The Dark Ages 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.  The ideal employee was hands without a brain that would follow orders precisely, and the ideal manager was a brain without hands, whose chief skill was clearly and specifically directing drudges to perform tasks.

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 orders.

In the present day, it is estimated between a third and a half of entry-level workers are “knowledge workers” who are engaged for their problem-solving capacity, and that most jobs above entry-level require at least moderate thinking skills. That is, 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 and practices designed to give direction to activity-based employees.

As a result, the present state of leadership is outmoded, and the result is poor performance and a demoralized workforce: people want to think, and recognize that thinking is necessary to success in their professional roles, but are discouraged from thinking by policies, procedures, and management styles that effectively discourage thinking by punishing those who disregard rules and procedures that reflect the notion that employees are to do rather than to think.

Even firms that pay attention to employee morale and wish to encourage innovative thinking tend to be awful at it, or at best take a superficial and inconsistent approach: to send employees to “training” that is more in the nature of a pep rally to encourage them to think outside the box, and then to return to their boxes and carry on with business as usual, to be reprimanded for putting into practice the kind of thinking they have just been encouraged to do.

What is necessary is a change in the culture of business organizations to one that embraces the thinking employee rather than discourages him – but then, cultures change slowly even in the modern world, and it may well be that a generation (or two) of the American workforce will be trapped in the present paradox.