Job suck—that creeping to complete feeling of job discontent caused by any number of "how work works" factors, from the small annoyances to total burnout—is a reasonable and predictable outcome of our "system" of management, that is, the paradigm that guides how “we” conceptualize, organize, manage, and ultimately do our work.
This “system” is called industrialized management and, with near certainty, I can predict it is how your organization is managed … because it’s how just about every organization is managed. It's a very popular paradigm.
The pernicious truth about industrialized management is that we have become so accustomed to its practice that it has become seemingly invisible. And, as humans, once we get locked in on a worldview as justification for how things are, it gets pretty difficult to change those views even in the face of evidence (and/or personal suffering) to the contrary. Instead of addressing the root cause of job suck—a pervasive affliction I've encountered in countless conversations with healthcare professionals over the past decade—we often resort to band-aid solutions. These typically fall into two categories: individual-focused remedies that attempt to help people cope with a broken system, or organizational fixes that ironically stem from the very management paradigm causing the problem in the first place and often end up perpetuating it.
Better solutions (and systems) exist. First, we must make the unnoticed visible.
What follows is a series of points to help you “see” industrialized management and notice where its practices may be leading to the job suck you’re feeling, have felt, or may feel once again.
Diagnosing the situation
Healthcare changed. The whole world, too. But how we work mostly hasn't.
And that means how "we" conceptualize, organize, manage, and ultimately do our work is a mismatch for the environment it's happening in.
This mismatch is creating the job suck we're all too familiar with …
Our approach to work today is built on the ideas of obedience in a 1950s classroom, efficiency in a 1950s factory, and military tactics of a 1950s fighting force.
To be fair:
- It has been mighty effective
- There have been some improvements along the way, but not nearly as many as you might have hoped
- Healthcare delivery organizations have demonstrated an uncanny ability to adapt to changing business environments, often with a focus on workforce efficiency
But there are (at least) two B-I-G problems with the prevailing approach in our modern times.
One, it wears people out.
Two, well, the second argument is that it limits the potential of what an organization can achieve—but in all seriousness, what’s a healthcare delivery organization if every employee is worn the f*** out?
Market forces have been reshaping healthcare for decades ...
... which are reshaping our organizations
... which is reshaping the work we do
... and, as a result, reshaping our jobs
... in ways that all too often have proven not to be for the better—not for the organization, nor for the people you work with, and not for you as an individual.
You get stretched, pulled, pushed, extended, and squeezed in an effort to get it all done and done well … because our approach to work hasn’t changed much from the 1950s.
Seeing: Recognizing the Symptoms
When it comes to “seeing” how we conceptualize, organize, manage, and ultimately do our work is mismatched for the operating environment we’re working in, I often reach for this parable from David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
“The point of the fish story,” says Wallace, “is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”
And while I hesitate to use such an erudite observation to make a point about something as minor as work in comparison to, you know, life, I argue that we spend half our waking hours doing this thing and, in my experience, a thing that can create a fair bit of suffering: so it works.
Awareness of the water that is industrialized management is required for what comes next: noticing how its practices incubate the job suck that exists up, down, and around the org chart.
Noticing: Observing the Patterns
Speaking of up, down, and around … it got to the point that during those daydreaming-while-driving moments where passive questions amble their way into the forefront, I was pondering: Why was I noticing so many bugs?
Ants. Hornets. Grasshoppers. Spiders. Beetles. Flies. Inside. Outside. Insects everywhere.
Well this is what happens when you get out of your normal routine and start seeing the world from a new perspective: my 16-month-old niece, whom I’m prone to following around, had become curious about bugs.
So bugs were what I was noticing, too.
But since following a toddler around work is likely to raise HR’s eyebrows, we need an alternative method to notice the “bugs” in our day-to-day system of industrialized management …
Borrowing and Learning from Tom Peters
Tom Peters introduced the American businessworld to a revolutionary idea in the early 1980s: Managing By Wandering Around.
Because it was time for a shakeup.
Until that moment, if you can believe it, the mental model of many people in management positions, especially the most senior positions, was that their job was best conducted from behind a big mahogany desk.
It’s laughable now—now, people would ask whispering questions (blink twice and all that ...) about any manager tethered to their desk for longer than a couple of hours. Heck, now Zoom even lets us wander-zoom around to different settings while tethered to a desk.
It took Managing By Wandering Around, Tom Peters, and agitators of his ilk to push the rest of the work world into a new mental model of just what management should look like, with a simple nudge to wander. Now it’s common practice.
Wondering: Prescribing a New Approach
Well, I believe we need a similar nudge for a similar purpose toward the practice of wondering about work—and since, as workers, we’ve become comfortable with our work practices to the point where we don’t even question if, you know, how we do a thing is actually the best way to do it, we need a tool to help us shake things up.
And as Managing By Wandering Around showed, the change(s) we need to make at work often only happen when we choose to deliberately open ourselves to the idea of updating our views about work … which often happens by first changing what we do.
The solution is to design how we work.
The top down approach, reverse jui-jitsuing industrialized management’'s do-as-I-say dictums, is one option:
- Understand the shortcomings of our industrialized paradigm of organizing and managing work
- Be in charge/have authority
- Use that power to make necessary changes
... but until then or unless that describes your current role, we've got the us up approach:
- Understand the shortcomings of our industrialized paradigm of organizing and managing work
- Get fit for the world of work as it is
- Start designing how we work to make it worthy of our care
What successful navigation of job suck calls for is conceiving of a better approach to how we work … for the type of work we’re doing … and in the environment it’s happening in. There are better ways to organize our work, manage our work, and perform our work. It’s up to us to find them.
And, in my view, that begins with understanding the shortcomings of our industrialized paradigm of organizing and managing work—and a critical (although not the only) component of this is noticing the friction that our work practices create and reflecting on why that might be so.
That is what Managing By Wondering About is for.
Managing By Wondering About is wondering if your work practices (how you get the work done) is, you know, the best way to do them.
And hey, who knows, maybe after a proper review you’ll find everything is hunky dory. But my well-informed hunch is that you’ll discover opportunities for transformation.
Managing by Wondering About is an entry point. It helps us recognize our reality, get curious about it, discover some things we didn’t know, and then, well, hopefully, provide inspiration to do something about it.
After a decade-plus of doing this sort of wondering about, I’ve been surprised at just how many of our workplace practices fall short of their intent to help us achieve what we’re out to achieve.
All too often: Work isn’t working.
Not the meetings, not the approvals, not the silos, not the planning, not the go-above-and-beyond requests, not the performance management, not the goal setting, not the weekend work ... okay, this list could go on and on and on ... but even the mental model (the hierarchical bureaucracy!) from whence it all originates isn’t working either!
It’s high time to wonder why.
Managing By Wondering About is a mental model to do more wondering—“Why?” is a powerful question and curiosity is a powerful frame of mind—so we can discover and then change the work practices (+ theories, + conditions, + tools) that, more often than not, lead right to job suck.
