Today millions of people hate their job. It is paradoxical that in the era of 5G, space travel, the metaverse and artificial intelligence, organizations continue to be structured under the principles of Henri Fayol’s classical theory of business administration and Frederick Taylor’s Taylorism, both theories of late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Under this scheme, a few think and give orders while the rest –the vast majority– carry them out. More than 100 years ago, these methods made perfect sense since knowledge was scarce and in the hands of a minority. But do you have it today? A priori It seems not, although it is surprising that there are still managers of large companies that promote this management model.
Efficiency and control are the priority
This form of organization was a radical innovation at the time, since it allowed thousands of workers to be efficiently organized, many with little training, who came from the countryside to the cities in search of livelihood.
No one has described this quasi-military command and control scheme better than the great Charlie Chaplin in one of his masterpieces: Modern times.
This type of organizational structure turns people into links in a production chain in which the comprehensive and complete deployment of individual and collective talent is simply a myth. Russell Ackoff, an expert in organizational design, put it witheringly:
“The machines and people were then grouped into a network of elementary tasks dedicated to the production of a product: the modern factory. However, in the process of mechanizing work, we made people behave as if they were machines. We dehumanize work.”
Where is all this leading us? That millions and millions of people around the world hate their job.
we are all entrepreneurs
Developing and deploying talent is inherent to the fact of being human. But designing the organizational structure based on those who think versus those who execute makes it extremely difficult to achieve, at the same time, the objectives of survival and growth of the organizations and those of satisfaction and development of the talent of the workers.
To get out of this paradox we propose to use one of the maxims of systemic thinking: “The structure conditions the behavior”. That is, if you want to change the behavior of the individuals belonging to a human system, you have to change the structural design of that system.
Lessons from a Nobel
“All human beings are entrepreneurs.” The phrase is from the economist Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his contribution to social development through the Grameen Bank, the bank for the poor, of which he was a co-founder. The value proposition of this bank is based on microcredits granted mostly to women. He intended them to be spark capable of changing people’s lives, helping them get out of the cycle of poverty by becoming entrepreneurs.
Yunus, who in 2012 was considered by the magazine fortune As one of the 12 great entrepreneurs of the time, he affirms that human beings have lost the entrepreneurial spirit “because we have become workers and they put a seal on us: you are work”.
Therefore, it is not about asking people to change individuallybut to design an organizational structure that facilitates certain behaviors.
Count on people by changing the leadership model
Now the question is: what if intrapreneurship –that is, the act of designing and promoting an entrepreneurial culture within an existing organization– could be the fundamental engine for the development of individual and collective talent in organizations?
An intrapreneurial organization is one that makes spaces available to its workers for:
- Question the prevailing processes.
- Propose and develop initiatives that transcend day to day, actively participating in them.
- Develop as people, contributing all their talent to the organization.
- Even, ideally, people and teams should be able to be part of this process of organizational redesign and innovation.
In short, and as proposed by the business management expert Peter Senge, it would be about opening and developing spaces so that each worker can be a leader, avoiding the usual mistake of calling leader to the boss. Something that is often not true.
Although it is true that many companies have an infinite number of initiatives, methods and proposals that seek to attract, develop and maintain talent, they rarely question making changes to their organizational structure. If we accept the proposal that in order to change people’s behavior the framework of the social structure in which they operate must be changed, we also propose to apply it to the design of organizations.
Beyond the organizational chart
It’s not a matter of make up the organization chart or dedicate a few resources to training programs that, by themselves, do not cause relevant transformations in the company. We talk about redesign the organizational structure and relationships, so that they are not based exclusively on the classic Taylorist design that we have discussed above.
If we assume that people are entrepreneurs by nature, each organization must seek its own path of cultural transformation so that talent can unfold and develop beyond mere compliance with the instructions and orders received.
We can’t keep letting millions and millions of people hate their job.
Pablo Atela, Ph.D., Professor Doctor Deusto Business School, University of Deusto
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original.