© 2015 José Ignacio de Juan http://joseignaciodejuan.com

Contrary to what I believed as a little girl, being the boss almost never involves marching around, waving your arms, and chanting, "I am the boss! I am the boss!"

Tina Fey,
American comedian
(1970-)

When an organization's culture is bad, don't just blame the managers. Happiness in an organization is everyone's responsibility. Better management means engaging people, improving the whole system, and increasing value for clients. For most people, however, these principles are not enough. They need concrete practices or, in other words, regular exercises.

Management is too important to leave to the managers. I have come to this conclusion after 20 years of being a manager, writing two management books, giving 80 management courses in 30 countries, and speaking at almost 100 conferences worldwide, some of them about management. I've noticed that most leaders don't know how to solve their management problems and most knowledge workers, such as engineers, teachers, consultants, and designers, don't realize that they are also (to some extent) responsible for management stuff. I firmly believe that, like keeping the noise down, the files organized, the meeting room tidy, and the customers happy, management is everyone's job. At one time or another, we all fit the description of manager.1

I am pleased to say that, of all the participants in my public workshops, fewer than 20 percent considered themselves to be managers. The other 80 percent were usually developers, coaches, consultants, entrepreneurs, team leaders, and other kinds of creative workers (see sidebar). This wide diversity of participants shows one of two things: Either management is an activity that is relevant to many more workers than just managers, or I am extremely bad at targeting the correct audience for my courses. I prefer the former interpretation!

© 2013 Jurgen Appelo

What are creative workers?

The term creative worker is an alternative to knowledge worker, which is a bit outdated in my opinion. I prefer this new term to emphasize that many people work nowadays in the creative economy 2 and they collaborate in networks, not in hierarchies. (I will elaborate on this throughout the book.)

A creative worker is a person who creates or grows unique value within a network of people, or someone who creates or grows the network in an original way for others to share their value. Even better, it can be a person who does both!3 The term knowledge worker, on the other hand, implies that people add value only with their knowledge. It does not imply creativity or the ability to network.

For two years, I kept track of the questions that participants from all over the world asked me during these management workshops. I have a box with nearly 2,000 colorful sticky notes expressing an equal number of colorful and sticky problems. Many issues in the box are the same or similar and were reported to me almost everywhere I went. These are the questions I encountered most often:

• How can we motivate our workers?
• How can we change the organization's culture?
• How can we change the mindset of managers?
• How can we get teams to take responsibility?
• How can we improve teamwork and collaboration?
• How can we get managers to trust their teams?
• How can we develop people's competencies?
• How can we be agile when the organization is not?

Notice that all these questions, except the last one, are asking, "How can we change other people?" This attitude is a reflection of the traditional approach to management: one person manipulating the behaviors of others. But what if all these management problems were simply the outcome of an incorrect interpretation of management? When everyone is trying to manipulate everyone else, should we be surprised that problems never go away and that new ones keep popping up? When people don't focus on improving themselves, is it any wonder they're always complaining about each other?

I often ask audiences if they have heard about global movements, improvement methods, or innovative management practices, and usually only a few hands go up. But when I ask them if their organization's culture needs to change, almost everyone says yes! It seems that few people learn, but most find fault in how their colleagues work. Perhaps they could change the culture together if they just start learning what has already been tried successfully elsewhere. Maybe they could stop reporting problems when they stop manipulating each other and instead start to improve themselves.

The focus of this book

The improvement of a person's approach to management is my focus in this book. I want to show all creative workers, including designers, middle managers, project managers, mentors, trainers, freelancers, and others, what they can do to change the way their collaborative work is managed. You don't have to solve all the problems mentioned earlier. If you choose to have a different view of management, the problems can resolve themselves. And you don't need to wait for permission from the managers. Change yourself, inspire others, and enjoy the book!

© 2013 FaceMePLS, Creative Commons 2.0
https://www.flickr.com/photos/faceme/8345123691

If your best experiences in life
then maybe you shouldn't
are all vacations,
tomorrow.
return to work

The misery of workers worldwide (managers included) is personified by the fictional character of Melly Shum, who has hated her job for almost 25 years. Melly is depicted on a huge billboard in my hometown of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She sits in her office, looks into the camera with a thin smile, and has not stopped working since 1990 (except for a brief vacation in 2013 due to office maintenance, after which she returned to work on another floor). Melly Shum, imagined and realized by artist and photographer Ken Lum, is for me the symbol for all workers who feel disengaged and unhappy about their organizations but who don't feel ready to quit their jobs. According to several studies, this situation accounts for about two-thirds of the global workforce.4,5,6

The happiness of managers and other workers is crucial because happy people are more productive.7 I firmly believe we can only improve worker happiness when everyone feels responsible for management and learns to manage the system instead of managing each other. The only reason people suffer from bad organizations is that they don't stand up to say, "I'm not taking this any longer; go boss yourself!" It troubles me that, when I ask people for their favorite moments in life, they usually only list things that happened in their personal time. But if your best experiences are all vacations, then maybe you shouldn't return to work tomorrow.

Doing the Wrong Thing

The reason I travel a lot is that I give presentations and workshops on almost every continent about modern management in the twenty-first century. Some people have said that the advice and practices I share are simply common sense, and I might even agree. Unfortunately, as many before me have observed, common sense is not common practice. Common practice for me is eating giant bags of M&Ms while watching a movie; common sense would be to watch my health and eat only the green ones. For organizations, common practice is that they are managed like machines, with their workers treated as gears and levers. I call this Management 1.0. In this style of management, people assume the organization consists of parts and that improvement of the whole requires monitoring, repairing, and replacing those parts. We can find Management 1.0 everywhere around us.

For example, some writers suggest that "winner-take-all" organizations should rank employees using measurements of individual achievements and give more work to the organization's "best performers" while getting rid of the bad ones.8 These writers seem to assume that the community of employees is better served with competition and politics than with collaboration and a shared purpose.

Other writers suggest that employees have a tendency to "slack off" when the boss is on vacation. After all, "When the cat's away the mice will play!" Therefore, the boss should return to the office regularly to peek around the corner and check which of the mice are laboriously sweating on the treadmill and which ones are partying with the cheese.9 It seems the assumption here is that work-life balance is bad and that nobody is needed to check the "work" of the cats.

Further extending this idea, other writers suggest that bosses should continuously monitor whether people are actually using office tools to do work and not for Skyping with friends, Facebooking diary entries, or Photoshopping baby pictures. The crucial and ethical part of this practice, it is claimed, is to let everyone know that they're being watched.10 In this case, the assumption is that managers can keep everyone's trust only when they are honest about not trusting anyone.

*sigh*

It is interesting to note that these examples were...