CHAPTER NINETEEN
Managing the Knowledge Worker
DIRECT PRODUCTION WORKERS—machinists, bricklayers, farmers—are a steadily declining portion of the work force in a developed economy. The fastest growing group consists of “knowledge workers”—accountants, engineers, social workers, nurses, computer experts of all kinds, teachers, and researchers. And the fastest growing group among knowledge workers themselves are managers. People who are paid for putting knowledge to work rather than using brawn or manual skill are today the largest single group in the American labor force—and the most expensive one.
The incomes of these people are not, as a rule, determined either by supply or demand or by their productivity. Their wages and fringe benefits go up in step with those of manual direct-production workers. When the machinists get a raise, the foreman’s salary goes up by the same percentage more or less automatically—and so does everybody else’s in the company right up to the executive office.
But whether the productivity of the knowledge worker goes up is questionable. Is there reason to believe, for instance, that today’s schoolteachers are more productive than the teachers of 1900—or today’s engineer, research scientist, accountant, or even today’s manager?
At the same time the knowledge worker tends to be disgruntled, or at least not fully satisfied. He is being paid extremely well. He does interesting work and work that does not break the body as so much of yesterday’s work did. And yet the “alienation” of which we hear so much today (I personally prefer to use the good old word “distemper”) is not primarily to be found in the working class. It is above all a phenomenon of the educated middle class of employed knowledge workers.
We do not know how to measure either the productivity or the satisfaction of the knowledge worker. But we do know quite a bit about improving both. Indeed, the two needs—the need of society and economy for productive knowledge workers and the need of the knowledge worker for achievement—while distinctly separate, are by and large satisfied by the same approaches to managing the knowledge worker.
1.
We know first that the key to both the productivity of the knowledge worker and his achievement is to demand responsibility from him or her. All knowledge workers, from the lowliest and youngest to the company’s chief executive officer, should be asked at least once a year, “What do you contribute that justifies your being on the payroll? What should this company, this hospital, this government agency, this university, hold you accountable for, by way of contributions and results? Do you know what your goals and objectives are? And what do you plan to do to attain them?”
Direction of the knowledge worker toward contribution—rather than toward effort alone—is the first job of anyone who manages knowledge workers. It is rarely even attempted. Often the engineering department finds out, only after it has finished the design, that the product on which it has been working so hard has no future in the marketplace.
2.
But at the same time, knowledge workers must be able to appraise their contributions. It is commonly said that research is “intangible” and incapable even of being appraised. But this is simply untrue.
Wherever a research department truly performs (an exception, alas, rather than the rule), the members sit down with each other and with management once or twice a year and think through two questions: “What have we contributed in the last two or three years that really made a difference to this company?” and “What should we be trying to contribute the next two or three years so as to make a difference?”
The contributions may indeed not always be measurable. How to judge them may be controversial. What, for instance, is a greater contribution: a new biochemical discovery that after five more years of very hard work may lead to the development of a new class of medicinal compounds with superior properties; or the development of a sugar-coated aspirin without great scientific value that will improve the effectiveness of pediatric medicine by making the aspirin more palatable for children while also immediately increasing the company’s sales and profits?
But unless knowledge workers are made to think through such questions and to review, appraise, and judge their contributions, they will not direct themselves toward contribution. And they will also feel dissatisfied, nonachieving, and altogether alienated.
3.
Perhaps the most important rule—and the one to which few managements pay much attention—is to enable the knowledge workers to do what they are being paid for. Not to be able to do what one is being paid for invariably quenches whatever motivation there is. Yet salesmen, who are being paid for selling and know it, cannot sell because of the time demands of the paper work imposed on them by management. And in research lab after research lab, highly paid and competent scientists are not allowed to do their work but are instead forced to attend endless meetings to which they cannot contribute and from which they get nothing.
Managers may know the rule. But rarely do they know what they or the company do that impedes knowledge workers and gets in the way of their doing what they are being paid for. There is only one way to find out: Ask the individual knowledge worker (and the knowledge-work team he belongs to), “What do I, as your manager, and what do we in the company’s management altogether, do that helps you in doing what you are being paid for? … What do we do that hampers you? … Specifically, do we give you the time to do what you are being paid for, the information you need to do it, the tools for the job?”
4.
Knowledge is a high-grade resource. And knowledge workers are expensive. Their placement is therefore a key to their productivity. The first rule is that opportunities have to be staffed with people capable of running with them and of turning them into results. To make knowledge workers productive requires constant attention to what management consulting firms and law firms call “assignment control.” One has to know where the people are who are capable of producing results in knowledge work—precisely because results are so very hard to measure.
Effective management of the knowledge worker requires a regular, periodic inventory and ranking of the major opportunities. And then one asks, “Who are the performing people available to us, whether they are researchers or accountants, salesmen or managers, manufacturing engineers or economic analysts? And what are these people assigned to? Are they where the results are? Or are their assignments such that they could not produce real results, no matter how well they perform?”
Unless this is being done, people will be assigned by the demands of the organization—that is by the number of transactions rather than by their importance and their potential of contribution. In no time they will be misassigned. They will be where they cannot be productive, no matter how well-motivated, how highly qualified, how dedicated they are.
One also has to make sure that knowledge workers are placed where their strengths can be productive. There are no universal geniuses, least of all in knowledge work which tends to be highly specialized. What can this particular knowledge worker do? What is he or she doing well? And where, therefore, does he or she truly belong to get the greatest results from his or her strengths?
Most businesses and other organizations as well spend a great deal of time and money on the original employment of people who, it is hoped, will turn into knowledge workers. But at that stage one knows very little about the future employees—beyond the grades they got in school, which have little correlation with future performance capacity. The true personnel management job, in respect to knowledge workers, begins later, when one can place workers where their strengths can be productive because one knows what they can do.
Manual strength is additive. Two oxen will pull almost twice the load one ox can pull. Skill is capable of subdivision. Three men, each of whom has learned one aspect of a skill, e.g., gluing the legs to a table, can turn out far more work of equal skill than one man skilled in all aspects of carpentry. But in knowledge work two mediocre people do not turn out more than one man capable of performance, let alone twice as much. They tend to get in each other’s way, and to turn out much less than one capable person. In knowledge work, above all, one therefore has to staff from strength. And this means constant attention to placing knowledge workers where what they can do will produce results and make a contribution.
Knowledge is perhaps the most expensive of all resources. Knowledge workers are far more expensive than even their salaries indicate. Each of them also represents a very sizable capital investment—in schooling and in the apprentice years during which the worker learns rather than contributes (such as the five years which every chief engineer knows will be needed before young graduates can truly be expected to earn their salaries). Young engineers, young accountants, young market researchers represent a “social capital investment” of something like $100,000 to $150,000 each before they start repaying society and their employers through their contributions. No other resource we have is equally “capital intensive” and “labor intensive.” And only management can turn the knowledge worker into a productive resource.
But, also, no one expects to achieve, to produce, to contribute quite as much as the knowledge worker does. No one, in other words, is more likely to be alienated if not allowed to achieve.
Not to manage a knowledge worker for productivity therefore creates both the economic stress of inflationary pressures and the highly contagious social disease of distemper. We can indeed measure neither the productivity nor the satisfaction of the knowledge worker. But we know how to enrich both.
(1975)