How did we get here?

How did we get to the point that employees have such low confidence in their leaders? How is it that more than half of employees don't trust their colleagues, leaders, and companies? Why do we have such a failure of credibility? How did we wind up with such a crisis of leadership? Consider the following story:

A young woman decides to host a holiday dinner party in her own apartment for the very first time.

She's planning to cook her family's traditional meal: a holiday roast. The recipe has been passed down from mother to daughter for generations.

She buys all the ingredients and looks over the recipe. She notices something a bit odd. The last step of the recipe says, “Cut the end off the roast before you put it in the oven.”

This makes no sense to her. So, she calls up her mother.

“Mom, I'm cooking the family holiday roast, and the recipe says to cut the end off the roast before you put it in the oven. I didn't know you're supposed to do that. Why do you do that?”

Her mother replies, “That's a great question. You know, I don't really know. That's the way my mom taught it to me. Why don't you ask grandma?”

So the young woman calls her grandmother and asks the same question about the roast. Her grandma answers, “I don't know. That's the way my mom taught me. Why don't you ask her why?”

The young woman's great-grandmother is 94 years old but still has all her faculties about her. The young woman calls her up.

“Great-grandma, I'm making the family traditional holiday roast for the first time. The recipe says that you should cut the end off the roast before you put it in the oven. I asked my mother why you do that, and she didn't know, so I asked grandma, and she didn't know, so that's why I'm calling you. Why do you cut the end off the roast?”

After a long pause, there's a sigh on the far end of the phone line.

“We had a small oven.”

I've shared this story with countless groups over the years. It always gets a huge laugh, because the absurdity is all too familiar. People know what it's like to work at organizations suffering from “small-oven thinking.” So many aspects of their workplace don't make sense, and yet, just like the mom and the grandma in the story, they keep doing things the same way. Questioning the past is too risky. It's safer to keep doing things the way they've always been done.

Ultimately, the reason companies behave in a small-oven manner is that their leaders have a small-oven mind-set. They have a built-in immunity to change. As Lisa Bodell, CEO of Futurethink, an innovation consultancy, says, “The only thing more resistant to change than a human being is a company.”

Caught up in the pressure to constantly produce, many of today's leaders don't take time to stop and question their own methods. It's all action, no reflection. When it comes to how they lead, they do what they do because that's the way it was always done. Yet, isn't doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result the definition of insanity?

The nature of the workplace has radically transformed over the past 30 years. These changes didn't happen overnight. There was no blaring of trumpets or great dramatic flourishes pronouncing that a new era of work had arrived. It crept in slowly, one day at a time. And as the weeks and months and years passed, our work world has been irrevocably altered.

Consider, for example, the number of business communication interactions the average executive takes part in. In the 1970s, it was about 1,000 a year. Today, it's more than 30,000 a year.¹ This tidal wave of information has dramatically changed the skills leaders need to function effectively today.

Maria, an executive vice president for a luxury retailer, describes it this way:

I was hired to head up marketing for this company. But do you know what my real job title is? I'm an email-processing machine. On an average day, I get 300 emails in my inbox. I'm not talking spam or junk or company-wide CCs. Three hundred items that clamor for my attention.

And of course I can't really give my full attention to these items because I'm booked into back-to-back meetings all day long. Most days, I get excited for 6:00 p.m. to come, because then I can get some of my actual work done. Look, if I'm really honest, in the constant hustle, things are slipping through the cracks. There's just too much to do on the to-do list. For one thing, I'm not spending enough time developing my team. Something's going to give. I'm just not sure what it is.

In addition to having to process more information, the boundaries between work and “life” are disappearing. People are working longer and harder than ever. A recent study found that although the 40-hour week is generally accepted as “normal,” adults employed full-time have reported working an average of 47 hours each week.² They're also expected to check in more frequently: nights, weekends, and vacations. A survey of employed email users finds that 22% are expected to respond to work emails when they're not at work.³

Jasmine, a middle manager at a technology company, explains the stress this way:

When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I think about is my to-do list. It's never ending and seems to get longer every month. When I think about it, I get anxious, because I know I won't have enough time to do what I need to do. Then the day goes by, and I do what I can, but most nights, when I'm trying to wind down and get to sleep, my last thought of the day is “I didn't get enough done.”

Leaders like Jasmine, caught on the hamster wheel of activity, are too busy to deal with the complexities of leading in today's workplace. What's more, they're too overloaded to recognize or admit that the way they're working isn't working.

Although information technology has advanced, our leadership practices have not. Most of today's leaders are painfully unaware of how all the changes in the workplace have made it so much more difficult to lead effectively. They don't realize that they're attempting to lead in the early 21st century using early 20th-century practices. The practices they're using were designed for a very different world. Continuing to use them perpetuates small-oven thinking.

So what's a 21st-century leader to do? What's the best way for leaders to change their approach to leading? The way to go forward is to look backward. After all, to get a handle on the future, you must understand the past.

Like the young woman and her family recipe, you can't take what's given to you for granted. Becoming aware of your inherited leadership legacy is crucial, because you won't be able to change what you don't notice.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF LEADERSHIP IN ORGANIZATIONS

New parents often experience a moment that shocks and amazes them: the first time they catch themselves doing or saying the exact thing that their own parents did or said to them. Without even trying, they've internalized the behaviors of the previous generation.

Most people who go to work as managers and leaders in organizations don't study the history of organizational management and leadership. They're too busy doing their day jobs. They're not aware that their leadership philosophy (with all its assumptions and beliefs) is based on a worldview that has long outlived its shelf life.

Before the dawn of the industrial revolution, commerce was manufactured in people's homes and on small-scale farms. Work was done using basic hand tools and machines. For example, textiles were made on hand looms and then sold at local markets. The homemade nature of this work meant that production was limited.

However, all that changed with the arrival of industrial-era machines and tools. In the textile industry, the spinning Jenny (a form of power loom) changed the game. Before its invention, a worker could only work one spool of yarn at a time. The first spinning Jenny could work eight spools. As the technology improved, the number of spools on the power loom grew to 120.

With the advent of these new machines, a seismic shift occurred. The center of work moved from homes to factories. Mass production bloomed, and factory workers were in high demand.

For the first time in the history of human commerce, the birth of the factory era created a new necessity: the need for a large-scale labor force. Factory owners had sunk considerable investment into factories and equipment. They were keen to harness the newfound power of steam and electricity. To make their resources profitable, they recognized that they'd also need to find ways to harness the power of the human resource.

With this insight came a series of new questions. How would these employees be hired? Trained? Organized? Led? Which ways of leading were better than others? The attempts to answer these questions led to the discipline now known as management.

Organizational management was started by mechanical engineers: people who were trained to see the world as engineering problems to solve. The aim of scientific management (as it came to be called) was to improve efficiency, especially labor productivity. The goal of leadership was to get labor to do more work in less time.

For the manager, people were not the competitive advantage: the factory was. Having the latest and greatest machine was of primary importance. Employees were subordinate cogs in this mechanical worldview.

The man considered to be the father of scientific management was an engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor had a deep-seated belief: he thought employees were only out to take advantage of their employers and therefore must be controlled. Taylor was certain that most of the employees on the shop floor spent a lot of their time on the job goofing off and working slower than they could.

Left to their own devices, Taylor believed, workers would work at the slowest rate possible, a behavior commonly known as soldiering. From Taylor's perspective, soldiering wasn't just bad business; it was morally reprehensible. He wrote of soldiering as “the greatest evil with which the working-people…are now afflicted.”⁴

Therefore, employees were not to be trusted. Taylor felt employees spent every possible moment conniving new schemes to take advantage of their employer:

Hardly a competent workman can be found who does not devote a considerable amount of time to studying just how slowly he can work and still convince his employer that he is going at a good pace.⁵

For Taylor, the perfect worker was the one who questioned nothing, understood everything, and did anything he was told to do. Taylor wrote that the ideal worker should be “so stupid…that he more nearly resemble[d] in his mental make-up the ox than any other type.”⁶

With the publication of Principles of Scientific Management in 1911, Taylor's ideas spread like wildfire. His ideas became the dominant mode of business thinking for the first half of the 20th century.

Taylor's beliefs set the norms of how a workplace should work. In a very short time, the prototypical relationship between leader and employee was born. It was a relationship forged in the cauldron of power, fear, and control.

THE TAYLOR APPROACH TO LEADERSHIP

In Taylor's system, work was firmly divided between management and labor. Management did all the “thinking” and laborers did all the “labor.” If you were a manager, communication meant telling people what to do.

Moreover, that communication was top-down: no questions asked. After all, in a giant machine, what “parts” ask questions? Telling people what to do became the norm of factory floor communication. The job of the leader was to give orders and maintain order.

Think for yourself? Speak up? Challenge authority? If you were a worker, raising your hand and speaking out might get you killed. Not metaphorically, but literally.

Labor-related violence usually began with workers speaking up and wanting better working conditions. In fact, between 1850 and 1920, in the United States alone, there were at least 74 separate incidents when workers calling for safer conditions were killed by law enforcement officials, members of the company militia, armed detectives, and guards.

In the industrial era, workers were expected to do, not think. They were meant to show up, shut up, and do as they were told. For the jobs at hand, there wasn't much need for analysis and complex problem-solving.

Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company (and one of Taylor's best-known disciples), pioneered the use of the assembly line in the auto industry. His disdain for the aptitude of his workers was quite well known, famously quipping, “Why is it every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?”

Taylor and his engineering disciples (known as Taylorites) were obsessed with getting workers to do more work in less time. Using stopwatches and some very fuzzy math, they originated what became known as time-motion studies. They believed there was one best way to do things, and management's job was to find it. Once “the way” was found, management's job was simple: command-and-control.

WHY COMMAND AND CONTROL ENDURED

Command-and-control was the dominant mode of leadership for most of the 20th century. In hindsight, it's hard to believe that so many employees would put up with practices and conditions that we'd now find intolerable. But there were quite a few factors that existed that allowed leaders to successfully employ command-and-control for so long.

SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT'S INFLUENCE ON BUSINESS SCHOOLS

Did you ever wonder where business schools came from? They haven't been around forever. Harvard University was the first American university to offer a Master's in business administration. Founded in 1908, it based its first-year curriculum on Frederick Taylor's principles of scientific management. The program was built on analysis, synthesis, logic, rationality, and efficiency.

The MBA approach to managing a business was built on the belief that an organization (and its people) functioned like a machine. With proper tinkering on the part of management, the machine could be engineered for the ultimate prize: continuous peak efficiency. Every challenge the organization faced was an engineering problem to be solved. Sound familiar?

If you listen closely to the language of business, you can still clearly hear the language of engineering. Its mechanistic, dehumanizing influence has affected beliefs, words, and behaviors in the workplace for more than a century. Some common examples of this include these concepts:

• Your job fits in a box on the bottom of the org chart.
• You report to your superior. You are his or her subordinate. You report up to that person.
• You are a rank- and-file employee.
• If we don't have direct reports, we may have dotted-line responsibilities.
• Salaries are one of the biggest costs we incur around here.
• We don't have enough human resources.
• Let's deploy for this new product launch.
• I'm going to send this up the food chain for approval.
• Let's interface before the 3 p.m. meeting.
• Get the proposal ready double-time!
• It's important that we drill this down to the front lines.
• We'll get this out to the masses.

How would it make you feel to know that there are leaders who are meeting together, trying to find the best way to drill stuff into you, along with the rest of the frontline masses?

In large organizations, personnel networks were modeled on the military, with layer on layer nested into the chain of command. Control was established through rigid hierarchy, structures, and processes. Rules were designed to maintain order and the status quo. Going outside the lines was considered a rebellious act and insubordination.

In this system, newly minted MBA graduates would join “high-potential” programs in large companies. Once on board, they would rely on the strengths that got them jobs in the first place: analysis and problem-solving. They'd in turn become the next generation of business leaders, continuing this cycle of mechanical thinking they'd known for their whole professional lives.

The rule of thumb was that employees were expected to be loyal and obedient. Junior employees knew their place: wait your turn, pay your dues, put in your time, and you'll be rewarded with a chance to climb the ranks. Then, you'd gain more money, prestige, power, a better parking space, and the corner office.

THE LEGACY STOPS PAYING DIVIDENDS

For much of the 20th century, the value proposition of the corporation was that if you were a dutiful employee, you'd have a job for life, a gold watch after 20 years of work, and a comfortable pension waiting for you in retirement. Things hummed along like this for decades, and traditional leaders kept managing using their rulebooks and regulation manuals.

This was the legacy that was passed down from one generation of leader to the next. Maybe this is the leadership recipe that you inherited: keep things orderly, and all will be well.

There's just one problem: it doesn't work anymore.

Twenty years with the same company? Not likely. Comfortable pension? Even less likely. Things humming along smoothly? Not a chance. The man in the grey flannel suit is long gone. He's been replaced by members of the free agent nation.

Command-and-control is no longer a viable leadership strategy. Society has transformed, and amid these changes, the rules of business have been rewritten. The relationship of employee to employer is radically different. In this new world of work, Old-School leadership didn't really stand a chance. The next chapter explains why Old-School leadership stopped working.