On the folly of leading people to do A, while hoping they will do B.

Any half-awake business manager could no doubt recite some key watchwords for winning the global competition game: vision, leadership, empowerment and teamwork. With a little encouragement they will blurt quotable words they memorized at the most recent seminar, e.g., "it is vitally important for our firm to broaden its environmental scanning in this new world where markets and borders are no longer coterminous." "To be successful," they will go on to say, "our company must rethink the way it organizes to serve its customers." Very impressive talk to be sure. The speakers have memorized their lessons well.

However, don't be too hasty about giving them promotions. Most are not leading in ways that will foster winning results. Not that it is their fault. They are doing what we have led them to do. How can this be? Haven't we trained them to do better? Haven't we deluged them with information and opinion on how to achieve organizational success? Why haven't they moved our companies further towards competitive success and record profits? This article proposes answers to these questions. The answers have to do with the folly of leading people to do A, while hoping they will do B.

What should we hope for from our people if we wish to be competitive in global markets? What is B? The practices of our nation's best organizations contain many important lessons be they a manufacturing company, a university, or a community medical center. Perhaps the strongest is that organizational success in the 21st century will be based on widespread mastery of work, career and leadership roles by employees. Employees will work in cross functional work teams. They will be required to think about continuous improvement and expected to collaborate to achieve it. Organizations that rely on the directives of a single leader, or group of elite professionals will be self limited in an age of complex economic and social activity. Yet, strong leadership will still be needed at the organization's top in the 21st Century as someone must be responsible for the organization as a whole and its improvement. However, the top person's vision will have to be leveraged by many acts of leadership at many levels within the organization. A network of collaborative teams will be required to provide an organization's competitive edge, not just the brains of a few senior managers a form of shared leadership.

According to the experts, success of a team network hinges upon a combination of capable people and organizational systems that enable standards of excellence to be consistently practiced. It is the leader's job to design this interacting web, monitor its performance, and act to keep it competitive. Effectiveness in this regard involves more than developing employees' ability to employ process improvement tools or customer service techniques. Leaders must develop interpersonal practice models that show how to work together collaboratively. To properly energize these models, leaders must base performance rewards on team results as well as individual success.

Our research shows that many popular writers and successful CEOs agree with these assessments.1 Both groups offer similar lists of success factors that they hope will gain wide acceptance. To compete effectively, they believe we must help our people adopt certain values, learn certain skills and apply these success factors to their lives. More specifically, we must help them form teams and work together. Most of us share these aspirations. However, such things happen too infrequently. Why? Why, when so many thoughtful and influential people know what needs to happen?

We think that part of the answer is that many managers inadvertently lead their subordinates away from doing these hoped for things. Instead they lead them to do things that will limit the productivity of their careers and the organization. They compound this folly by heaping rewards on their subordinates for doing these counterproductive things.

Twenty years ago Steven Kerr wrote a thought provoking article entitled, "On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B." His basic premise was that most living beings seek information designed to identify those activities that are rewarded. In Kerr's words,

In our view, Kerr's words help explain today's disappointing competitive results. In the present case, we hope people will strive to be world class competitors (B), but we continue to train them to value traditional, manager centered operations (A). Further, we continue to reward less productive behavior, e. g. getting the job done is more important than how the job gets done, even at the expense of long term gains in productivity. As long as this folly continues, winning the global competition game will not be easy on the shop floor or in the classroom.

The remainder of this article examines, in detail, the folly inherent in present leadership practices. Several suggestions are made about how to lead people to higher productivity.

What We Must Hope People Will Do

Many managers and their organizations are finding out that, in practice, it is difficult to catch up with today's market leaders. They find it extremely difficult to turn ideas and concepts into actions and workable competitive advantage. Most improvement efforts go nowhere. Many leaders are unable to transform "the system." Our research shows that this inability is doubly frustrating to proponents of change because the vision of what they hope people will do is so clear. They know what people must do, they ask them to do it, but it just doesn't happen. We come to this conclusion after researching three vantage points: management theorists and researchers, other thoughtful observers, and business leaders.

What Management Theorists and Researchers Hope People Will Do

As noted in the introduction, many management theorists and researchers believe that an organization will need a network of collaborative teams to provide it a competitive edge in the 21st Century.

From a productivity standpoint, we interpret this central lesson to mean something like what we depict in Figure 1.

The productivity scale shown in Figure 1 is geometric. The rugged individualist of the past earns a "1" on the productivity scale. Next, the industrial revolution organized both farming and industry. Smart bosses ran their large scale organizations like monarchies. The boss did the thinking and the workers did the work. The result was geometric improvement in productivity, perhaps four times as much was produced from the same resource pool. Much improvement occurred despite widespread use of repressive leadership styles that bridled the potential of the work force. Today, according to the experts, the world's top organizations are moving towards "team think." In the global marketplace, they argue, the winners are those who get the maximum out of their human resources. They do this by organizing the work force into self-managed teams that synchronize to achieve goals. Again, it is argued, by adopting this "new philosophy" there will be geometric improvement in productivity.

W. Edwards Deming used a story about horse harnesses to illustrate this alleged geometric progression of productivity improvement. When first domesticated, the horse was fitted with a collar designed for other beasts of burden. Ill fitting, the collar choked the horse and limited its work potential. Still the horse could do four times the work of a man. When the horse collar was invented the horse could finally breathe. It could then do sixteen times the work of a man. [The Deming Management Library (videotape), volumes 1 and 2].

Deming and others believe their "new philosophy" is the horse collar design for the 21st Century. The design emphasizes cooperation and the use of cross functional work teams. In this context the leader's job changes. The main job is no longer to "motivate," that is, to drive their people to work harder, more conscientiously, at their assigned tasks. Nor is it to decide where to put capital to attain the highest return on investment. Under the "new philosophy," the leader's main job is to give consistency of purpose and continuity to the organization. The leader is responsible to see that employees have a future. Although employees now work in a network of collaborative teams, they still work in the organization. The leader should work on the organization to see that it produces the highest quality product at the lowest possible cost. The leader is responsible for the organization as a whole and for improving it. [Adapted from Tribus, Quality First, p. 4]

Since the mid 1960s management experts have found that world class organizations look at organizing task, people, and work flow in a very different way than their more traditional competitors. It is clear that the traditional firm is manager-centered, i.e., the manager directs. On the other hand, world class competitors tend to be "team" centered. The team determines direction. As Figure 2 illustrates, although the three variables of people, task and workflow interact in either approach, the central focus of each model differs. The implied substance and style of the leader also differ. In the manager centered model, the focus is on the manager. He leads by driving employees towards what they perceive to be the manager's goal. In the team-centered model, the focus is on the team. Employees work together, striving to achieve what they perceive to be a common goal. Strong leadership is still present, but its substance and style is different. To make the team centered model work, top leadership works hard to provide a compel ling vision; effective policy; collaborative, interpersonal practice models; and appropriate incentives. By so doing, the leaders harness the energy of the team net work, while still "allowing the horse to breathe."

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