SIX:
The Individual’s Work is Essential

This proposition stands in the place of: “People Need Jobs.” Sure, people need paychecks. But people increasingly need to make an important contribution in their work lives. What’s more, business enterprises can no longer afford to employ only parts of the people they hire.

Henry Ford, the last century’s wizard of industrial production, reflected in his auto-biography about the more than 7,000 specialized jobs required to manufacture a Model T:  “949 required strong, able-bodied and practically physically perfect men. 3338 needed men of merely ordinary physical strength, most of the rest could be performed by women or older children, and we found that 670 could be filled by legless men, 2637 by one-legged men, two by armless men, 715 by one-armed men and 10 by blind men” (Ford, My Life and Work, 1923)

Following Ford’s lead, we have institutionalized organizational designs that employ only parts of people. To reverse this pattern – to earn the right to the whole person – businesses must deal with the whole person. That means openly and effectively dealing with “messy” human issues like emotions, interpersonal issues, conflicting needs, family demands and obligations. For, if a person’s work is essential, we must, in every way, deal with the person, herself, as essential.

If an organization is to move beyond the slogan, and truly honor each individual’s work as essential, a new type of corporate culture is required. Command and control systems must be replaced with more open, flexible and responsive processes that provide natural checks and balances as individuals work with one another. The organization must not only be made up of self-managed people and teams, but the work of those teams must be self-correcting, so that when a person or a team gets off course, others quickly know it, and pressure it back into the flow.

Essential people must be allowed and encouraged to shape their own work, not just to do “jobs” that were structured sometime in history by unknown people. They must be afforded significant control over the tools and equipment they employ. They must be treated as the “owners” of their own work processes. They must have the authority to negotiate working agreements with anyone in the organization who affects their performance.

For employees to structure their work responsibly, each must develop and maintain an understanding of the nature and the strategy of the business. Each individual’s responsibilities must be directly and tightly connected to a strategically essential end product and/or paying customer. Essential people shoulder essential responsibilities.

For employees to capably exercise the responsibilities that come with structuring their own work, they must have broad and general skills that were never required for specialized jobs. Much of the training that has been provided only to managers and supervisors over the past 50 years must be made available to self-managing employees and their teams.