Proper way of managing people

Editor's note: Some people say that November 6, 1954 was the day when management was born, because on that day Peter Dulac published "The Practice of Management" This book. Before that, he had published The Concept of the Company. After that, he has also published "Results Management", "Effective Managers", "The Management of Non-Profit Organizations", "Management Frontiers" and other books and numerous articles that have profoundly influenced the management community. Dulac is recognized as a "master of masters" in management. Among the more than 30 books he left behind, he also includes novels and monographs on Japanese art.

Peter Dulac died in the United States on November 11, 2005 at the age of 95. This magazine specially launched "Dulak Special" to express his memory.

This feature includes three articles, "The Right Way to Manage People" and "The Four Principles of Change" from Dulac's 1999 book "Management Challenges in the 21st Century," and "Managers Must Be Trained" from The book "The Practice of Management".

"Enterprises take, or at least should take, a way of managing people." This assumption has become the cornerstone of almost every book or treatise on the management of people.

Douglas McGregor cites this hypothesis the most. He believed that managers could only choose two different ways of managing people: "Theory X" and "Theory Y", and then he believed that only Theory Y was reasonable (in my 1954 book The Practice of Management The same issue is also discussed). According to Abraham H Maslow, McGregor and I were both wrong. He argues irrefutably that businesses need to manage different people differently.

I immediately changed my opinion, Maslow's evidence was simply irresistible. But so far few people pay attention.

The basic assumption that a business has, or at least should have, one and only one way of managing people lays the foundation for all other assumptions about people in an organization and the management of people.

Among these assumptions, one assumes that the people who work for the organization are employees of the organization, working full-time, and the organization is what they depend on for their livelihoods and careers. Another assumption is that the people who work for the organization are subordinates of the organization. In fact, there is an opinion that most of these people either have no skills at all, or have only rudimentary skills, and they do what the organization asks them to do.

80 years ago, during and towards the end of World War I, when these assumptions first emerged, they were so close to the truth that they were considered correct. Today, they are no longer tenable. Most people who work for an organization may still be employees of the organization. However, a minority, while also working for the organization, are no longer employees of the organization, let alone work full-time. The number of these people is not small, and it is steadily rising. They work for outsourced contractors, such as those that provide maintenance services in hospitals or manufacturing businesses, or those that help government agencies or businesses manage data processing systems. They are "temporary employees" or part-timers. More and more people are becoming individual contractors earning consulting fees or working for a defined contract period. This is especially true of some people: they work for the organization and are the most knowledgeable and therefore the most valuable.

Even if they become full-time employees of the organization, there are fewer and fewer people who are "subordinates" - even if they are in fairly low-level jobs. They gradually become "knowledge workers". At the same time, knowledge workers are not subordinates, they are "collaborators". After the internship period, knowledge workers must know their work better than their bosses, or they are worthless. In fact, it is also mentioned in the definition of knowledge workers that "they know their work better than anyone else in the organization".

The engineer serving the customer does not know their product better than the engineering manager, but he knows the customer better, which may be more important than knowledge about the product. Weather forecasters at Air Force bases are much lower in rank than commanders at Air Force bases. But when it comes to weather forecast knowledge, unless he knows a lot more than the commander at the airbase, he's nothing. The mechanic who repairs a passenger plane knows better about the technical condition of the plane than the airport manager who manages him, the airline. The same examples are not enumerated.

Furthermore, today's "superiors" often don't do the work their "subordinates" do, and what was happening a few decades ago is the opposite of reality as many people still hold today.

Only a few decades ago, a regiment commander in the military used to do every job his subordinates did: battalion commander, company commander, and platoon commander. From the lowly platoon commander to the noble regiment commander, the only difference in these positions is the number of people they command; the exact jobs they do are exactly the same. Today's regimental commanders begin commanding troops early in their military career, but not for long. They have also been promoted to their current positions from colonel and major. But for most of their military careers, they've done a variety of jobs - as staff officers, on research projects, teaching, working in embassies abroad, and so on. They just don't take it for granted that they know what their "subordinates" (such as a colonel in command of a company) do or prepare to do, and of course they have been colonels, but they may never have commanded a company.

Similarly, the VP of Marketing may be promoted to this position step-by-step in the sales department. They know sales very well. But they know nothing about market research, pricing, packaging, service and sales forecasts. Therefore, the VP of Marketing may not be able to tell the experts in the marketing department what to do and how to do it, but these experts are "subordinates" to the VP of Marketing, who is undoubtedly responsible for monitoring their job performance and urging them to serve the company's Marketing efforts make their contribution.

The same applies to hospital directors or superintendents who manage trained knowledge workers working in clinical laboratories or physical therapy departments.

Of course, these collaborators are also "subordinates" because they are hired, fired, promoted, and rated by the "boss." But in their own work, only after these so-called "subordinates" assume the responsibility of educating their superiors, that is, to help "superior" understand the content of market research or physical therapy, the specific procedures and their respective "effects", the superiors to issue orders. These "subordinates", in turn, require orders from their superiors. They want their superiors to tell them how many "points" they can get.

In other words, their relationship is less of a traditional subordinate relationship than that of a symphony orchestra conductor and musician. A superior in an organization that employs knowledge workers usually doesn't do the work that so-called subordinates do, just as the conductor of a band doesn't play the trumpet. Knowledge workers, in turn, need superiors to dictate and "score" the organization as a whole, ie, to define standards, values, performance, and effectiveness. Just as a symphony orchestra can affect the conducting quality of the most talented and authoritarian conductors, a knowledge-based organization can easily degrade the quality of management of the most savvy, let alone the most authoritarian.

In conclusion, businesses need to manage their increasing number of full-time employees in a way that they manage volunteers. Of course pay their wages. But knowledge workers are mobile. They can lift their legs and walk away. They own the "means of production," the knowledge they hold.

We've known since 50 years ago that money isn't enough to motivate people to work, even though it's clear that dissatisfaction with money can lead to negative emotions. Forty years ago, in 1959, Frederick Herzberg pointed out in his book Motivation for Work that satisfaction with money is primarily a "hygiene factor." What motivates people to work, especially knowledge workers, is what motivates volunteer work. We know that because volunteers do not receive wages, they must derive more satisfaction from their work than salaried employees. Most importantly, they need challenges. They need to understand and believe in the organization's mission. They need constant training. They need to see results.

The above discussion implies that enterprises need to take different methods to manage different types of workers, and the management methods of the same type of workers need to be adapted to the conditions of the time. Companies increasingly need to manage "employees" in a way that manages "collaborators", and the definition of partnership also points out that in terms of status, all partners are equal. The definition of partnership also states that cooperators cannot be dictated to. They need to be persuaded. As a result, the job of a manager is increasingly becoming a "sales job." In the sales process, we don’t start by asking, “What do we want?” We ask, “What does the other person want? What values do they have? What are their goals? What do they need? The result?" And none of this can be answered by "Theory X," "Theory Y," or any other manager's theory.

We may have to overturn the definition of "management of people" entirely. It probably doesn't mean "managing the work of employees". "Performance-oriented management" should be the starting point of theory and practice. The starting point should be in the definition of results, which is just as effective as a symphony orchestra conductor and a football coach's starting point is results.

The productivity of knowledge workers is likely to be at the center of the management of people, just as 100 years ago, in Frederick W. Taylor's day, the center was around the productivity of manual workers unfolded the same. Most importantly, this requires one to make very different assumptions about the people in the organization and their jobs:

Management is not "managing" people.

Management is leadership.

The goal of management is to fully exploit and utilize each individual's strengths and knowledge.

This article is selected from the first chapter of "Management Challenges in the 21st Century" by Peter Dulac, published by China Machinery Industry Press, with the permission of Huazhang Branch of China Machinery Industry Press. Paradigm", the title and subheadings are added by the editor of this journal.