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In many of today's work environments,
employees' primary goal is quitting time and payday. Leaders' priorities are
power, control and maintaining the status quo. Getting the job done is down the
list. Once needed skills are mastered and employees follow established
procedures, the job offers little or no challenge. The unwritten law, "accept
the way things are or leave."
Change equals challenge which is the source of motivation,
workplace efficiency and job security.
Because of fast changing trends and technology, work environments are evolving
into continuous challenges. Responsibility is moving to the front line where it
becomes the workers' responsibility to find the best way to get the job done,
not management alone. For this to succeed, the front line must have continuous
learning opportunity, be in a continuous learning mode and be continuously
adapting to new technology.
Revised term used in this section:
Worker responsibility and decision-making responsibility has replaced empowerment or team empowerment.
Who has the efficiency advantage?
Below are two warriors who will complete the
job, but at what efficiency level? Each works under a different leadership
style that is based on organization priority, worker responsibility or
command-and-control leadership? These priorities produce different results, sometimes
opposite, and cannot be considered equal. The organization's priority
determines its leadership style.
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Efficiency under worker responsibility!... People who are first aware of elementary problems have
full authority to prevent or solve them while the problem is minor. Management is not
involved with them, they are focused on new trends and technology.
Management's priority is to GET THE JOB DONE.
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Efficiency under command-and-control leadership!...
The front line does not have authority to solve or prevent elementary
problems - they must go
through management before authority to take action is granted. Some of these
problems pile up and become a never - ending burden on the front line while
other problems grow until they explode, at which time they are recognized.
Management is preoccupied with the exploding elementary problems.
Management's priority is CONTROL.
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Decision-making responsibility and learning opportunity work together. If an
employer wants employees to assume responsibility and make quality
decisions, they must organize in a
way that offers learning opportunity.
- The Efficiency of Responsibility
- Opportunity with decision-making responsibility is the only way to discovery true
capabilities of employees and the workplace as a team.
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- The Efficiency of
Learning Opportunities
- Employees with learning opportunity are
developing skills to accumulate wealth for their employer. This also gives employees
opportunity to apply these skills to their lives, thereby, creating wealth
for themselves. Employees under control leadership do not have this
opportunity, they just follow orders.
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- As a Leader, What is Your Priority?
- A leader's priority will determine the efficiency of his subordinates.
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- Leadership Styles
- Command-and-control leadership was the primary leadership style of
the 20th century. It was accepted because efficiency was
created by repetitive action, teaching people to resist change. Once a
skill is mastered, they do not want to learn another. Worker
responsibility is just the opposite, it motivates people to thrive on
change by seeking challenges, finding ways to achieve goals. This is
efficiency leadership of the 21st century.
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Visionary Leadership
- Elements of Visionary Leadership
- Visionary Leadership increases efficiency by moving decision-making
responsibility to the frontline. Efficiency is achieved with limited
supervision. To make frontline responsibility effective, leadership must give
workers opportunity to develop quality decision-making skills and learn to
trust them.
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- Visionaries
- Today, fast growing organizations are built on leadership innovation, that
is, they are not built by product visionaries but by social visionaries —
those who invent entirely new ways of organizing human effort.
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- Leadership Trends
- Technology is forcing a change in leadership styles. The
command-and-control leadership methods of the last century are extremely inefficient in
fast changing environments. There is a need for new attitudes. Motivating
environments are needed on the front line, people who assume responsibility
and exercise leadership. To attract and keep this type of person, the work
environment must inspire and exploit employee capabilities.
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- Short History of Worker Responsibility
(Worker Empowerment)
- Worker responsibility has always been highly motivating and extremely efficient. It
is little used because most leaders priority is control, believing their ideas
alone are responsibility for efficiency.
Today's narrowing profit margins are forcing the adoption of worker responsibility.
Throughout history, responsibility leadership was implemented when efficiency had priority
over control.
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Team Responsibility
Teams unite responsibility with learning opportunity. The team acquires and shares knowledge for finding the best way
to complete jobs efficiently.
Team Intelligence
 | A group of people with common interest, united in a common goal. |
| Team members share knowledge, searching for an efficient way to reach a common goal. |
| The team inspires creative intelligence by:
 | Bragging and socializing. |
| Conflict and debate. |
| Trial and error. |
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- Nine Rules for Effective Work Teams
- These nine rules are based on the belief that level of elementary problems
controls efficiency, quality and cost. If there are many elementary problems,
productivity will be negative, likewise, low level of problems puts
productivity in the positive column.
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- Mutiny on the Bounty
- Captain William Bligh's problems on the Bounty is an excellent example on
how one man changed from control leadership to team unity in a
matter of minutes, 200 hundred years ago.
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Barriers to Worker Responsibility
- Why Some Leaders are Efficient and Others Not
- Worker responsibility is highly efficient, but rejected by most managers.
WHY? Human nature and natural instincts.
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- Social Prejudice and Self-fulfilling Prophecy
- Social prejudice believes other people are less capable than us.
If we are managers and we think other people are less capable, then we
will establish a management policy that reflects that belief. Through
employee turnover and self-fulfilling prophecy, our opinion will be proven
right.
Social prejudice kills MOTIVATION!...
In the Classroom, in the Workplace and in Society.
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Students do not drop out of high
school because they can't learn; they drop out because of social prejudice
in the classroom. The classroom is a teacher and promoter of social
prejudice. The system uses students'
natural talent as a friend or foe, intellectual versus
non-intellectual. Non-intellectuals are labeled non-achievers who have low
ambitions, because they do not perform academically like intellectuals.
This prejudice is carried from the classroom to the workplace.
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- Technical
Schools & Natural Talent
- When employers hire from technical schools, what do they get, intellectual
talent or technical talent? What does the employer want, intellectual skills
or technical skills? To enter technical schools, students must achieve
academic skills before they are allowed to develop technical skills. People
who have natural intellectual talent are accepted, people who have natural
technical talent are rejected.
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Formal training is time consuming and costly. Employees who developed
the habit of learning additional skills without instructors are valuable
assets to the company. This is possible in
natural learning environments.
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- Survival during an Economic Downturn
- Dramatic changes are taking place in the workforce. People who embrace new technology
are discovering new opportunity while those who fight it are not fully aware
of the fundamental changes taking place in our society.
The opportunities and successful projects I had in my life are the
result of my ability to educate myself. I also had a
love to
learn, but not in the classroom.
List of
opportunities and projects.
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My experience as a machinist,
hard-hat diver and boat captain.
The below articles give some insight to the concepts in my websites. I
worked in abusive environments during my early twenties, then during my
thirties through fifties in a highly motivated worker responsibility environment, then
in my early sixties in abusive command-and-control. Efficiency between
leadership styles is dramatic.
- From Worker Responsibility to
Command-and-control Leadership
- This article compares my 25 years experiences with worker
responsibility at the Panama Canal Company, Panama. Then, after retirement,
my experience with abusive leadership environments in Guam.
These dramatic experiences motivated me to research leadership styles and
alternative education methods.
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- Working On The Panama Canal
- Coworkers were the friendliest I have ever met. They introduced
themselves and told me what they were doing. Some suggested I come and
work with their team. They asked the supervisor and he said "no." Being
fought over on the first day boosted my ego and established my attitude
towards coworkers and the company.
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- Sudden Opportunity
- How self-education skills open doors to opportunity.
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Notes:
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The typical job is based on repetitive action with
limited need for additional knowledge. Repetitiveness can be one hour or one
month, white-collar or blue-collar, and is based on accepting the status quo.
Status quo work environments make it difficult to adapt new technology. The
US textile industries had to shut their doors because techniques were outdated
and the work environment would not allow change. Emerging technology is
shorting the time window when current technology is feasible. Today's work
environments must adapt to change.
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Today's education system teaches students to accept
the status quo and employers wants employees to accept the status quo, that
is, follow orders without input. With today's fast changing trends, the status
quo is fast becoming deadly to students, employees and society. For example, the skill of computer technicians would have no value if they sat back and
accepted the status quo, in fact, in their world, there is no such thing as
status quo. The knowledge they have today will be obsolete three years from
now. Knowledge is already obsolete for computer instructors, because classroom
education cannot keep up with changes taking place. In the computer world,
technicians must be able to
educate themselves without instructors. They must
know how to learn in
natural
learning environments. This "need to know NOW" is spreading to other
professions and the people who adapt will be the winners.
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K-Mart versus Wal-Mart -- For
seemingly unknown reasons, people prefer to shop at Wal-Mart. My theory is, customer
preference is based on employees' attitude towards their company and
attitude is based on leadership style. K-Mart uses control while Wal-Mart
uses responsibility.
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Everyone, at some time during their
life, had a desire to learn and be an achiever. For various reasons, this
desired became dormant. Under the right leadership, this latent
desire can be brought back to life.
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