3
Self-Management in the Pursuit of Purpose

This chapter will give you a detailed understanding of the essence of today’s work—self-management. As we’ll see, it is the defining characteristic of employee engagement as well as the source of the intrinsic rewards that drive employee engagement.

You’ll probably miss the core of today’s more purposeful work if you only look at the visible activities or behaviors of this work. You will see only tremendous variety—bookkeeping, counseling, sales, and so on. The common core requirements of the new work aren’t behavioral at all—at least not in the traditional way we think of overt, behavioral actions. They involve the mental events that direct those actions toward a purpose.

Consider the way managers talk about the new work. It involves “working smart,” “using judgment,” “taking responsibility,” and “applying your intelligence” toward the organization’s purposes. Again, these are mental events. Academics use fancier words to describe this purposive mental activity: self-regulating, self-controlling, and self-managing. I prefer the term self-managing because it conveys the idea that workers now do much of what managers used to do for them. Whatever term you prefer, we are talking about the way that workers add value in the new work.

What’s Involved in Self-Management?

The circle represents visible task activities—overt task behaviors like planting flowers, grinding lenses, or taking orders over the telephone. The four boxes are the self-management events that direct that behavior toward a purpose. Like most flow charts, the diagram oversimplifies what is often an intuitive and messy process. However, it is useful in fleshing out the key parts of self-management.

Note: Circle represents overt task behavior. Boxes represent internal (cognitive) self-management events that direct overt behavior. Dotted lines represent feedback effects.

Source: Adapted from Kenneth W. Thomas, Erik Jansen, and Walter G. Tymon Jr., “Navigating in the Realm of Theory: An Empowering View of Construct Development,” Research in Organizational Change and Development 10 (1997): 1–30. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

The solid arrows in the figure show the main sequence of events, from left to right. Self-management begins when you commit to a meaningful purpose. You then choose activities to accomplish the purpose. As you perform those activities, you monitor the competence of that performance to make sure that it is adequate. Finally, you monitor progress toward accomplishing the task purpose to make sure that the activities are having the intended effect and are actually moving the purpose forward.

For example, consider a self-managing gardener who works for a landscaping firm. The gardener commits to planting a flower garden that will delight a customer. She chooses which flowers to plant and where to plant them. As she plants them, she monitors her behavior to make sure the plants have proper soil, that their root balls are properly covered, and that they receive enough water. Periodically, she checks with the customer to make sure that the customer is actually delighted with how the garden is taking shape.

The dotted lines in the figure are feedback effects. They represent adjustments and learnings during the course of a task. For example, if activities aren’t being performed well enough, you can adjust your performance or, if that doesn’t work, you can choose other activities. Likewise, if the purpose isn’t being accomplished, you can look for new activities that will move the task forward.

The next sections go into more detail about each of the events in self-management, to help you understand better what today’s work requires.

Committing to a Meaningful Purpose

Without commitment to a purpose, there would be no point in the remaining events. There would be no reason to make choices, care about the competence of one’s work behavior, or keep track of progress. In many ways, then, this commitment drives the entire self-management process.

So what is commitment? Commitment to a purpose is inspired by the pull of a worthy, desirable purpose. But commitment is clearly more than desiring or hoping that the purpose will be achieved. It is a decision to take personal responsibility for making it happen. Let me spell out this distinction because it is important. Much decision making is activity centered rather than purpose centered. In activity-centered decision making, we decide to perform behaviors with the hope that they will accomplish a purpose. The purpose is in the background as a desire, intention, or aim. We perform the activities and see what happens. If those activities don’t achieve the purpose, we are disappointed, but that is sometimes the nature of life, and we move on to another task.

In purpose-centered decision making, by contrast, we commit to a purpose, and the activities are in the background. That is, we’re not entirely sure how we will accomplish the purpose. The decision is basically to find the activities needed to deal with the uncertainties involved. Subject to our moral code and our other commitments, we are deciding to do whatever is needed to accomplish the purpose.

The nature of commitment became clearest to me when I approached marriage, so I’ll use that as an analogy. I could have made a reasonable effort to make the relationship succeed and then waited to see how well that worked. But I realized that this wait-and-see approach would have real consequences: it would make it less likely that the relationship would succeed and would also make it less likely that my wife-to-be would commit to making it work. I realized that I already knew enough about my future wife to make a commitment and that I needed to do so. So I made the commitment—to myself and to her. And we both began to use the language of commitment: “We will work it out.” We committed to doing whatever it took to make the marriage successful—to keep track of how well it was working and to find ways of overcoming obstacles.

As the marriage analogy implies, committing to any purpose is not to be taken lightly. It is a promise you make to yourself and to others that involves some personal accountability: you will be unhappy with yourself if you fail to deliver. People grieve when forced to abandon a commitment—it’s like suffering a small death. Taking on a new commitment also involves investing a significant chunk of psychological energy in a task purpose. It is possible to become overcommitted—to feel too thinly stretched to function. At those times, you need to complete some of your tasks or get them back on track before you can find the energy to take on new ones.

Nevertheless, commitment is what we all need if we are to be effective in accomplishing the purposes we care about in an era of increasing uncertainties. General Gordon Sullivan, former Army Chief of Staff, put it well in the title of his book with Michael Harper: Hope Is Not a Method.

Choosing Activities to Accomplish the Purpose

After committing to a purpose, the second event in self-management is deciding how to make the purpose happen—selecting activities that will accomplish it. Notice that commitment depends on this ability to choose and vice versa. Without the freedom to choose proper activities, it would be pointless to commit to a purpose—to take personal responsibility for achieving it. You could not steer your behavior toward the purpose. You could only carry out prescribed activities as well as possible and hope that they would achieve the purpose. Likewise, without a committed purpose to steer it, choice becomes choice for its own sake and degrades into simple whim or impulse.

Allowing workers to choose useful activities is the main point of the decentralized decision making in the new work. Workers use their intelligence in problem solving to find ways of dealing with the uncertainties they encounter: what would be a good way of achieving the task purpose given the circumstances they find? In self-management, workers tailor their work activities to the needs of the situation in ways that fixed rules cannot anticipate. Workers select appropriate work procedures and adapt or improve old procedures—or invent new ones—depending on the changing requirements of the task.

Choice involves freedom of thought—being able to act out of one’s own understanding of the situation. The elaborate rules of the compliance era were intended to box in workers’ judgment and behavior. I once saw a safety poster that actually said “Don’t Think!”—implying that free thought was dangerous. In contrast, managers in the new-work world are encouraging workers to think “outside the box.” This “box” is made up of the old constraints on thinking: the elaborate rules, the established procedures and precedents, and the tradition of relying on the boss’s judgment rather than their own and of using prevailing assumptions instead of their own understanding. The freedom of thought of committed workers has become a vital competitive resource that produces inventions, innovations, continuous improvement, renewal, and customer satisfaction.

Monitoring for Competence

After choosing our activities, we begin to perform them. As we do so, the next event in self-management comes into play—monitoring our performance for competence. This event, then, involves making sure that our work activities meet our standards.

During the compliance era, work standards were external and set by managers at fixed levels. Workers were charged with doing work that met these levels—doing “good enough” or “satisfactory” work. In contrast, self-management involves committed workers’ meeting their own internal standards of competence. Internal standards are more dynamic: people raise their standards on tasks they care about as they become more skilled and experienced at the task activities. Worker self-monitoring, then, can be a powerful force for improving performance.

The nature of the standards involved in self-monitoring depends on the type of activity involved. For a machinist, standards involve criteria such as the measurement specifications of a part, its finish, and the absence of any burrs. For a salesperson making a presentation to a group, the standards would be quite different: keeping the group’s interest, conveying essential information, listening, answering questions, and remaining courteous. Standards generally cover aspects of activities that play a significant role in achieving the task purpose. Most of these standards are technical standards—standards relating to technique—but ethical standards may also be involved. The notion of worker professionalism includes both.

Regardless of the nature of the standards, the essential requirements of monitoring for competence are the same. People must pay attention to how well their standards are being met by being fully present, involved, and focused and by concentrating on the task. They must also be prepared to make adjustments in their performance of the activity when threats and opportunities (uncertainties) arise. The machinist changes a machine setting and spends more time polishing a part as necessary; the salesperson rephrases a statement and provides a different example in response to a customer question. Some of these adjustments may involve stopping to think, but with experience much of the adjustment becomes intuitive. As workers become more adept at the task, the activities and adjustments often blend more smoothly into a seamless and graceful flow.

Monitoring for Progress

The last event in the self-management process involves checking to see that the activities are actually accomplishing the purpose—that progress is being made. Like monitoring for competence of performance, this step involves an assessment of how the task is going, together with a willingness to take action to make changes. In contrast to monitoring competence, however, monitoring progress is a purpose-centered evaluation of how well the task is going.

I find that people sometimes miss this distinction, so I’ll elaborate a bit. There are two parts to evaluating how the task is going—how well you are performing the activities (competence of performance) and how well the activities are accomplishing the task purpose (progress toward the purpose). Both are important. If you have chosen the right activities, the competence of your performance is likely to advance the purpose. In an uncertain world, however, you can’t be sure that those activities are the right ones. So you have to keep checking to make sure that the purpose is being achieved. This is, after all, the bottom line of the task. Without monitoring for progress, you are only hoping that the task is on track.

Since most purposes involve helping an internal or external customer, monitoring task progress usually involves some form of customer feedback. On longer tasks, this means checking with the customer at different milestones and making any needed adjustments. The gardener, for example, checks with the customer at key points in the planning and planting of a garden. On shorter, more repetitive tasks, monitoring means checking with customers after they receive a product or service and using that information to improve task activities to increase customer satisfaction in the future. The machinist learns whether the finished part works for a customer, and the salesperson finds out whether the customer makes a purchase. This use of customer feedback became a cornerstone of much of the quality movement.

Measuring progress and collecting feedback from customers takes a certain amount of discipline. It takes time and energy away from performing task activities. There is also some psychological cost to reexamining your choices, exposing them to customer evaluation, and possibly having to make changes in your activities. But it’s the only way for a committed worker to be sure the purpose is being achieved. Again, it’s dramatic to contrast this aspect of self-management with the conventional wisdom of the compliance era, which concluded that “workers resist change.” Looking back, the truth was more that, under command-and-control management, workers often resisted imposed change. In the new work, committed workers initiate changes when their purpose is threatened or they see a better way of accomplishing it.

Feedback and Learning

Finally, consider the rather innocent-looking feedback arrows in figure 2. In reality, these arrows represent much of the value-added of human intelligence in dealing with task uncertainties.

Feedback comes from the two monitoring events—monitoring for competence of performance and for progress toward the purpose. Think of this feedback as either positive or negative. When feedback is positive, it means that our efforts are working as we expected, resulting in competently performed activities, and those activities are moving the purpose forward. Positive feedback strengthens our work habits and our assumptions about what works, as well as our commitment to the purpose. That’s good, of course, but we could program machines to do all of our work if these habits and assumptions always worked.

The real value of human intelligence shows up when the feedback is negative—when something isn’t working. After all, that’s how uncertainties show up in tasks: the expected doesn’t happen. According to American educator John Dewey, that was also when learning was most likely to occur. When our processes don’t work, we look up to see what happened, try to figure out why, and come to a new understanding that is usually more complex than what we believed before. The new understanding leads to a new activity or adjustment. If that works, our new understanding is strengthened—until we encounter a new uncertainty, and the learning cycle repeats itself. If something doesn’t work, we keep trying to figure it out until we find something that works. If nothing works after a great deal of effort and experimentation, our commitment eventually declines, and—sadder but wiser—we move on to a new purpose.

Not only does this feedback produce more responsive and adaptive behavior, then, it also produces important forms of learning. As the work world has become more uncertain, organizations have realized the competitive value of this learning as a kind of intellectual capital and have recognized the importance of becoming a “learning organization,” to use Peter Senge’s phrase. It has become clearer that workers’ learnings in the new work increase their value as human resources and make them more difficult to replace. It has also become clear that organizations need to invest resources in trying to capture or “harvest” this learning and in sharing it with others in the organization who would find it helpful. Some of the learning is in the form of preconscious intuition and the physical artistry of a craftsman. But other learnings are more easily transferable. Some take the form of “lessons learned”—insights or theories that can be told to others. Others are specific innovations or inventions that can be used by others—new techniques or procedures or new physical equipment.

Work Engagement

With that background in the nature of the new work, we are now ready to define “worker engagement.” Simply put, workers are engaged in the new work to the extent that they are actively self-managing at that work. Rather than simply going through the motions or doing “good enough” work, then, workers are engaged in their work when they are committed to a purpose, using their intelligence to make choices about how to best accomplish the task, monitoring their behavior to make sure they are doing the task well, checking to make sure their actions are actually accomplishing the purpose, and taking corrective action when needed. As mentioned before, this is the way that workers add value in the new work. To borrow a phrase used by the Conference Board and the New West Institute, it is also the way that workers exercise “discretionary control over their performance.”

What Happens to Managerial Control?

Notice that the self-management events in figure 2 substitute for some of the traditional command-and-control activities performed by managers—deciding on a task purpose, assigning task activities to workers, supervising or directing those work activities to ensure they are done properly, and making sure that the purpose gets achieved. Many leaders who were used to command-and-control, then, have felt like they were losing control when their organization shifted to worker self-management. In reality, the shift represents a change of form for managerial control, rather than a loss of it. More of the nuts-and-bolts decision making is taken on by workers, but you, as a leader, stay informed on issues of performance competence and progress.

Under worker self-management, you keep influencing workers, although the form of that influence also shifts. You tend to use less authority and coercion to impose decisions and provide more information and expert advice as inputs to workers’ decision making. Several writers have used the metaphor of partnership to describe this relationship, underscoring the free flow of information between leader and team member as partners in the task purpose. A number of management writers have also used the metaphor of coaching to describe this new relationship. As workers take responsibility for task purposes, they are more likely to welcome this helpful input and to seek it out—in the way that athletes welcome help from a knowledgeable coach. Jack Welch used the metaphor of boundarylessness at G.E. to describe this flow of helpful information and the removal of traditional barriers that interfere with it.

It may be helpful for you to remember that the switch to worker self-management is occurring because it is a way to increase control over the uncertainties facing a work team. By allowing workers to make more decisions on task uncertainties they encounter, you are better able to leverage your time to deal with larger uncertainties facing the team. You can attend to planning, watch for dangers and opportunities facing the team, help with coordination, deal with personnel issues, and make sure that nothing important falls through the cracks.

As a practical manner, it’s also important to remember that you retain your command-and-control authority and can use it if needed. As Peter Block noted, self-managing workers have the right to disagree with their leader’s suggestions, but the leader also retains “51 percent” of the votes in the final decision when there is disagreement on an important issue. The challenge for you, of course, is to lead in such a way that this overruling occurs fairly rarely—or else self-management becomes a sham.

All this assumes that your workers are ready for self-management. That brings us to the subject of worker development.

Worker Development

In a paper with Susan Hocevar and Gail Thomas, I proposed that development simply means moving toward greater self-management. Think about this for a moment. Isn’t that what we look for as our children develop and what we mean by maturity? We look for young people to increasingly commit to worthwhile purposes and accept responsibility for them, to make their own decisions consistent with those purposes, to apply standards to their behavior, and to be resourceful and persistent in pursuing their purposes. Those are the kinds of lessons we try to teach our children and the way we judge how responsible a young person is becoming. As parents, this is also what guides us in deciding how much self-management to allow our children as they grow up.

In many ways, then, self-management is simply a way of describing the task capabilities of an adult human being. To be self-managing at work is to fully engage those adult capabilities in one’s work tasks.

Still, workers don’t always come to a task ready to be fully self-managing. Younger workers may still be learning general self-management skills. Some workers of any age may be hesitant to self-manage, particularly if they are emerging from an environment with command-and-control management. Even workers who are predisposed to be self-managing may need to ease into it on new tasks as they learn new skills and gain experience. Other workers start to self-manage, run into difficulties, and become discouraged.

The development of worker self-management, then, is an important issue for leaders in today’s work world. It is also an important issue for workers themselves—the key to their effectiveness and satisfaction, their level of responsibility, and even their long-term employability.

This brings us to the central motivational issues of this book. What are the intrinsic rewards that you can use to reinforce self-management and develop self-management skills? How can you and your workers increase those rewards so that engagement and self-management flourish?