Fear, Control and Meaningful Work

To do some idiotic job very well is certainly not real achievement. What is not worth doing is not worth doing well.

~ Abraham Maslow

If you want people to do a good job, give them a good job to do

~Frederick Herzberg

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a king punished by being compelled to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this throughout eternity. In Existentialism, Albert Camus used this myth as a metaphor for the futility of life, but it could equally be used as a metaphor for the futility of work that has been stripped of meaning.


How do managers strip meaning from work? 

One way is to eliminate opportunities for workers to use their minds, by developing complex sets of rules that eliminate discretion. Part of the problem with rule-obsessed management is that it becomes increasingly difficult for workers to make decisions.

• The more rules there are the harder it may be for the worker to determine whether there is a rule that applies and then to find that rule.
• If workers are unable to find a rule and end up using their own discretion, they will still be left with doubt and uncertainty about whether they have complied with what was required, and with fear of reprisal if they haven't.
• With workers getting fewer opportunities to actually use their judgement, even simple decisions may become problematic.
• Workers end up applying the rules mechanically without using their common sense or judgement to determine whether a rule should be bent, broken or tweaked for a particular set of circumstances.
• Maintaining a complex set of rules becomes a task in itself requiring resources that could otherwise be devoted to getting the work done. It also becomes increasingly difficult to determine whether the rules are consistent.

In Streetlights and Shadows, Gary Klein tells the story of a senior air traffic controller faced with a hijacking situation and also faced with a 15cm (6") thick manual of procedures to follow. Time was critical so he jettisoned the manual and instead drew on contacts in the security services and started to improvise. As the senior air traffic controller told Klein:

I was reprimanded for not following the procedure and commended for handling it with no civilian casualties. Then I was asked to re-write the procedure. It is still too thick.

Incidentally, rule-obsessed management isn't about getting the job done effectively. The person who makes the rules probably believes that they could do the job without the rules, they just don't trust anyone else to do so. So on the one hand there is arrogance ("I am smarter, have better judgement...than any of the people working under me") and on the other hand there is a desire to centralise power due to lack of trust ("I must control things through rules because I can't trust the workers to do the right thing"). And both of these attitudes send a demotivating message to workers, as well as resulting in delays, logjams and bottlenecks as workers end up seeking guidance on even the simplest decisions. Or conversely, it may lead to malicious compliance where the workers apply the rules to the letter regardless of the consequences.


A second and related way is to eliminate the exercise of skill in the job. For example, a manager may not trust the workers to write effective letters to clients, so they may put in place hundreds of different letters for staff to use with only limited discretion to vary them. Again, it is about centralised control and lack of trust. And paradoxically it achieves the opposite of the intended result. Since workers get less practice in wording their own letters, they lose confidence in their abilities and so they end up choosing the wording that fits the best even if it doesn't fit that well and are afraid of modifying it. And the client who writes in more than once may receive identically the same response implying that the issues they ave raised have not been given any genuine consideration.


I think you can see a pattern here:

• management fear leads to
• mistrust leading to
• centralised controls leading to
• skill reduction leading to
• mechanical performance due to fear of deviating from the centralised controls leading to
• poorer customer service.

The lesson here is that:

• You don't build a skilled workforce by eliminating opportunities for the exercise of skills.
• You don't build a motivated workforce by removing the more satisfying parts of the work.
• You don't build trust and confidence by increasing fear