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"Changes: How is the Practice of
Work Evolving?" (1)
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AT WORK
Social psychology is the study of how we relate to one
another. It emphasizes status and power relationships, how these impact
the formation of attitudes, and the relation of status, power, and
attitude to behavior in a given social context-in this case, at work.
|
Charlie Grantham's Rule of Twos |
| Here's how much time you have |
...to |
| 2 minutes |
...take action on immediate requests for you
attention.
If you can't handle it that quickly, then it needs
to go to someone or someplace else. |
| 2 hours |
...hold face-to-face meetings
If it takes longer than that, you're not planning! |
| 2 days |
...respond to electronic requests.
If you can't get to it by then, you're wasting your time and
everyone else's. |
| 2 weeks |
...assemble a work team and commit to a plan.
If you can't find the right people and the right
plan by then, the project will fail. |
| 2 months |
...identify a business opportunity and test it with
cutomers.
If you can't do it by then, your competition can. |
| 2 years |
...do nothing at all.
If your plans reach out years into the future, the
world will have passed you by long before you accomplish them. |
We've seen that technological and historical forces are
pulling knowledge workers toward more collaborative kinds of work and away
from work patterns based on hierarchical power structures and great
disparities in status between similar white-collar workers. This evolution
toward true collaboration began in the mid- I 980s with the mass
introduction of personal computers. It will culminate in the first years
of the twenty-first century with the emergence of the truly collaborative
workplace, at least for the technologically elite.
Innovation is a 24 x 7 x 365 proposition
in a global
environment.
In practical terms, this move toward a work model of
collaboration means that we're going to be finding ourselves working more
in situations with small teams of 5 to 20 people and spending far less
time working as "individual contributors" or as members of
committees. Collaborative work teams do not have any one individual
continuously in a leadership role. That doesn't mean that they are without
structure and differences in power and status, but these structures change
rapidly according to the nature of the task at hand.
I see the new world of work as one in which we will work
together in teams, and the person who makes a critical decision for the
team at any given time will be the person who is the best equipped to make
that specific decision. As an example, in the context of a start-up
company, often decision making is passed around like a basketball on a
court. In selecting a method of financing, it's usually the CFO who takes
the lead in making the decision. Conversely, when there's a design
decision to be made on a technology development project, that decision
falls to the chief engineering person. And so it goes. This is often
difficult for people who were used to the more traditional hierarchical
structure where a single individual was always in charge.
Companies such as Apple Computer, DreamWorks, and
Hewlett-Packard have been practicing mastery of the structures in which
the authority and decision-making process is very fluid and ever changing.
Team-based work processes are nothing new. There are plenty of examples
throughout history where smaller work units with flexible decision-making
power have conquered in the face of less-adaptable and slower
organizations. The classic example of the utility of this small-team-based
approach actually comes from America's Revolutionary War. If you think
about it, the forces of George Washington, by organizing into guerrilla
bands, fighting from behind trees, and then immediately disbanding and
fading back into the environment, eventually conquered the large,
well-structured, well-disciplined British forces.
What we're seeing with the Internet is an increased
degree of uncertainty and change in the general business environment. In
this situation, successful companies will be those that can organize and
reorganize more quickly than their competitors, which is more easily
accomplished by the new work structures comprised of small,
project-oriented teams. There are a number of examples of this in the
current business environment. Actually, some of the best case studies we
have to offer have been taken from the entertainment industry and
Hollywood, and we will discuss these in some detail in the following
pages.
Organizations working in collaboration are all well and
good if you are creating a new company and can structure it exactly the
way you want. What happens if you live in Dilbertville? You are sitting in
the cube farm, assigned to committees and task forces that are flooded
with e-mail and voice mail continuously. I think that these situations
present the challenge to all of us.
Ultimately, the answer comes down to one of leadership.
Companies without courageous, effective leaders who can steer them into
this direction of the new world of work will continue to suffer from
information overload, confusion, and inaction, thus becoming less and less
effective over time.
A key task for all of us, then, is to begin managing the
process of change so that we can consciously make the transition to the
new world of work. We need to know that the answers to our questions are
going to be different from the ones we are used to getting, and it is the
purpose of this book to offer you some ideas. I've seen many people in the
process of making this transition try and try again with little success to
have their organization change to a more humane way of working, to control
over communication, and to bring caring and respect to the work teams. In
some cases, this has proved to be simply impossible. In others, success
comes through persistence and construction of good solid business cases as
a rationale for this kind of change.
Actually, I offer up a challenge to each of you to
become the master of your own fate and begin the change process yourself.
That's the only way it will work. Given the diffusion of technology, which
is the backdrop of this story, I suspect that, over time, more and more of
you will make the decision to leave existing large hierarchical
organizations and either strike out on your own or partner with a small
group of like-minded folks to begin your own exciting business venture.
However, there are steps that workers in existing
organizations can take to ease that transition, starting with one of the
most common problems with new technology: information overload. What I
found to be very successful in my work with people in these organizations
is to establish protocols of communication. That is to say, members of a
work group reach an agreement about how they will communicate with one
another for certain activities. Then they do that, ignoring all other
communications that come outside of the proper channel or are not in the
proper format. Another way to confront information overload and wasted
time is to control meetings. We all hate them and often find them less
than effective, especially meetings that have a standing agenda, forcing
workers to devote valuable time to them, no matter what. To lessen such
time wasters, many companies are starting to reconsider the value of such
practices. I'm aware of at least one company that has a prohibition again
standing meetings. There has to be a purpose, an agenda, and pre-stated
expected outcomes before people may come together. This means that
individuals don't attend meetings unless they are preceded by a written
agenda least 72 hours beforehand. Think about what that would do your
everyday work life.
(1) "The Future of Work" Charles Grantham -
200 pages. 22-25
http://www.thefutureofwork.net/
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