Management as if people mattered

 Merriam-Webster defines management as “the conducting or supervising of something (such as a business).” Is something an organization? A task or a set of tasks? A bunch of people? For most of us, tasks are easy (look, this needs to get done) and people are hard (would you do it?). Tasks, and their organization such as processes and hierarchies are clear in our minds: they don’t have feelings, opinions or talk back. They just are, and can aligned on paper and executed. 

But what about the people who have to do the tasks? To avoid thinking of people as people many mangers assume subordination: people take a job for pay, and accept that they will obey instructions, follow rules, their work will be controlled and they will be rewarded or punished accordingly. Following that, managers can safely work around the topic of people and focus on organizing, specializing, sequencing, staffing and controlling tasks.

 Entire books are written about how processes should be organized. Should we control tasks centrally via a computer or distribute work instructions via Kanban? Should we batch work and locate it where labor costs are lower or should we create continuous flow cells? You can discuss endlessly of what the most productive arrangement is without ever mentioning people.

 But people? How do they intervene in performance? After all, they’re there to follow the process, the procedure or the standard, aren’t they? Yes – well… but they’re people. Which means they can either do so mindfully, with enthusiasm and care, or they can do it mindlessly, getting by with the minimum and not caring much about the outcome. The difference in performance is astonishing. Compare the same workplace setup with two different teams, one willing and motivated, the other unwilling and deflated. The demotivated team will produce twice as many defects and twenty percent less productivity. And the impact will spread through the facility, as they will take little care of the equipment, not flag problems and find workarounds.

Every organization generates its own friction – difficulties in doing the work – because no engineers is so clairvoyant that she can design the perfect setup. Motivated teams will help reduce the friction by improving their environment every day, demotivated teams will increase the friction – and find more causes for grief in doing so.

And then, of course, the engineer is a person as well, and needs people to discuss what worked and didn't work in their designs - have new ideas, insights and initiatives that will lead to learning about designs, and making the next round better. No machine or procedure will ever have an opinion or idea and talk to you.

 Discussing organizational structures and process design, the hardware, makes little sense if we don’t discuss people as well – the software. But motivation is really a complex topic, and one we all struggle with in practice: what will make someone take interest and get involved? Or, conversely, what will make someone withdraw and do the minimum without trying to go further?

One practical way of looking at it is to align sense-making with meaning-making. People have their own ideas, opinions, likes and dislikes. They have their own interests about what to pay attention to, and reasons to do something or other. Sense-making is about making sense of a situation, in the abstract. Seeing the logic of it, finding an explanation that fits and that, well, makes sense.

 Meaning-making is about what makes sense to you personally – how you fit in this situation, what’s in it for you: do you find it interesting or intriguing? Or threatening? Do you see your personal advantage or disadvantage? How do my friends stand on that issue – and which camp should I join and so on. Sense-making is abstract, meaning-making is personal.

 As a manager it’s easy to limit yourself to subordination: since people’s opinions don’t matter, the sense-making is reduced to what the manager intends to do and why, and the meaning-making is all about “how much” and “or else.” However, if you want to truly engage people, however, heart and mind, you need to consider both more deeply. First, does what you want to get done make sense? Is the gain clear? Is the logic persuasive? Would they think so by themselves, without being forced? And then what does it mean for them? Why should they be interested? What is the pay-off? Is this pay-off something they value? How does collaborating to this project makes them look in the eyes of their friends? Why should they make the effort?

 Managers shy away from motivational issues largely because they lack the vocabulary and concepts to handle them. We’re all human and we experience emotions – we feel them – but are often hard put to recognize them, label them and respond to them – whether our own or others’. As a result, we try to avoid the topic and treat the fact that people have their own opinions, positions and insights as a inconvenience, not a boon, simply because we were never taught to deal with them.

 Focusing on distinguishing sense-making from meaning-making gives a us a simple tool to look at people as people and explore how they see, understand and feel about situations. Learning to align sense-making and meaning-making is a simple managerial practice that will help you see situations differently and find a way in – by creating space of people’s individuality.

Oddly, the secret to productivity is teamwork and reducing friction in processes, and the secret to teamwork is considering each person as an individual. We’re poorly equipped to do so, both by nature (we feel emotions, but don’t quite know how to think about them) and by education (we’re rarely taught how to label emotions and create space for their expression). In doing so with lose both the creative potential of people’s insights and the fluidity of people’s enthusiasm – two of the main sources of fun and pleasure at work.

Considering sense-making (am I explaining the logic of what I intend clearly enough?) and meaning-making (where does this person see their place in this scheme) and then aligning both is a good place to start thinking about motivation and see people as people, not just cogs in the machine. Try it, you will be surprised by the difference it makes to outcomes.