Can you be a better manager by being a lazy manager?

At the core of our ridiculously successful AgencyAgile techniques is this very idea and ways to apply it.  Should you be involved with your teams, or merely available?  Should you be the expert, or would it be better to be at least a little ignorant? 

As with every TAOM podcast, we’ll surprise you with the research and our first-hand learnings into how to bring the best out in your teams by being the best style of manager.

Tune in to this week’s episode and learn more!

Questions that you’ll want to ponder after the episode:

1. Do you remember what it was like, the shift from specialist to manager?  If not in yourself, in others?  Can you see that the things that we want in an effective Lazy Manager are things that you or they may have lost?
2. Make a list of things you think you should do as a manager, but could instead be done by the someone or everyone else, to equal or greater effect.
3. Do you see how managers try to show that they are managing, that they can compete for being managerial, which also usually means lower productivity?

Managing is the business of numbers…or is it? Certainly, Frederick Taylor, the inventor of Scientific Management felt that way. 

What neither of them told you is that just because you’re using a number, it doesn’t mean that you’re managing well. In fact, it may be quite the opposite.

A key behavior for managers is assessing the problems that surround moments like this episode’s stars, the numbers 6 and 8.  In this case, 6 was the number of hours that it was supposed to take to get something done, and 8 was the number that it actually took.  The simple solution employed by most managers and systems is to treat the 8 as the problem.

We’ll explore both the consequences of that behavior, and also dig deeply into what the 6 and 8 really tell us, touching briefly on concepts like anchoring bias, false precision and a key idea taken from Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System.

Questions that you’ll want to ponder after the episode:

1. Can you see the bias in estimates versus actuals and the way they are handled?
2. Can you see our sense of betrayal or disappointment, and how that can color your or other people’s responses? 
3. Can you see what happens when you introduce range-based estimates to a discussion?

Theory X was a representation of the assumptions or implications of Taylorism (listen to episode 3.1) – that workers, in general, refuse to work unless rewarded or punished.  Theory Y represented an opposing view, that workers actually embrace or welcome the opportunity to work.   

The argument was made that for processes that tend to be more repetitive, Theory X was probably more effective.  Likewise, for work where craft (or thinking) was needed, Theory Y would be more suitable. 

But that turns out to be untrue.  

In this episode I will provide a brief vignette in which you can hear the difference between the styles, and also share with you some of the very interesting history of this research, including the work done by Rensis Likert.

Likert was famous for his survey techniques and how he isolated a set of managerial attitudes and topics that are at the core of the Theory X and Y divide.

Key Insights and Your Homework:

1. Do you see and hear managers talking about employee’s and their attitudes towards work using the Theory X perspective, as if the worker is the problem, and all other factors are a constant?

2. Theory X posits that workers are inherently not motivated.  Who needs greater motivation to go into work each day, the Theory X manager, or the worker who works for a Theory X manager?

In the late 1800’s, after millennia of craftsman-type commerce – a global network of artisans who did things with simple tools – gave way to increasingly complex automated and powered machines that could reliably replicate actions performed by people.

For many types of products, the automation eliminated much of the need for “craftsmen.”  But didn’t get rid of need for people. Early machines required a massive amount of human assistance.  

In a major shift, people were no longer the source of productivity, but rather, the limit to it.  A factory only ran as fast as the people could feed the never-tired machines.

And this is where our modern management was born: how do we make sure that people are not slowing down our machines?

A mechanical engineer named Frederick Taylor developed a concept for managing people these repetitive, automated processes called Scientific Management. And with it, many of our current notions of managing were born.  

Scientific management is with us today – everything from timecards to many forms of measurement, and the idea that numbers are the best way to manage a business.  Hence, scientific.  But it was not the science of people, but rather the science of how to manage people within a factory.

Many quickly realized that the whole approach was somewhat “dehumanizing” and that there were probably better ways to manage. But we seem to have never shaken his words and ideas  out of our heads.

Key Insights and Your Homework:

1. Can you see in yourself or other managers a tendency to expect people to perform to a time standard, to do things the way that they have been told to do it?

• Can you see the difference between the manager who blames people for not living up to the standard, versus the manager who feels like it is their job to elevate people, to set their own standards?

• How do you think these differences affect productivity, quality and how happy they are?

This idea is not new, that management can be costly to productivity.  But why do managers never speak of it?

It was an idea that came into prominence in 1937, in the heart of the industrial age, by a young PhD student at the Oxford School of Economics, Ronald Coase.  

Back then, industrial economics looked something like, the bigger you get, the bigger you can become. The concept of “economies of scale” had become popular. As your company grew larger, it would become more efficient with its resources and become an even better competitor, with better talent, experience, financial resources and a long list of other advantages. 

“Why is there not just one firm?”, Coase asked.  

It was an interesting point: If bigger is better is true, then why are there so many firms? In fact, he pointed out (gleefully, we can only assume, for he won a Nobel Prize for this later on) that in virtually every industry, sure, there were one or two, even three very large firms, but then there were also far more merely-large firms, and once one started looking at small and very small firms, there were multitudes of them!

With that insight and a lot of good thinking that followed, Coase defined the idea of “coordination costs” which are the costs and activities involved in coordinating the resources, of most of which would be called “managing.”

Why would that be, and what does it say about managing?

In this episode, we’ll explore this first of many “hidden taxes” of managing, this one a somewhat benign but significant tax that is tied to the size of the organization, as well as other factors.

In future episodes, we’ll also cover managerial costs that Coase didn’t really hit upon: that managerial style (and its cousin, organizational structure) that also have profound impacts upon a firm’s productivity and potential size. As pervasive and invisible as the Natural Manager Tax can be, these other taxes, the Tax of Bad Managing, and the Tax of Bad Organization are far more insidious and impactful, especially in our world, the world of knowledge work

Today, the most costly aspect of managers is usually not their pay. It’s the way that they interact with the people who produce work and how that can reduce their productivity.  In this way, less actual managing by the managers can be a good thing.  

Key Insights and Your Homework:

1. Can you see (in your organization) how managerial activity gets less effective (or more costly) as the number of managers increases?
2. Another angle on this is that meetings can get less effective when the manager to worker ratio shifts? Do you notice this?
3. Do you notice how having more managers creates the need for more coordination?