Just over 100 years apart, two prolific writers, Frederick Taylor and Ray Dalio, wrote nearly the same words, signalling a full swing in leadership thinking. In a nutshell, they both believe that employees do the minimum.
What they said cuts against what I was taught to believe about leadership, what I used to teach about it, and what I want to hold as dear. I really want to say that employees are hard workers who give their all for the company. But after working with thousands of leaders over the past two decades, I’m inclined to say that I was wrong.
The godfather of productivity, Frederick Taylor, wrote in the most influential management book of the 20th century, The Principles of Scientific Management, that employees “deliberately work as slowly as they dare, while they at the same time try to make those over them believe that they are working fast.”
Taylor did not mince his words and a century later, nor did Ray Dalio. In his book, Principles, the founder of Bridgewater writes “most people will pretend to operate in your interest while operating in their own”. Over the past 40 years, Dalio has developed, refined and used what he calls unconventional principles that have led Bridgewater to become the world’s largest hedge fund.
As he says, “Most people will operate in a way that maximises the amount of money they will get and that minimises the amount of work they have to do to get it.”
In 1911, during the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and again in 2017 at the height of the knowledge economy, both Taylor and Dalio zeroed in on the fact that employees fool their leaders into thinking they’re working as hard as they can, while doing the least amount possible. Those words might sting, but they serve as a call to action. If you want to maximise your output, you must confront under-working.
That is, deliberately working slowly to avoid doing a full day’s work. It constitutes the greatest calamity leaders face every day.
I never used to think this way, partially because it didn’t seem acceptable to do so and partially because I like to hold onto the ideal that people work hard for collective success, not just their own. But then reality hit and the time came for me to confront my own beliefs and practices. I had to accept that in the end, giving control to employees leads to no control at all.
What’s more interesting is the way the two writers confront the issue of under-working. They aren’t fooled by the utopic hope of benefiting from employee self-control. Instead, they tackle the problem head on by employing a data-focused, scientific approach to leading.
The term “scientific management” refers to planning and monitoring a company’s work for everyone’s benefit, including that of employees. It effectively says that competent leaders should create and control the system of work. Instead of giving wide leeway to employees, you should only give latitude sufficient enough for them to exceed targets.
While there are potentially more ways of doing each task in each job, there is always one way that is quicker and better than the rest. Instead of relying on an employee to make this choice, you should make it a science and build it into your business. Remember, the true science is found in the data, not in experience and intuition.
This approach is antagonistic to the idea that each employee can best determine his own way of working. But truth is that when employees are the benefactors, they work for their own benefit, and that means working less ambitiously than if they had a vested interest in the result.
It’s time to eliminate the waste in your company’s system. To do that, you many need to correct your assumptions about your workforce and take control of what your employees are doing. Only then can you be sure that they’re using the one best way to work, 100 per cent of the time.
— Tommy Weir is a CEO coach and author of “Leadership Dubai Style”. Contact him at tsw@tommyweir.com.
