From Coal Mines to Cubicles: Why The Way We Work Is Broken and How to Fix It
The Industrial Revolution is over, and yet we’re still working like coal miners — and it’s doing nobody any favors. Learn why work isn’t working and how to fix it here.
Look to Lancashire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire or Wales in the 1760s and what sort of action would you see? Unless you’re equipped with x-ray vision, probably not much.
From the hours of 4 or 5 a.m. to 8 or 9 at night, man, woman and child could be found behind closed — often locked — factory doors. They went to work before sunup and trailed home in the dark. The longest break, a half hour for tea, was the best respite most people could expect, which likely felt as ghastly as it sounds.
Industrial revolution work policies were no cup of English breakfast. Work in factory textile mills and coal mines was typified by:
1. A strict command hierarchy in which decisions were made at the top and implemented at the bottom.
2. A large army of uneducated minions who performed mindless work like swinging a pickaxe or operating a mechanical loom, with middle managers barking orders at them.
3. A thoroughly unpleasant organizational culture for all involved, except maybe the cigar-smoking, top hat-wearing, monocle-wiping owner at the top of the hierarchy.
Although things have changed for the more humane since then, if reading the above gave you an unsettling prickle of familiarity, you wouldn’t be alone. This system of management, called command and control, is still widely used today.
Command and control might be “historically proven,” but it only makes sense if the person running the show is a complete genius, and the employees, mental midgets incapable of independent thought. These days though, organizations tend not to be this stratified: smart, educated people can be found at all levels of a company, and as you’ve probably already realized if you’ve ever held a job, that someone holds a senior position doesn’t always indicate smarts.
So what do you think happens when you try to force people of equal intelligence into a strict hierarchy as in the command and control system?
71% of people wind up hating their jobs, that’s what.
The trouble with command and control
Clunky, chunky, and resistant to change
In addition to damaging employee morale, the old command and control system has two other major problems. The first? It’s a massive competitive disadvantage.
As its martial name might imply, command and control is a bit stiff which, back in the days of the Industrial Revolution, was fine. Business was pretty predictable: the world’s demand for coal or linen wouldn’t plummet or skyrocket overnight, so it was possible and sensible to plan well ahead and stick with the program. Executives could occupy themselves with plotting the road ahead and pouring drinks while their employees toiled.
In today’s environment, however, this just won’t fly. Companies find themselves trodding ever-changing terrain where new technologies, competitors and opportunities spring up overnight. If a business isn’t nimble enough to respond, it’s likely to collapse.
Photographic film giant Eastman Kodak furnishes an unfortunate example of such a situation. In the late 1990s the company was so stuck in its film-photography mindset that it completely failed to spot the increasing trend toward digital photography. As a result, it went from dominating the industry to filing for bankruptcy in 2012.
Lest you believe that Kodak’s case is unique, a Yale University study showed that in the past century the average lifespan of leading US companies has decreased from 67 years to just 15. In this new, turbulent world, businesses need agile decision making that helps them adapt to changes — something command and control just won’t allow.
Office politics abound
The second issue with command and control is that it incites political discrepancies — and not the kind you can take up outside the polls.
At the heart of every organization, you’ve got people, who almost always develop their own special sets of alliances and antipathies. But in a command and control system, this standard can derail the entire purpose of the company.
For example, have you ever heard of someone at work getting a promotion not because they’re the best for the job, but because they’re on the best terms with the boss? In command and control systems, managers and supervisors wield far too much power compared with employees. They are near-despots who can hire, fire, and promote based on whims, not merit.
And what’s the result of this dictatorship? Not only do companies end up with sub-par managers due to unfair promotions, but the rest of the team becomes demotivated. They see that recognition has nothing to do with skill, and so they begin to wonder: “Why do I bother with work when I’d be better served by a bit of well-placed brown-nosery?”
In a perfect world
Command and control’s lack of agility and encouragement of office politics clearly make it a poor match for the high-minded goals and aspirations of today’s businesses. So then what, if it weren’t for command and control, could be better?
Wouldn’t it be great if companies weren’t so entrenched and resistant to change, but rather more adaptive, responding swiftly and efficiently to threats around them?
Such a change would’ve been huge for, say, Eastman Kodak. Free of the an industrial revolution-suited protocol, it might have spotted the digital photography wave on the horizon and ridden it to success instead of being pulled under.
And what if work weren’t about politics, ego, and kissing up to the right people, but rather about actually doing work — well? If promotions weren’t handed down by an omnipotent boss, but rather work assignments were decided together, fairly, within the team based on who’s the best fit?
However Utopian it may sound, the fact of the matter is that a world like this already exists, and it’s called Holacracy: a new management system that is to command and control what the Ford Model T was to the horse-drawn carriage.
At the Blinkist & Page19 offices, we read all we could about how to instate a Holacratic system, and then we replaced our own infrastructure with this brand-new backbone. What we got was a sense of purpose, an incredible uptick in productivity, and a new lease on work-life.
Stay tuned: next week we’ll tell you more about it, and we’ll also release our free e-book that offers up how we got started with a light version of Holacracy in our office, and how you can do the same in your organization, ASAP.
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