Mining Gold in the Workplace Marketplace
by Doug Kirkpatrick
Scary terms like “future of work” and “self-management” are challenging for leaders already anxious over wrenching COVID-19 transformation, accelerating technological change, and the uneasy mix of generations in the workplace. Small wonder that an IBM study of executives found that even in the pre-COVID-19 environment, most leaders doubted their own ability to manage complexity.[1] In an age when average CEO tenures are shrinking, it’s safer to embrace familiar frameworks than to adopt new paradigms fraught with potential chaos (a concept eerily reminiscent of ancient cartography with sea monsters at the edge of the known world with the caption “Here be dragons”).
Michael Grove, the founder of CollabWorks in Redwood City, California, is a man on a mission. His view is that traditional management of others through control is brittle and change-resistant; while employee-directed role ownership and work improvement thrives on change and accountability. His value proposition is that the objective of every leader and every enterprise should be to get the right work done while minimizing the management of others. His approach is that if you want to maintain a traditional organization chart with departments, silos, titles, and managers—knock yourself out. At the same time, it’s entirely possible to decompose worker roles into transparently higher- and lower-value activities and give people enough autonomy to optimize the higher-value work. What would be the result?
As individuals exercise agency and self-manage organizational value creation, both the individual contributor and the enterprise reap benefits. Workers mine the hidden gold in their own work portfolios, relieving the pressure on managers to drive results. Managers are suddenly liberated to coach, mentor and facilitate. As personal value-creation rolls up and accelerates across the organization, the salience of traditional command-and-control management declines. Taken to its logical conclusion, traditional management would decline to the point of invisibility.
Giving everyone in an organization the task of creating individual value is a path to increased engagement, reduced management costs, and optimized business performance. A renewed spirit of leadership confidence will quickly follow.
[1] https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/1VZV5X8J