Frederick Winslow Taylor.

I’m sure the name at least sounds familiar if you don’t know exactly who he was. He is the creator of scientific management, and he helped propel the workforce into the industrial age by creating new ways of managing production work to maximize the value of the labor force. This did a whole lot for organizations that wanted to mass-produce more and more products each year while maintaining profitability. Taylor helped these organizations develop easy ways of replacing employees when needed. He helped leaders build a very strong collection of parts, parts that were always interchangeable. There was no team. There was only individual productivity to meet the assigned team goals.

But it wasn’t all that bad. Scientific management did produce a great deal of value for organizations. That’s largely why its practices are still in use even after the theory went by the wayside. It created the practice of standard work, which made it easier for workers to do their job, train new employees, and coach employees. It also helped create more predictability, allowing businesses to forecast labor, costs, and growth much more accurately. The value of scientific management is seen in the short-term. It will lead to short-term value, which a lot of people care about in our modern world. The two big drawbacks of scientific management come in the hidden costs; the ones organizations choose to ignore or unknowingly dismiss as less important than short-term value in the marketplace.

The first drawback is the impact it has on people. Scientific management treats people like parts of a machine. Parts that can be easily replaced, updated, or removed, depending on the next iteration of the machine. People have value because of the labor they can add to the equation. The second drawback is the lack of a long-term foundation being cultivated. The focus on short-term work often detracts from longer-term planning, goal-setting, mission alignment, and creation of a unified, positive culture. In short, it diminishes the amount of trust between employees and the organization.

The modern workforce needs trust and autonomy. Technology has made it so. But more importantly, the nature of work has drastically changed over time. We don’t need to monitor desk-bound, computer employees like we’re squeezing every ounce of productivity out of them. We need to build relationships with each employee and help them drive their own success by providing autonomy to do the work without being held to the arbitrary hourly standards of productivity that scientific management gave to us. Leaders should focus on building teams, not a strong collection of parts.

There’s a foundational shift you need to make when moving on from the scientific management mindset. You have to trust that your employees give their best effort. You have to give your employees autonomy to operate within the trust alongside clear expectations and intended outcomes. Instead of creating oversight and surveillance measures to track every minute of the day, you need to trust your employees to operate without such oversight.

It’s easy to hold people accountable without watching them constantly. You give them an assignment, a timeline, and trust to complete their work. If they don’t complete it on time, you give them more training or coaching, or you find out they took advantage of your trust. The last option rarely happens. Employees want autonomy to operate, and they want to feel like you trust them. They’ll respond by putting their best effort into work to keep the trust and autonomy you’ve given them.

Until next time,

Rick