The analogy that's often used to help illustrate this point is sports. Imagine if you were the coach of a soccer or football team and after each game you waited six months to provide feedback and ideas on players' performance. Numerous studies also show that only around 5 percent of employees are satisfied with the reviews they get and the majority of HR managers actually dislike their own system! Achievers, a rewards and recognition consulting firm, did a study in 2012 of 645 HR managers: 98 per cent of them believed that these types of reviews were not useful... 98 per cent!
Adobe, which employs around 12,000 people, recently abandoned their annual review process in favor of more casual check-ins and conversations that happen in real time. According to Adobe, this is saving more than 80,000 employee hours a year.
Focusing on inputs
The standard for measuring how productive or successful an employee is has always revolved around how many hours they spend doing something. Not only that but managers wanted to physically see the employees coming into the office doing the work so that they would 'know' that work was actually getting done. If you come in and put in your time then that's all that mattered.
Why this is now obsolete
The future of work is about focusing on outputs. In other words, work when you want and where you want as long as you get your job done when you need to get it done and produce good-quality work. New technologies are making this possible and managers today are adjusting to this new way of work. There is simply no reason to focus on time spent working on something when the goal should be to focus on what is actually produced.
Managers have access to information and make decisions
Very much modeled after the military, the gold standard for how companies were run depended on the decisions that the managers made. These managers were the ones who had access to the information that was required to make decisions and once those decisions were made the tasks required to carry them out were delegated to the rest of the company.
Why this is now obsolete
We are seeing a massive shift toward opening up information and relying on collective intelligence and the wisdom of the crowds. It's becoming increasingly easier for employees to get access to people and information and these employees are able to come up with powerful ideas to help solve problems and identify new opportunities (think about Theory X and Theory Y).
There are many more outdated management practices, which I'm sure you can come up with. The thing to think about is why are they still being used today and why anything hasn't been done in most organizations to change them. We have become increasingly comfortable with the status quo and we need to step up and challenge that. It's time to start challenging convention. The crucial issues with today's management boils down to a few things.
Too few controlling too much
As organisations grow and become more complex and as the rate of change in the world continues to accelerate, relying on just a few people to identify opportunities, avoid risks, and make decisions on behalf of the organisation no longer becomes effective. Often, nonmanagerial employees are able to see the rocks on the horizon before the managers are.
No room for experimentation
Management is very formulaic, which is great if you are trying to put together Ikea furniture or run an organization in the 1900s. Traditional management approaches that our organizations have been built on top of don't allow for any wiggle room or experimentation to try new things. This means there is very little learning or adaptation as it relates to management. Management was taken as dogma with no room to challenge conventional wisdom.
Re-printed with permission from the publisher. Excerpted from 'The Future Of work'. Copyright 2014 Jacob Morgan. All rights reserved
MEET THE AUTHOR
- Jacob Morgan is the principal and co-founder of the future of work consulting firm Chess Media Group and the FOW Community, an invite only membership community dedicated to the future of work and collaboration
- He has worked with companies such as Sodexo, Cisco, SAP and Franklin Templeton Investments. He has been named by SAP as one of the top influencers on human potential
