Why is it so hard to put people first?

The short answer is that people are complex. That is what makes it difficult to put people at the center of the decisions we make, how we manage, how we lead, and how we organize our companies.

Labour-intensive workplaces, such as Amazon and Walmart fulfillment centers, have taken the natural consequence of that and put rules at the center, as opposed to people. Making decisions, managing, leading, and organizing your company by a set of rules removes the human complexity. As a result, Amazon and Walmart have point systems to manage employee tardiness and absenteeism. Show up half an hour late, lose half a point. Take too long in the break room, and lose a quarter of a point. Accumulate five points in a three-month period, and you are fired. No if-and-or-buts. See how easy Amazon and Walmart have made it for their managers and leaders. The father of scientific management, Fredrick Taylor, would be proud.?

Be careful, though. What you gain in ease of management, you lose in terms of creativity, problem-solving, thinking for yourself, innovation, and delighting customers. Treat people like machines, and they will eventually start acting like machines. Machines cannot think for themselves. They cannot spot improvements. They cannot go the extra mile for the customer. They can only do as told by following the prescribed rules.?

So what do you do if you don’t want employees to act like machines? What do you do if you want your employees to think and solve problems creatively? To innovate and to go the extra mile for customers? Well, that is exactly what agile is built for. Agile ways of working are constructed in a way that puts people at the center, not rules and processes. In agile, we want teams to self-organize and be semi-autonomous. We want teams to be empowered. We want teams to have all the skills they need to solve whatever works come their way. And we want them to think for themselves, look for ways to improve how they work and what they work on, and continuously ask themselves how they can delight their customers.?

Now that paints quite a different picture than putting rules first, right? The good news is that most agile ways of working, such as Disciplined Agile, Scrum, etc., come with principles and practices right out of the box that supports this people-first approach. All we have to do is to trust the teams, support them where we can, get out of their way, and watch them be awesome.