Alain Hunkins - Cracking the Leadership Code

Organizational management was started by mechanical engineers: people who were trained to see the world as engineering problems to solve. The aim of scientific management (as it came to be called) was to improve efficiency, especially labor productivity. The goal of leadership was to get labor to do more work in less time.

For the manager, people were not the competitive advantage: the factory was. Having the latest and greatest machine was of primary importance. Employees were subordinate cogs in this mechanical worldview.

The man considered to be the father of scientific management was an engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor had a deep-seated belief: he thought employees were only out to take advantage of their employers and therefore must be controlled. Taylor was certain that most of the employees on the shop floor spent a lot of their time on the job goofing off and working slower than they could.

Left to their own devices, Taylor believed, workers would work at the slowest rate possible, a behavior commonly known as soldiering . From Taylor's perspective, soldiering wasn't just bad business; it was morally reprehensible. He wrote of soldiering as “the greatest evil with which the working-people…are now afflicted.” 4

Therefore, employees were not to be trusted. Taylor felt employees spent every possible moment conniving new schemes to take advantage of their employer:

Hardly a competent workman can be found who does not devote a considerable amount of time to studying just how slowly he can work and still convince his employer that he is going at a good pace. 5

For Taylor, the perfect worker was the one who questioned nothing, understood everything, and did anything he was told to do. Taylor wrote that the ideal worker should be “so stupid…that he more nearly resemble[d] in his mental make-up the ox than any other type.” 6

With the publication of Principles of Scientific Management in 1911, Taylor's ideas spread like wildfire. His ideas became the dominant mode of business thinking for the first half of the 20th century.

Taylor's beliefs set the norms of how a workplace should work. In a very short time, the prototypical relationship between leader and employee was born. It was a relationship forged in the cauldron of power, fear, and control.

In Taylor's system, work was firmly divided between management and labor. Management did all the “thinking” and laborers did all the “labor.” If you were a manager, communication meant telling people what to do.

Moreover, that communication was top-down: no questions asked. After all, in a giant machine, what “parts” ask questions? Telling people what to do became the norm of factory floor communication. The job of the leader was to give orders and maintain order.

Think for yourself? Speak up? Challenge authority? If you were a worker, raising your hand and speaking out might get you killed. Not metaphorically, but literally.

Labor-related violence usually began with workers speaking up and wanting better working conditions. In fact, between 1850 and 1920, in the United States alone, there were at least 74 separate incidents when workers calling for safer conditions were killed by law enforcement officials, members of the company militia, armed detectives, and guards.

In the industrial era, workers were expected to do, not think. They were meant to show up, shut up, and do as they were told. For the jobs at hand, there wasn't much need for analysis and complex problem-solving.

Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company (and one of Taylor's best-known disciples), pioneered the use of the assembly line in the auto industry. His disdain for the aptitude of his workers was quite well known, famously quipping, “Why is it every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?”

Taylor and his engineering disciples (known as Taylorites ) were obsessed with getting workers to do more work in less time. Using stopwatches and some very fuzzy math, they originated what became known as time-motion studies. They believed there was one best way to do things, and management's job was to find it. Once “the way” was found, management's job was simple: command-and-control.

Command-and-control was the dominant mode of leadership for most of the 20th century. In hindsight, it's hard to believe that so many employees would put up with practices and conditions that we'd now find intolerable. But there were quite a few factors that existed that allowed leaders to successfully employ command-and-control for so long.

At the turn of the 20th century, the standard of living was much lower than it is today. Disposable income was the privilege of only a wealthy few.

There was no middle class to speak of. In 1900, the average family had an annual income of $3,000 (in today's dollars). Most people had no indoor plumbing, no phone, and no car. About half of all American children lived in poverty. Most teens didn't attend school; instead, they labored in factories or fields. 7

Working to put food on the table was no metaphor. It was literal. Opportunities for steady employment were few and far between. People who landed a factory floor job with a regular paycheck were primed for obedience; questioning authority would put their golden egg at risk. As such, they'd put up with a lot of lousy behavior.

On a cold day in January 1914, an estimated 10,000 people lined up outside of Ford Motor Company's employment office desperate to be hired. 8Henry Ford had announced an extraordinary offer to job candidates: he was willing to pay $5/day. That was more than twice the average factory wage at the time. Ford set a precedent that was followed by other companies over time: pay your workers well, and turnover and absenteeism will go down. After this wage increase, the Ford Motor Company doubled its profits in less than two years.

Ford's move to raise wages also gave birth to the U.S. industrial middle class. A salary of five dollars a day allowed workers to enjoy a standard of living the likes of which had never been seen by working-class people. There's a sign outside the abandoned Model-T plant in Highland Park, Michigan, that says, “Mass production soon moved from here to all phases of American industry, and set a pattern of abundance for 20th-century living.” 9

Workers knew (and were often reminded by managers on the floor) that if they didn't want to do the work, there were five other people outside who'd be ready to jump at a moment's notice. The golden handcuffs of high wages kept most people obedient in the command-and-control system.

For most employees, factory work didn't involve a great deal of technical skill. The basic job functions of what needed to be done on the assembly line could be learned relatively quickly. The skill that was in demand was perseverance. Workers would have to stand in one place on the line and do the same thing over and over again. All day. Every day.

Because the work process was so repetitive, managers were not interested in things being done differently. Traits such as innovation or creativity were off limits for employees. “Just do your job” was a key operating principle.

After all, there were production quotas to hit. Managers didn't want anything to stand in the way of that assembly line. Thus, a “do as I tell you to do” ethic became the norm.

Managers focused on command and control of the labor force because on a day-to-day basis, things stayed pretty much the same. For example, the Ford Motor Company started manufacturing the Model T automobile in 1908. They kept manufacturing that same make and model of car until 1927. For 20 years, the Model T didn't change. As Henry Ford famously said, “Customers could get it in any color they wanted, as long as it was black.”