“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”
General Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff. U. S. Army
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Competitive businesses of the future will accomplish their mission with teams of creative people working collaboratively. These teams will "truly" value diversity, listening, ethics, synergy, relationships, understanding systems thinking, and the ability to either lead, or rapidly adapt to, change.
Think about a start up enterprise for a moment. A start up needs to get a product or service to market fast enough to avoid running out of capital. The person or small group of people who originated the concept for the enterprise will choose the people to add to their team and exercise a certain degree of "management", until the team becomes self-managing - if it's to survive and thrive.
In the global economy of innovate or die, jobs for pure "managers", will be limited to large bureaucratic organizations that can only exist in an artificial environment such as government, government subsidized businesses, or divisions within an overall profitable private enterprise, that are insulated from market forces.
This is not to say that administrative jobs will cease to exist. Depending on the size of the company there will be needs for people to file, order supplies, take care of insurance, payrolls, accounting, training, travel management, etc. These tasks can be outsourced to companies specializing in this type of work to make for maximum efficiency.
There will not be a hierarchical "chain of command" outside of a team and consequently the command and control structure jobs will become unnecessary.
Military, hierarchical, patriarchal models will be discarded because they will not work. They are too slow, too rigid and don't utilize people's talents. Of course this is happening, or has happened in leading companies, but it is trickling down to Fortune 500 companies who are fighting to survive.
One area you see this trend occurring is with more and more women being assigned to lead teams that are assigned very challenging, and sometimes seemingly impossible, tasks.
Women are better than men at some things (not that men can't learn). Women are better listeners, better at intuiting, less enamored with work based on titles and more receptive to work based on relationships.
Back to the quote by the General at the top of this post, "if you don't like change, you are going to like irrelevance even less." Yes..yes..yes.
The flip side of that is that a lot of fearless change agents are really very afraid of change. Why?
Because their job as "speaker for change", (as opposed to doer of change, or maker of change, or changer or changee) might go away if things really changed. True fearless change agents would be fine with their job going away and redefine their role, and reincarnate themselves. Speakers for change on the other hand profess their belief in change as long as it doesn't eliminate their job. Were all for preaching to workers about accepting change or becoming irrelevant (i.e. unemployed) why not do the same for management?
Chew on that for a while and see if it makes any sense where you work.
In general a team needs a captain, or leader, or project manager, although there are creative teams where this would not be necessary or desirable.
A designated leader becomes necessary when there is a timeline, a specific end product, a need for an arbitrator or when the need to fill/replace team roles arises, as the team and it's work evolves. This person is not separate from the work or the people doing the work and will act as a facilitator to attempt to reach a consensus (general accord) on important items (such as who to add to the team) and make a unilateral decision only when that is not possible...and be responsible for those decisions (as contrasted to a bureaucratic organization where no one is in charge thus no one is responsible).
There's an old saying that "Chief's run the Navy" that is interesting to think about when considering the role of management and workers.
The Navy is made up of two classes; officers (management)and enlisted people (workers). Officers generally have a four-year college degree (warrant officers are an exception) but the vast majority of officers start their service with a four-year degree. Enlisted people generally must have at least a high school education or equivalent GED. Enlisted people who apply themselves and are suited for the job can rise through the ranks to become Chief's after 20 years or so.
I know a Navy pilot who loved to fly in the Navy (he still does love to fly as a civilian). He was happy as can be flying a Navy jet but when they assigned him to shore duty as an officer in charge of a group of sailors he no longer enjoyed his Navy job. Why?
He was an officer, and when assigned to shore duty he was put in charge of a group of people who in some cases had 20 or more years of experience doing the things he was "managing". He saw the flaw in that concept.
The people who were actually "managing" the work being done by the group were the Navy Chiefs. They were intimately familiar with the day-to-day operations and what was needed to get the job done. The Chiefs would take care of business, make sure tools and supplies were available, people were assigned to the appropriate tasks and that the team ran smoothly. My friend having come from a job flying on and off carriers had no clue. He was a smart guy and very motivated but he saw the ethical dilemma with pretending to be in charge of something he could not possibly control as essentially an outside observer.
Chiefs on the other hand were members of the team who had hands-on knowledge and involved in the team's work everyday.
If you want to know which way the wind is blowing what do you do?
That's right...
Watch T.V.
What does the television tell us about the workplace of the future?
How does the Trump Co. or Martha Stewart Inc. implement their workspace on their Apprentice shows?
With Donald and Martha's apprentice the focus is on collaborative teams with a Project Manager (not a pure manager in the sense of a large bureaucracy) but a working member of the team who has the responsibility to ensure the task is accomplished.
The team’s work is evaluated by a very small group and the team itself either remains in existence or is slowly dissolved based on their ability to excel at completing a task. Dysfunctional teams dissolve, creative collaborative teams thrive.
There's a key point to what those shows are teaching though that's a little more subtle than the creative collaborative team, with a project manager, concept.
The team that "wins" is not subjected to any management.
They are self managing with a Project Manager (PM) responsible for guiding people into roles that fit them best based on real time real world data.
The fact that the winning team did better than the competitor gives them all "immunity" from management scrutiny, gets them a nice bonus, and even gives the P.M. immunity from getting fired on the next task.
So lets review what those shows teach -
Provide a team a task
Let them accomplish that task in the way they decide is best
Use non-subjective criteria to evaluate the success of the two teams - whoever makes the most money wins.
Fire people on the losing team based on team input concerning that persons ability to function as a productive team member.
One caveat to the team input rule, is that the PM is always subject to scrutiny in the event of a failure but may be spared the chopping block if the team, and Donald or Martha, decide some other team member was more responsible for the failure.
The title "project" manager indicates someone responsible for getting some thing done as opposed to the fuzzy identification of a pure manager's role in a bureaucracy; as being a coach, champion, mentor, roadblock remover or whatever other phrase we could come up with to describe a role that isn't really defined and for that reason will not be possible to maintain in competitive markets.
"We have a ‘strategic’ plan. It’s called doing things.”
Herb Kelleher
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This is not to say that there won't be lot's of fuzzy jobs in the future where you define and redefine your role constantly, just that the structured bureaucratic hierarchical model is nearing extinction and will be completely gone as fast-changing global and technological factors will favor those able to adapt quickly.
Besides the two "Apprentice" shows, "The Office" is probably helping condition people for the future irrelevance of pure managers as much as anything...showing Michael the manager and his suck-up Dwight as self-important, insensitive, unintentional buffoons and the workers as cool funny people.
Just as the internet eliminated the need for middle management to disseminate company goals and procedural information to workers, information technology will help speed up the process of creating self-defined, self managed work groups...further reducing the need for middle management to manage either "people" or "projects". Once you take people and project management out of the equation you are left with the need to manage commodities (accounting, travel, training, insurance, payrolls), which can be outsourced to efficient independent companies that may or may not reside in the same country as the company.
The days of having a job because there's a spot on an organization chart (regardless of the benefit to the bottom line of the company) are nearing an end and will end as global market forces grind through the inefficient and reward the efficient.
There's a counterpoint to that of course...in business schools, the media, universities, consultant businesses - the dominant paradigm is that there is a "class" of people who are born to be managers of other people. The beauty of pure capitalism, which will be inescapable in the global marketplace, is that any preconceived notions of "class" mandates that businesses retain a certain number of managers, will either stand or fall based on it's pragmatic success.
In other words if it is truly the case that a class of people are destined to be managers, and to employ those so destined, companies need to retain a boatload of middle managers regardless of the actual need for those positions, that truth will be borne out by the cool economic precision of the global marketplace.
This is a well worn argument but many people theorize that knowledge workers don't need traditional managers.
It doesn't matter if we are talking "lean" principles borrowing from Henry Ford's ideas for mass production, or Fredrick Taylor's Scientific Management principles, which are still deeply ingrained in many supposedly future-thinking management practices.
These management techniques from the early 1900's have little or no relevance to knowledge workers in the 21st century participating in diverse, creative, collaborative, empowered teams able to rapidly adapt to changing conditions.
Finally...this isn't to say that the global marketplace will not further class division in some areas. In the case of a business that produces a tangible mass producible or labor-intensive craft item, the factory workers will be further removed from the management class as capitalism forces businesses to search for the lowest labor costs. But that's a whole different story...
There is another aspect of command and control, rigid hierarchies, that is detrimental to business of the future.
They are too good at what they do.
They are great for implementing a plan and marching the troops forward...which is why the military needs such a structure. Side note - If nothing else happens, I'll personally be glad when people stop calling people in technology offices "troops" because it just serves to reinforce the whole military structure concept.
In a rapidly changing environment chaos is inevitable. We pick things out of that chaos and try them out. If they work we keep them, integrate them into a greater whole, if they don't work we discard them.
In any complex system, depending on the accuracy of our modeling ability, we have a lesser or greater degree to understand the impact of a change. Many businesses have Zero modeling ability, either because they are in uncharted waters or they don't have the tools and knowledge, and yet make changes to complex systems without understanding the consequences. That works fine in a nimble organization because they either rescind or modify and improve a change that has unintended consequences...it can be disaster for a behemoth BigCo.
Once the command and control hierarchy gets a direction it can't be stopped, and even making small course corrections can be extremely difficult. The train has left the station as they say.
