Xem mẫu

Gettingintowork 11 possibly yet another, each abandoned before the plans have been fully implemented, presumably because they weren’t going anywhere. With each one, employees ask: “why”? And, when it’s over, they say: “noth-ing has changed.” While a restructuring is in progress, they wait anxiously to see whether they’ll have their jobs at the end of it. After experiencing the ups-and-downs, not surprisingly they are deeply prejudiced against “change management,” which seems to achieve nothing more than a per-vasive mood of resignation and apathy combined with the fear that those who survived will “get it” in the next round. Most of the breakdowns associated with dysfunctional teams fall into this category too. They occur frequently and are usually, but not always, on quite a small scale. As a rule, knowledge workers interact and cooper-ate to get things done and, more and more, are organized in teams: sales teams, project teams, design teams, customer service teams, and planning teams, as well as “red” and “blue” teams, or “alpha” and “beta” teams (the kinds of names given to groups of administrative staff set up to handle particular functions, such as “accounts receivable” or “benefits”). Usually, these are teams only in name.7 “My project group never functions as a real team” is a common complaint, which is hardly surprising, as competition is the prevailing ethos at work and people are rewarded for competing, not for collaborating. Moreover, they are seldom accountable to each other, especially when they belong to separate departments or divisions and report to different bosses who manage their units like private fiefdoms and expect “their” employees to follow their own, separate, sometimes personal, agendas and meet their particular goals and requirements.8 Breakdownswithtragicconsequences Breakdowns can have tragic consequences. Astonishingly, the United States government spends more on its military than virtually all other governments in the rest of the world combined. You might expect, there-fore, that the U.S. military would be very good at supplying soldiers in the field with whatever they need, when they need it.9 After the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, however, there were reports of serious deficiencies in organizing: Soldiers and Marines on the ground soon found themselves short of even water and food. According to the GAO,10 the military lacked more than 1 million cases of Meals Ready to Eat. Soldiers ran short of the non-rechargeable lithium batteries needed to operate 60 different communications and electronic systems, systems that are critical to 12 BeyondManagement tracking targets or allowing soldiers under fire to talk to one another. Many soldiers and Marines not only didn’t have armor on trucks or Humvees, they didn’t even have spare tires. The tire shortage was so severe that...[they] were forced to strip and abandon expensive, and otherwise perfectly good, vehicles because they had no way to replace flats.11 While shortages of any kind can be dire for soldiers, the failure to get them items like batteries and tires is especially puzzling. After all, some ofthesearen’thighlyspecialized,made-to-orderproducts.Itmightbepos-sible to pick them up at a local store if there was one nearby. It’s easy to understand why soldiers in the field would want their comrades in logis-tics units to do their jobs carefully and conscientiously, to stay focused on what they’re doing, and to check to see that others down the line have responded to everything they’ve initiated or requested. In other words, that those who are responsible for organizing, recognize their responsibilities and take them seriously and organize well. If they did this, wouldn’t there be fewer breakdowns? And, isn’t good organizing what we all wish for? Isn’t good organizing integral to what we consider good work? Shouldn’t we expect that anyone organizing anything does the best he or she can? If we are organizers, shouldn’t we take responsibility for doing it well? And, shouldn’t we be prepared to hold one other to account and have them do the same to us if this is what it takes to make sure we do it well? Systematicdisorganization If we know what it takes to do a good job, why do efforts to organize work often fall woefully short? As you see, writing about breakdowns almost inevitably brings up the twin questions of what causes them and what you can do to tackle them or, ideally, to prevent them. A standard response is that organizations are complicated, lots can go wrong, and to avoid breakdowns you should learn the lessons of man-agement books and follow the advice of consultants. You should work at getting the structure right; coming up with a better strategy; improving processes; enhancing communications; paying more attention to plans; and using new tools. Charting work processes will help you to reengi-neer your workplace; while information technologies, which enable you to move data around, will make everyone more efficient. Whatever the advice, however, two things don’t change. One is the basic belief that management will see to it that everything gets done properly. The other Gettingintowork 13 is the touching faith that, whatever goes wrong, management will find a way to put it right.12 Like the whole story of management told in business books, these assumptions don’t ring true. Clearly, they rule out the pos-sibility, which is precisely the one I want you to consider, that, whether the problem is, say, team members not cooperating or employees of intel-ligence agencies not sharing what they know, management itself—the practices—are a primary source of work breakdowns. When deep-seated beliefs give rise to practices that are wrong for the work at hand, they lead to systemic breakdowns. Three examples are com-petition,bureaucracy,andhierarchy.Thesearebelievedtobenecessaryfor efficiency; but all are obstacles to sharing knowledge and to collaboration. When cooperation is high on your agenda, as it must be for knowledge workers, you don’t want any of them. Systematic breakdowns, though related, are a little different. These are caused by misguided actions, or poorly designed tools and struc-tures, which are considered “sound management,” but prevent knowledge workers from doing a good job and/or solving their problems. Examples include: structures intended to make large organizations manageable that contribute to a “silo mentality”; a dependence on data, even when “num-bers” can shed little light on the issues at hand; long, convoluted chains of command that make it difficult to reach the right people when you need to talk to them; frequent changes in personnel, who take their experience and tacit knowledge with them when they are promoted or rotated through the organization; and the use of consultants and other outside “experts” who don’t know enough about what is going on to offer sensible advice. You’ll find these practices in organization after organization, which makes the breakdowns they cause systematic. “Systematic disorganization” may sound like a contradiction, because one word suggests order and the other the absence of it, but this is exactly what you get when you organize knowledge-work using princi-ples and practices that originated in factories, when work was mechanical. By preventing knowledge workers from organizing effectively, standard management practices are a primary source of disorganization, contribut-ing to both kinds of breakdowns. But, they are also ubiquitous, hence the expression “systematic disorganization”. Being saddled with practices that are wrong for the work you are doing isabitlikebeingonamannedmissiontoMarsthatisheadinginthewrong direction under a remote-guidance system that is malfunctioning. Every-thing seemed fine until the craft was on its way and someone discovered that the experts had programmed the coordinates of the craft’s trajectory incorrectly. A sensible solution would be for the astronauts onboard to 14 BeyondManagement fly the craft; but ground control refuses to let them, claiming they have a better picture from the control room, they are sure it isn’t a major problem, they have the tools to sort it out, and, besides, astronauts can’t be relied on to make the right decisions. They haven’t been trained for this. It is not their job. How is this analogous to organizational breakdowns? It has to do with thehigh-controlmindset:theideathatyouleaveeverythingto“thetop”(to “mission control”), even though they aren’t doing a good job and the peo-ple on hand are probably able to do a better one because they know what is happening. Management isn’t all tools, like org charts or strategic plans, and titles, like “senior supervisor,” “deputy assistant director,” or—one of my favorites—“chief knowledge officer.” These tools and titles, which seem to shout “control,” are emblematic of a paradigm: a set of ideas and deeply held beliefs, attitudes, and values about how to run organi-zations, plus a language, which I’ll call “management-speak.” Together, these shape what people say and do at work.13 The paradigm is to blame for the kinds of breakdowns I’ve described and, unfortunately, is much harder to change than tools and titles. Pioneers in management include Frederick Taylor, who launched data-driven “scientific management,” and Henri Fayol, who argued for an unambiguous chain of command along with well-defined roles and responsibilities. They didn’t invent the management paradigm but simply took ideas about science, knowledge, and the way the world works (now known, collectively, as “modernism”), widely shared by intellectuals of the time, and built these into their prescriptions for organizing factory-work.14 The ideas had been around for centuries. They coalesced in the Enlightenment, when scholars started shifting allegiances, placing their faith in empirical (i.e. data-based) science, rather than scripture, as the means to unlock the mysteries of the universe.15 We are a hundred years beyond the contributions of Taylor and his early disciples, yet the pillars of Enlightenment thinking are still propping up our work places; only now, when most of us are knowledge workers, those ideas are dead wrong. For, as Tim Hindle puts it, “the way people work has changed dramatically, but the way their companies are organised lags far behind.”16 Lookingthewrongway,atthewrongthings To the Enlightened mind the universe is a giant clockwork mechanism, with the earth and everything in and on it governed by universal laws like the Law of Gravity, the First and Second Law of Thermodynamics, and the Newtonian Laws of Motion. The machine world isn’t perfect but, Gettingintowork 15 fortunately, is inhabited by “rational man.” A tiny subgroup of the species homo sapiens (literally, “wise man” or “knowing man”) is trained in the methods of science. The duty of experts of every persuasion, from accoun-tants to zoologists, is to make the world a better place by applying data produced by scientific analysis and discovering more laws (economists, for example, claim to have found some new ones, like the law of supply and demand, in the last century or so). In the process of practicing their craft, when gathering and using data, experts must obey one cardinal rule: never bring your own feelings, beliefs, values, or personal relationships into your work. Subjective feelings, beliefs, values, and relationships have no place in objective science.17 Rollingtheseandafewotherprinciplestogether,intoatheoryandprac-tice for organizing work, what you get is management science as we know it: a picture of organizations and work from the “outside,” framed by a view from the top. The top in this instance isn’t a place or position. The view from the top is a mindset born of a belief in empiricism and the idea that numerical data is king. To understand the mindset, just pick up a man-agement book. There is very little that is not written from this standpoint. Now, coming back to the reasons for breakdowns and systematic disor-ganization at work, things fall apart because, with a view from the top, you can’t see what knowledge workers are doing and you can’t tell what it takes to do knowledge-work well. Relationships and meaning-making as well as attitudes and beliefs are just a few of the important ingredients of knowledge-work, but the combination of objectivity and empiricism hides these. What is the result? The view from the top has everyone thinking aboutthewrongthingsandlookingthewrongway:atrules,structures,and data, rather than what matters to people when they’re organizing (or how they see things) and how they share knowledge. With the substance of knowledge-work hidden or invisible, it is impossible to see that standard management practices prevent knowledge workers from doing their work properly and to tell why the practices do this. As you can’t see the limits of your paradigm when you are embedded in it, when you are thinking and practicing management you don’t know what you don’t know about work or organizing it. Going“inside”work Looking at work through a management lens today, what you see are the six Ds: documentation, data, deliverables, directives, deadlines, and dollars. The fact that this is an “outside” view of work, which tells you nothing about what, how, or why people are doing it, matters much more ... - tailieumienphi.vn
nguon tai.lieu . vn