Pathways to Engagement: Learning to Need, Not Just Use Each Other
Working with a group of managers this week we opened what has now become to me a familiar 
and productive organizational conversation. “How can we learn to need, not just use each other?” The group I was working with was by any standards “high functioning” yet it was obvious upon introduction that they didn’t quite grasp the question they were being asked. So, I tried asking the question in a slightly different way, “OK, what’s the real reason everyone complains about IT?” This proved to be a bit more penetrating as the people in the group began to grasp that what I was pushing them on and what was making them uncomfortable was having to acknowledge something that we have all become familiar with in our organizational lives, avoiding vulnerability. We all do it and we don’t talk about it. But what if we did?
Back in 1959 Peter Drucker coined the term ‘knowledge worker’, he then spent a good portion of the next 45 years studying and revamping his theories about knowledge worker productivity and how best to adapt and adjust management practice to account for this new reality. He went so far as to say, “…better knowledge work productivity is our most important economic need.” He further warned that our long term prosperity and even our economic survival depend upon it.
Today more than ever our habitual treatments of Drucker’s ideas as quaint or optional are like “chickens coming home to roost.”
Through observation of this new reality of economic life, the worker as asset not merely resource, Drucker developed some perspectives that the majority of managers are, 5 years after his death, just beginning to grasp. What Drucker saw was the need for managers to simultaneously make their present Enterprise more effective, identify and realize its potential, and create a different Enterprise for a different future. In so doing he suggested that business leaders needed to continually shift resources from less productive to more productive areas through better knowledge work productivity and innovation.
“ …business leaders need to continually shift resources from less productive to more productive areas ...”
The implication of this statement is profound and redefines what it means to manage. It is no longer sufficient to think of the role of management in terms of knowing what needs to be done and seeing to it that it gets done. While this definition remains a portion of what it means to be a manager we must expand the demand on the role to include “knowing” what talent is available at all times and seeing to it that it is put to use for the best advantage of the enterprise. It also means, and this is where the “why we are all afraid of IT” thing keeps coming up; as managers we must be able to recognize what knowledge and skill we need… that we do not have and cannot provide for ourselves… that we will be reliant on others to provide. This last requirement makes us veeerrry uncomfortable. Embracing the interdependency....eeeeeuuuuwwww!
In order to succeed in the manner Drucker is describing we are going to learn to consciously, strategically need the talents, knowledge and skills of not only those people working for us but also of those we will collaborate with. And look at us; we are still struggling with getting our performance reviews done on time, again, this year, for the umpteenth consecutive year. It is time to step up our game or step away from the role!
Tomorrow I’ll go back into my workshop and we will continue to explore this newly introduced distinction between needing people and using them. As the conversations unfolds predictably the managers in the group will begin to see that they
- Need to know a great deal more about themselves in terms of strengths and limitations.
- Need to know much more about the capabilities and interests of people reporting to them, continue to know what needs to be done and now who is best to do it and, what is going to need to get done that we must be preparing for now or we’ll never be ready and who should be doing that and
- Know where they currently have collaborators who are not being related to as assets, what do those assets need from them in order to be able to provide them service and what are they going to need from these collaborators in the future that they need to let them know about now so their expectations stand a chance of being met.
And at some point in the process of becoming fully aware of what is called for now they are going to become overwhelmed with the limitations they have placed on themselves and recognize that they will need to shed some of the protective behavior patterns they have used to avoid vulnerability until now. And they will get a bit panicky, and then they will be fine.
Puff, puff, puff! Whew! The level of complexity is daunting and yet if we (managers) continue as we have with our historical ways of working like we don’t really need as much as we do we are going to get run over by the sheer volume of what we are faced with. Like the man in the commercial said many years ago, “you can pay me now or pay me later.”
