If you’re a leader, the language you use is probably inherited from the Industrial Age, when people were divided into strict categories: deciders and doers, leaders and followers, decision-makers and decision-executors.
Today, the most successful organizations reject that division, including all team members in both thinking work and doing work. To achieve that end, leaders need to rethink radically the language they use to communicate.
This approach is exemplified in Frederick Winslow Taylor’s 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management. In it, Taylor specifies the single most efficient way for steel mill workers to perform a variety of tasks. The typical worker, for example, was most efficient when shoveling 21 pounds of material at a time. Not 20, not 22 – 21. Exactly 21. The way to improve efficiency, Taylor found, was to reduce variability.
That made sense at the time. In traditional manufacturing industries, after all, standardization was key. Even today, it often makes sense for companies to reduce variability. To mass-produce cars, for example, factories have to build millions of identical parts in rapid succession. To keep customers happy, McDonald’s has to ensure that its burgers come out the same every time.
The language of the old approach to leadership is deterministic and binary – all about doing, not about thinking.
Next time you want to move from one phase of a project to the next, don’t ask your team to sign off on a decision you’ve already made. That means avoiding a question like, “Everyone OK with this?” or “This looks fine, right?” Instead, ask, “How could this be improved?” or “On a scale of one to five, how confident are you feeling about moving ahead?” That way, you’ll get better and more diverse input – and a more motivated team to boot.
Break up work in to smaller chunks and use phases of doing and stopping to reflect to ensure the direction/path is still correct. Use open language with colleagues to listen to feedback and adjust accordingly.