Why Organizations Must Break with the Legacies of Taylorism

Photo by Lili Popper on Unsplash.

I am continually asking myself the following question: Why do people applaud the same simple pictures and infographics about leadership repeatedly posted on Twitter and LinkedIn? My first article, Find your personal leadership style, concluded that it’s because leadership know-how does not find its way into our corporations. Continuing the argument, let us take a closer look at what I observed:

1. People have only a superficial knowledge of the concept of leadership.
2. People miss inspirational leadership in their corporations.

I find both observations problematic. It seems that many of today’s corporations do not invest in adequate leadership training and coaching. Additionally, because people long for an inspirational leader to come, corporations do not encourage employees to practice leadership at all levels. And it shows that people do not take responsibility for themselves to change something about their situation.

However, just telling organizations to encourage their employees to practice better leadership comes too short. We must figure out the root causes for that organizational behavior. But, before I discuss why corporations lack motivational and inspirational leadership, we should find out why an investment in leadership makes sense.

Profitability — let the market in

Why is leadership so important? Is it just because good leadership has the power to inspire a happier workplace? Yes, that’s one reason for looking at companies’ ethical and social responsibility. But as hard as it sounds, happy staff is only an end in itself, and therefore it is an artificial goal since it does not pay off in terms of the company’s actual objectives.

Following Wohland and Wiemeyer, it would only be an internal reference. Instead, everything an organization is doing must connect to the market — the external reference.[1] Peter Drucker had a similar concept for it which he called profitability.

If archangels, instead of business men, sat in directors’ chairs, they would still have to be concerned with profitability despite their total lack of personal interest in making profits.
The Practice of Management, Peter Drucker (†)

As Drucker said, even corporations with the highest social and ethical standards must be competitive to stay alive. However, an organization needs competent and motivated people to do so. And the thing is that the job market changes. For example, I see many companies searching for software developers because there are not enough developers available. As a result, software developers are in a position of power where they can cherry-pick the job they want to have.

One effect of such an undersupply of resources is that people don’t just want to earn money since companies must provide high wages anyways. Analogous to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the basic needs of financial and job security are satisfied.[2] Thus, most professionals are searching for self-fulfillment and self-efficacy. Therefore, a robust, inspiring, and authentic approach to leadership becomes a selling proposition to potential employees. And a powerful authentic argument for keeping the existing staff.

Since corporations need employees to remain competitive, the job market becomes an indirect external reference. Meaning an organization must meet the demands of the people on the job market to get and keep the right employees. Otherwise, it cannot meet the market’s demand.

Organizational design first

We all know that the thought is not sufficiently complex to proclaim a new leadership style, and everyone in the company adheres immediately. Leadership is indeed interdependent with organizational structures and processes. Meaning it is highly dependent on the systemic design of a company.

Consequently, we must see the prevailing leadership style as an observable artifact of an organization’s culture. Thus, we can only change it indirectly via the design of our organization. And that makes change difficult and hard to predict, if not impossible to foresee. Therefore I formulate my first law of leadership as follows.[3]

Leadership follows organizational design.

Still, I think that leadership and organizational design are interdependent. But I believe that organizational design is the more substantial variable. The organizational design provides a limited space where a particular dominant leadership style can form and solidify. Because of this relationship, I believe my observations that people ask for inspirational leaders are symptoms rather than root causes.

Consequently, let us dive one level deeper by asking why people have a superficial knowledge of leadership and why they constantly ask for better leadership. That will bring us to the root cause.

We don’t see leadership as a profession

I work in the software industry. The average Java developer knows the programming language Java and relevant Java frameworks.[4] Most of these developers studied computer science, where they learned a lot about the underlying theory of programming. It means those developers have learned what they are doing and understand it as their profession.

Consequently, they continuously learn new things because they are interested in them. In other words, they are intrinsically motivated to stay up to date with advancements in their profession. But that is just the internal reference.

Of course, there is an extrinsic motivation — or let’s say external reference — behind this behavior. Each developer must stay competitive inside the job market. Thus, most developers I know are searching for environments where they can satisfy both needs — originated in the internal and external reference.

For leaders, or let’s better say, managers, it’s pretty different. Many managers I know used to be technical people, for example, software engineers. They climbed the ladder to a management position at a given point in their career. Many of these managers are still interested in the technical fields and have never seen leadership as their core profession. When I have asked such managers about their preferred leadership theories, they don’t even know the fundamentals of leadership.

Instead, managers are informed about the hottest technological trends and deep-dive into technical and functional details. But they don’t have a deep understanding of either leadership or followership. It often leads to the manager slipping into micro-management behavior and employees getting frustrated.

We can now get upset about this situation. But the simple truth is that for most companies, the organizational design heavily supports and encourages this behavior. And as long as an organization is reasonably successful, there is no need to change because there is no external reference. And if there is no need, change will not happen.

We think leadership and management are the same

What I discussed so far may seem natural for techies. But also, managers in non-technical fields often lack an understanding of leadership. They may be good salespeople, controllers, or project managers — but not leaders.

Please pay attention to the fact that I have spoken exclusively of managers but not leaders so far. The way we talk is another observable artifact of our culture. And to be sure, the fact that the terms management/manager and leadership/leader are mainly used synonymously is a clear observable artifact where leadership is not valued within an organizational culture.

So what exactly is the difference between management and leadership? Peter G. Northouse provides the answer.

The overriding function of management is to provide order and consistency to organizations, whereas the primary function of leadership is to produce change and movement. Management is about seeking order and stability; leadership is about seeking adaptive and constructive change.
Peter G. Northouse, Leadership: Theory and Practice

In contrast to that definition, many corporations still handle leadership in their understanding of management. Therefore, the safekeeping of the status quo is the top priority. That’s understandable when looking at the processes and structures inside these corporations. They rely on what I call The Legacies of Taylorism: very top-down oriented hierarchical structures with clear silos, focusing on efficiency.

Within these structures, it often comes to what Peter Drucker called The Activity Trap. Meaning managers are forced into hamster wheels because they are not empowered to decide and are busy doing management tasks. A controller does controlling. A salesperson does sales. That’s Taylorism: do what you were told to do, do it inside your silo, and do it efficiently — where efficiency is translated to capacity utilization.

Besides, top-down hierarchical structures provide a strong incentive for political games with the prospect of climbing up the hierarchical ladder. Therefore managers are even busier because of those political games. They do not find the time to perform acts of leadership. It leads to a situation where day-to-day management tasks are seen as a profession, whereas authentic leadership is seen as a fanciful idea of some theorists and dreamers.

In short, the impact of the tayloristic organizational design on the behavior of the actors inside an organization is tremendous. And so is its impact on their leadership behavior.

But where does it come from? And why are we still doing it?

We tend to follow existing paths

As it is always for systemic reasons, it’s a chicken-and-egg situation where it’s challenging to step out. Without changing the organizational design, leadership will not change, and without leadership, the organizational design will not change.

We are locked in. And we are more often in a lock-in situation than we think. Paul A. David called it a path-dependence.[5] It means that we repeatedly follow the same path once a path has been trodden. And by doing so, the path gets more and more trodden. And again, we are more likely to follow the path. It is called a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism.

Interestingly, path-dependencies start with what David called a critical juncture. It is a random event that kicks off a chain reaction of a reinforcing feedback mechanism at a certain point in time.

Taking David’s most prominent example, I wrote this article on a keyboard with the well-known QWERTY layout. When was it the last time you wrote something on a keyboard with the Dvorak layout? It probably never happened, and you probably have never seen such a keyboard. That’s because the QWERTY keyboard layout became the accepted standard over time.

Quite surprising, the Dvorak keyboard layout requires less finger movement to type a text, and thus, you can write faster. Therefore QWERTY is inferior to the Dvorak layout. Meaning we are often stuck in a sub-optimal status quo just because a random event has happened at some point in time. More alarming, we often do not know or remember this event.

Thus, we blindly follow a given path, meaning that we don’t know why we are following it, and we are often even unaware that we are following it. Consequently, we are less likely to question the status quo, which strengthens the status quo even more. Again, it’s a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism.

The legacy of Taylorism

Closing this argument and coming back to leadership, the reason we do not see leadership as a profession, and we are mixing up management with leadership, is a path dependency. The critical juncture happened in times of Taylorism in the 20th century.

Back then, the markets were not as dense and globalized as today. This led to a situation where a corporation’s size and efficiency trumped speed and innovativeness. The more dense and globalized the markets became over time, the more competitors tried to dominate the markets. Thus, innovativeness became essential to constantly generate unique selling points to differentiate from competitors.

This is where the difference between complicatedness and complexity comes into play. The creative process of innovation requires people to explore unknown domains. It results in complex problems because solving one part of the problem inside an unfamiliar area creates yet unknown effects on another part of the problem. Thus, the work to be performed cannot rely on existing knowledge. Instead, a company needs great people with a lot of experience to tackle complex problems. This makes staff less interchangeable and asks for attractiveness on the job market.

In contrast, in the times of Taylor, problems were quite often of complicated nature. Complicated problems can be solved by existing knowledge because of a clear relationship between cause and effect. Therefore, large, complicated problems can be divided into small and simple parts.

It leads us to the following insight: because in Taylor’s times, the pressure for high levels of innovation was low, corporations faced complicated and simple problems instead of complex ones. Therefore, it allowed the following top-down management approach: at the top, complicated problems were disassembled to simple tasks based on existing and documented knowledge, and at floor level, the given tasks were just executed. The following famous quote summarizes this situation in a concise way.

Why is it every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?
Henry Ford (†)

Henry Ford was a child of Taylorism.[6] His view makes the following things very clear: there were many people available in the job market because nearly everyone could solve simple problems. For example, repeatedly performing only one isolated step to construct a Model T. Thus, there was no need for inspirational leadership for two reasons.

1. The oversupply of employees made inspirational leadership as an argument to attract new employees obsolete, and
2. Inspirational leadership was not required to foster creative problem-solving.

You see, the external reference for inspirational leadership was entirely missing. Consequently, organizations adapted to that situation.

The management innovation of the time of Talyor was to divide and conquer, which manifested as thinking above, execution below, working in efficient functional silos, and people needs are not that important. It was then combined with extrinsic rewards like piece wage.

Taking a look at the Full Range of Leadership Model, all of this is very much about what Bernard M. Bass called Transactional Leadership, which I see as a traditional management approach. Thus, Taylorism produced a primacy of management with no significant need for inspirational leadership, and certainly not at all levels.

However, because there were at least 70 years heavily dominated by Taylorism until the 1970s, many organizations are still following this path today. But it’s not an appropriate leadership approach to operate in today’s dense and dynamic markets. Instead of size and efficiency, today, speed, innovativeness, and effectiveness are required to master complexity.

That asks for inspirational leadership at all levels of an organization. From a leadership theory perspective, this is very much what the Full Range of Leadership Model calls Transformational Leadership. On the one hand, it is required to attract the most skilled people and, on the other hand, to foster creative problem-solving behaviors.

Good-Bye, Taylor!

So what does it take to break with Taylorism and start to see leadership as a profession? I think it requires three interdependent things:

1. Consequent adjustment of the overall organizational design combined with
2. Heavy investment in leadership development to
3. Foster organizational development towards structural and cultural change.

Thus, we must understand that leadership plays an important but not essential role in organizational development. Adjusting the organizational design, meaning structures and processes, is the most crucial (and challenging) part.

However, from a systems thinking point of view, leadership can be seen as a constant perturbation of a system by a leader fostering organizational development. This argument follows the idea of Transformational Leadership very much, and I think there lies a lot of truth in this idea. However, this perturbation must hit fertile ground in order to flourish. And the fertile ground is the appropriate organizational design.

Remember: Leadership follows organizational design.

Another critical insight that comes with this thought: we must not understand leadership as something that always comes from above. Leadership and responsibility must emerge on all levels of an organization. Thus, we must try to design our organization to support and incentify that kind of people’s behavior.

Finally, we may be able to get rid of the top-down thinking of Taylorism. However, it’s still a long way to go to break with our trodden paths of the past.

Footnotes

[1] You may read “Denkwerkzeuge der Höchstleister: Warum dynamikrobuste Unternehmen Marktdruck erzeugen” by Gerhard Wohland and Matthias Wiemeyer.

[2] Learn more about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs at Wikipedia.

[3] My law of leadership “Leadership follows organizational design” is in line with Craig Larman’s fifth law of organizational behavior, “Culture follows structure.” Leadership is part of an organization’s culture and organizational design can be translated to structure.

[4] See Java programming language and frameworks like the Spring framework at Wikipedia.

[5] Learn more about the Path-Dependence Theory by Paul A. David at Wikipedia.

[6] Peter Drucker wrote in The Practice of Management the following (p. 286): “Henry Ford (one of the most thorough practitioners of Scientific Management, though he had never heard Taylor’s name) believed that …”.

Book recommendations

The Principles of Scientific Management
Frederick W. Taylor

Leadership: Theory and Practice
Peter G. Northouse

Transformational Leadership
Bernard M. Bass (†), Ronald E. Riggio

The Future of Management
Gary Hamel

The Responsibility Process: Unlocking Your Natural Ability to Live and Lead with Power
Christopher Avery

Denkwerkzeuge der Höchstleister: Warum dynamikrobuste Unternehmen Marktdruck erzeugen
Gerhard Wohland, Matthias Wiemeyer

The Practice of Management
Peter Drucker (†)

Professionalizing Leadership
Barbara Kellerman

Leadership Without Easy Answers
Ronald A. Heifetz

Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Change
Ronald A. Heifetz, Marty Linsky

Acknowledgments

Many thanks go to Lee Harrison, who reviewed this article for me. Thank you very much! I also thank Peter G. Northouse for the permission to quote from his book.