Are managers capable of liberating their employees?

Open this photo in gallery:

Frederick Winslow Taylor and Peter Drucker seem miles apart in their management approach. One was an industrial engineer, the other philosopher-like. One treated manual labour as mindless muscle for the industrial era while the other humanely viewed knowledge workers as volunteers who must be satisfied. But was their approach in fact the same? And are we suffering from that today?

That was the suggestion of Cal Newport in a recent blog post. The professor of computer science at Georgetown University and author of several productivity books, including Deep Work, says the two men delineate the two most important trends in management history.

Mr. Taylor exemplified the study of a production system, figuring out the most efficient way to run it, and then giving simple, repetitive tasks to workers – who might be timed, since it was known how fast the task could be performed. Henry Ford echoed that approach by creating the automotive assembly line. Both tried using salary and bonuses to motivate workers to operate at maximum efficiency.

But as knowledge work emerged, it was too unstructured to reduce to a set of optimized simple tasks. Mr. Drucker responded with management by objectives, getting employees to buy in to important objectives and then figure out for themselves how to achieve success.

But Mr. Newport argues both approaches had the same foundation, treating workers as a black box: a computing term for a system only understood by its inputs or outputs.

“Both philosophies conceive of workers as opaque vessels that receive instructions and incentives as input, then produce valuable artifacts as output. The key is to figure out which types of instructions and incentives produce the best output,” he writes. “Neither approach, however, is interested in the internal processes within the black box that actually perform the messy work of producing the output.”

That may seem highly theoretical – interesting, if not of much use. But guess again. It’s practical and vital, the cause of so much despair in workplaces today.

Mr. Newport says that to obtain the high cognitive performance required by modern knowledge we will have to open up the figurative black box to face the reality of how the human brain works. How does it take in information and provide valuable outputs? If we turn our attention to this, we will find that overwhelming people with too much information as we’re doing these days and not allowing them sufficient time to focus on their work is counterproductive. We will need to listen to the wailing we hear, daily, from the people around us about being flooded with distractions – and the increasing concerns that our attention spans, if not our brainpower, is shrinking.

I wrote recently about dividing the workplace between makers and managers, and how we favour the latter because they are the bosses. So we get jammed with meetings and e-mail – managers’ form of work. I wrote about what individuals can do .

Now, let’s flip it around, because too often these issues of balance and burnout are treated as only for individuals to solve with productivity tricks and techniques, when more systemic change is required. If you are a manager, particularly a senior one, you can continue to let people flail away in a climate non-conducive to focused work, or you can try to liberate them so they can produce more effectively for your organization.

There have been experiments in this vein over recent years, notably reducing e-mail usage on evening and weekends and trying to limit meetings to essential participants. Those are probably only starting points. But, as with any issue you face as a manager, action begins by admitting this is a problem worthy of attention – call it black box management or the distracted, frenzied workplace. Mr. Taylor and the managers of his era have been attacked for treating people as expendable. A century later, in a more humane era, we are essentially doing the same: a grand experiment in which people are left to cope like rats in a maze.

Investigate the problem, asking your staff for solutions. Instead of focus groups for customers, try them with staff. Listen acutely. Be open to change. The manager-maker dichotomy is simplistic; it makes it seem as if the system works for managers, and often it doesn’t, as they suffer, too. And make change, experimenting with different approaches that liberate your staff to be more productive. Don’t treat the situation as inevitable and expect them to suck it up.

Cannonballs

· What’s your goal: Profit, purpose, service, or some blend of the three? It’s helpful to know.

· Managers try to avoid bad news or sandwich it between two slices of good. But a 2013 study shows that people prefer to begin with the bad news when offered a choice, notably when it’s something that the person can’t do anything about. You can follow that with some kind of good news to buffer the blow.

Research in the United States shows that banks with more materialistic CEOs – as determined by their possessions – take more risks than those with less materialistic CEOs.

We’ve launched a new weekly Careers newsletter. Sign up today.