Why Should Leaders Care About Improving Thinking?
The author asserts that current practices in leadership and management have become ritual behaviors, followed in spite of their complete failure to achieve actual results.
Aside of failing to achieve organizational goals, these practices are also detrimental to morale. Consider the various studies and surveys done in employee satisfaction have uncovered unflattering truths about the quality of leadership: 74% of employees respond that they "not engaged" by their work, and full 60% of workers claim that their jobs make them "miserable."
These and other issues demonstrate that leadership in the present day is mismatched - and there are a number of factors that drive this: there have been dramatic changes in the nature of employment over the past few decades, and leadership techniques have not changed appreciably in centuries.
The Nature of Work
Half a century ago, most employees were paid for their physical labor, and the relationship between management and worker was in the nature of an overseer whose role was directing the physical activities of a work crew whose efforts produced tangible and visual results.
By the mid-twentieth century, the nature of work began to change, to where electricity and mechanization automated many of the physical tasks required to produce goods and employees moved to tasks such as operating equipment, managing information, and other secondary tasks. In this era, management changed to providing processes and designing work flows, with a goal of finding ever greater efficiencies. Even so, employees were not required to be particularly intelligent, "just smart enough to follow plans laid out by management."
In the last few decades, much of the process work has been computerized or automated as well. Even tasks that require human judgment have been automated. The author refers to a stunt pulled by one of his colleagues, who submitted a fictitious resume to each company in Fortune magazine's list of the 100 best places to work - and even though it was clearly fictitious (the applicant's name was given as "Goldilocks") it received a frightening number of positive responses from interested firms.
By 2005, it was estimated that 40% of entry-level workers were "knowledge workers" - and that 100% of mid-level management and above also fell into this category. The net result is that people in the modern workplace are not being paid to do - they are being paid to think. However, leaders and managers are still following leadership models based on activity-based employees.
Managing Knowledge Workers
Employees in the modern workforce are better educated than any previous generation. A college degree is a requirement for most white-collar positions that, a generation ago, required only a high-school diploma. Even advanced degrees such as the MBA are commonplace, with (literally) thousands of universities cranking out graduates every year.
As well as being highly educated, employees in western countries are more independent and wealthier. In terms of material possessions, most executives today have the kind of wealth that only a fraction of the population had fifty years ago, and control considerable sums of money in their professional lives.
This is especially true of more recent generations (Generation X and Millennial), who expect more from an organization than a paycheck: to these generations, work is part of their identity, and the workplace is an environment where they expect to be challenged to develop personally and given responsibilities that match their capabilities.
The increasing education and independence of employees is a significant issue - and yet we have not rethought our management models since the early industrial era, a time at which business owners "hired a pair of hands and wished they'd left their brains behind."
The Pace of Change
Another factor that has a significant influence on the workplace is the pace of change. Throughout much of history, the tasks that people did varied little from day to day, year to year, or decade to decade. The industrial revolution brought about dramatic change all at once, but also set wheels in motion for change to continue and accelerate. A worker in the present age can't count on doing the same thing today as he did last month or last year.
Consider that, when most of the management modes in present user were developed, product life cycles were about ten years. Now, lifecycles are much shorter - they can be moths or even days - and the processes that are used to manage the production activities are constantly changing to suit. To make matters worse, leaders have been trained to constantly tinker with business processes, without regard to the impact on the people who are involved in these processes.
Performance as the tip of an Iceberg
The author presents an iceberg model to suggest that the factors that drive performance are below the surface and invisible.
Performance is the result of actions/behaviors. These are easy to observe and measure, as they are above the "waterline." However, behavior is driven by emotions and beliefs that reside below the surface.
Ultimately, what we achieve is driven by the way we think: we cannot change performance without changing the factors that drive performance. Even if we seek to drive performance by influencing activity, this is still working above the water line.
The only effective way to change performance is to move the entire iceberg, above and below the waterline. To date, management is generally not effective at doing so - and most models of management do not even consider anything beyond actions and outcomes.
Leadership in Crisis
As a result, the present state of leadership can accurately be called a "crisis." Performance is rotten and employees are miserable, and the leaders who continue to follow outdated models are not only failing to solve the problems, but are quite often making the problems worse.
In summary, leaders must learn how to improve employees' thinking, but as a prerequisite, they must change the way that they think about employees. The problems in performance are not for lack of smart, talented, and motivated individuals - but in the way that companies fail to manage and direct their work.