Author: Jordan Cohen

I will never forget the experiences of getting my first suit. I was 12 years old and my father took me to a department store on 18th street in New York City. I was very excited; this was the transition to feeling grown up. A real milestone. I would have a suit like all the grown men I knew.

At the store, we headed straight downstairs to the boys department and I tried on several cream-colored suits (very mid-1970s Saturday Night Fever). Once we found the right one, the tailor had me stand on a box in front of a mirror. He then went to work pinning and marking for the alteration. When he finished he stepped back, and he and my father looked at the suit pinned on me. In the mirror, I saw my father point to the back and shoulder of the jacket and sleeve and then shake his head no. The tailor went back to work, re-pinning and re-marking. Once again, my father shook his head no. So the tailor added padding under my shoulder. Still, my father shook his head. After about 30 minutes of back-and-forth, finally my father nodded and my cream colored, three-piece suit with bell bottom pants went off for alteration.

For me, the experience was long and boring and not as exciting as I anticipated. On the car ride home I asked my father why he didn’t just tell the tailor what to do (my father was a clothing manufacturer). He explained, “if I told the tailor what to do, he would have done exactly what I had requested — but then if the jacket didn’t fit properly, he would have said, ‘I did what you told me to do’. On the other hand, if I told him what we are trying to achieve (for the jacket to lay flat with no pulling in the back, shoulder, or sleeve) he could be responsible for the outcome I described.”

This lesson of trusting the skill and experience of the professional has stayed with me. In my experience, this idea of describing the outcome and letting a skilled professional determine how best to get there often results in a more committed worker, higher quality work, and a proud employee. This is also a very effective approach in getting the most out of knowledge workers. Describe the outcome you are trying to achieve, be clear on the requirements, and preserve the worker’s autonomy. If the worker needs help, she will ask for it.

It turns out there is a scientific reason why employees are less effective when tasks are dictated. Amy Arnsten, a neuroscience professor at Yale University, studies the importance of feeling in control. Her studies can be applied to employee autonomy in managing a team. In an interview at her Yale Laboratory, Arnsten explained that when people lose their sense of control, such as when tasks are dictated to them, the brain’s emotional response center can actually cause a decrease in cognitive functioning. This perception of not being in control, whether real or imagined, would presumably lead to a drop in productivity. If a manager describes the long-term outcome he wants, rather than dictating specific actions, the employee can decide how to arrive there and preserve his perceived sense of control, cognitive function, and ultimately improve his productivity.

This neuroscience behind leadership came to a head when I was working with an aggressive start-up operation. Like many start-ups, the founder was hard charging, charismatic, and had big aspirations and a compelling offering, which afforded him early success and an expansion in operations. In preparation for the expansion, the founder told his team that they needed to win more business. In turn, the team started accepting all types of requests from new and existing customers and ultimately overburdened the operation with a volume and types of requests they could not fulfill. Some team members were starting to get frustrated if a customer they had personally said “yes” to didn’t get their request fulfilled. When this happened, other team members did not understand the issue — they had been told to win more business and they were delivering on what was asked of them.

What the leader failed to realize is that he was working with skilled and experienced professionals. The team did not need to be told what to do, but merely shown the organization’s direction. To resolve this issue, the team jointly developed a mission and vision statement that identified what requests were in scope and which were not. By showing the team the purpose of the organization they were able to effectively execute the expansion of the operation resulting in increased volumes, satisfied customers and stronger financial performance.

The knee-jerk reaction of many managers to a performance challenge is to “tighten the screws” and get involved in how and when a task is done. Both practical experience and now scientific evidence tell us often a better approach is to protect the autonomy of the worker and provide high level direction.

Growing up in the 1970s, I often found myself in my father’s factory, which manufactured women’s clothing. Spending time in the factory was not only a way to be close to my dad, but also great entertainment in an era of only 5 TV channels and no cell phones or personal computers. (Later, my first job was sweeping the factory floors). The factory was like my personal playground — the stacks of pallets were mountains, the floor-to-ceiling dress racks a jungle gym, the colorful stacks of fabric a 50-layer cake. Enthralled by my surroundings, I would run around the factory floor and talk to the operators at each machine. They took pride in showing me what they did — they were paying it forward.

The technology employed in the seventies was a top-of-the-line sewing machine or a battery-powered forklift. There was little computerization, automation or even reporting compared to today’s manufacturing environment. Yet my dad needed to be able to see if production was on schedule or not. He also had to be able to quickly identify bottlenecks to determine if he needed to intervene in order to complete a run or meet a delivery deadline. Rather than sitting in an office, my father put a desk in the middle of his rectangular shaped factory floor. He built a small platform that raised his desk 3 feet above the floor. This enabled him to see the entire factory at one glace. It also allowed the employees to quickly locate the boss if they needed help. It made each employee and their respective work visible to each other. My father knew every job, task and process.

He set up a system that was the same for each station or job. Items that needed to be worked on were piled onto a cart just to the right of the operator; completed items were piled up just to the left. As fast as it took dad to lift his head, he could tell if the sewers were on schedule (were the piles on the right high or low?) or if a particular operator needed help (was the pile on the right of one operator always higher than the rest?). He knew when the pressers were about to be idle because not enough dresses had been completed (was the pile on the right low and about to run out?). He knew if the buttonhole operator needed more training on that new machine, or if the shipping truck was late. The visibility was critical to the productivity of the factory.

I decided not to become a dressmaker (big mistake given the success of Project Runway). Instead, I went to graduate school and joined a large corporation. Nonetheless, I see that the transparency of the factory floor needs to be applied to our modern knowledge work environment. That is a challenge. By definition, knowledge work goes on inside an employee’s head. This makes it difficult to supervise and to intervene if an employee needs help producing his output (deliverable/report/decision). If an employee is off track, he can consume a lot of organizational resources without the manager even being aware. Some organizations have responded to this inherent challenge by moving to an open office concept. There has been a lot written about open offices (and I won’t go into the topic here), but they don’t solve the problem: they make the employees visible — not the work. A productive working environment requires the inputs and outputs (right cart and left cart) to be visible.

That mans knowing what the input is. At an individual level, we often think of it as hours spent on a task or project. However, this is only one input, and often not the best one. How many analyses were required to complete that market segmentation report? How many times did the cross-functional team have to meet to reach a decision? What type of competitor analysis are you doing in order to evaluate that market? A system that makes all these inputs visible to management will enable better decisions. Equally, all too often, individual outputs are only visible to the contributors at the very end of the production with little to no time for others to reflect, intervene, teach, and challenge. Maybe it takes you six hours to write that report, but it only takes your colleague two. Unless that becomes visible to you, you’ll never know there’s a more efficient way to get it done. Making the work output visible to all workers involved allows them to contribute by providing insight, identifying short cuts, including innovations and adding suggestions from their diverse experiences and background.

At a collective level, knowledge work is often interconnected: one knowledge worker’s output is another knowledge worker’s input, so transparency benefits the process of knowledge work as a whole. To use the dress making analogy, “seeing” each component of the dress being assembled gives the manager (and all operators) the opportunity to intervene and ramp up any individual part of production. If knowledge workers and their managers can “see” the work, they are more likely to contribute additional value beyond the narrow task that they are assigned.

Some companies have organized their knowledge workers to achieve that visibility. At one insurance company, work was broken down into projects and each project was broken down to a plan with assigned resources. Once approved by the manager, the plan and resources were loaded into a workflow system which was then continuously updated. Plasma screens that displayed the workflow individually for every project and collectively for the whole department were placed in public areas. The manager could “see” which projects were ahead of schedule, in progress, or lagging behind and how much work was starting, underway or being completed each day. In fact, one manager saw that work actually stopped when a merger was announced and, as a result, increased his communication activity and presence with his team.

When work is not transparent, you lose a chance for employees to contribute the gifts they have to offer — their creativity, inspiration, and perspective. And that’s true whether you’re making dresses, or making information.

If your organization has managed to make invisible knowledge work visible, please let me know how you’ve succeeded in the comments.