Humanizing work and busting bureaucracy

As part of my journey to help people thrive in large organizations like Roche, I connected with Professor Gary Hamel, one of the world's most influential business thinkers and author of "Humanocracy." He’s a pioneering management renegade who's been inspiring leaders like me for more than 30 years – and I want to share that with others. 

So we set up a LinkedIn Live conversation. The result? A lively discussion about slaying the corporate beast, busting bureaucracy and humanizing work. Plus a few of Gary’s delightful analogies. 

Here are some of my favorite reflections from him:

Gary on how his work in studying and transforming organizations led to his book, Humanocracy

It struck me that trying to help organizations to be innovative or be adaptable was kind of like trying to teach a dog to walk on its hind legs. You can do that. You get a biscuit in front of its nose, get it to focus on you, and it will stand up and take a few steps. But the moment you walk away, the dog is back on four legs. The dog isn’t like ‘Wow, that was so amazing. Thank you so much.’ It’s more like ‘You're kind of an idiot. I'm a quadruped.’ 

When you see that over and over again, you see that innovation is happening almost despite the system. Then you start to look at the system and you realize there's something here that's almost a DNA-level problem.

Clearly, organizations weren't built for innovation. So what were they built for? Turns out they were built for efficiency, compliance. And that becomes a problem. So then you start to say, right, how do we reinvent? Not a product, not a strategy. How do we reinvent the very DNA of large-scale human organization? 

First things first, de-bureaucratize yourself

As we work forward, there are a lot of things we're going to have to unlearn. 

The first thing you can do to try to de-bureaucratize yourself is to recognize that inside of a bureaucratic organization, there's a set of behaviors that we all learn and develop because they get rewarded, but they don't create much value. We get good at negotiating targets and deflecting blame, managing up, and kind of elbowing rivals out of the way. 

You can start by doing a personal kind of moral inventory. Go back and say, ‘where am I falling into that trap? Where am I exhibiting those behaviors?’ And then go to your colleagues and say, ‘Hey, hold me accountable on this. I don't want to operate out of that old frame. So when you see me behaving in this way, call me out when I'm sacrificing my values for expediency, when I'm defending, rather than challenging.’ Because organizations change when we change. 

The second thing is, wherever you are, you can hack that management model. Right? Nobody's going to give you permission to tear it all up. But within your team you could say ‘What can we do to create more openness? What can we do to create more meritocracy? What can we do to get some rules out of the way?’ The way you change large, complex things is through experimentation. 

Good managing is a lot like good parenting 

Gallup data says that middle managers are even less engaged than the people who work for them. What we ask many middle managers to be is basically surrogate parents. You know, their primary role is controlling, making sure everything's done right. At some point as a parent, you hope your kids grow up and start making their own choices – because that's not a role you want to be in all your life. 

It’s the same in business. You [Bill] said recently ‘You can be a manager or you can be a coach. You can't be both.’ What we have found in our experience is there's a difficult transition process in doing that, but most leaders are going to have way more fun in that new role, where you are building other people, where you get to work on more interesting problems, where you are out of that ‘surrogate parent’ role.

Then Gary unleashed another dog analogy

When we see something like Total Quality Management 40 years ago, or we see something like Agile teams today, we see there's a set of techniques. We bring it back, we install it, but it's kind of like putting a tutu on a dog – it doesn't make it a ballerina. You just have a kind of stupid looking dog. 

When you look at companies that have been at it for 20, 30, 40 year – that have built these hyper-empowered, immensely productive organizations – they all started with a fundamentally different view of the relationship between people to work. 

The model we now have is that organizations hire people to produce products and services. You'll hear that language, ‘These are my people.’ It's completely logical to think that way, but if you think about it that way, it is the human being who is the instrument. The organization has hired the person, and uses that person as a tool we call a ‘human resource’ to do something. 

But if you flip that around, you see human beings are independent agents. Human beings join organizations to do together what they can't do alone, and to make an impact. And yes, to earn a salary. Then it is the institution that's the instrument, not the human being.

With the old system, we've put a huge amount of ingenuity and initiative under lock and key. And today, given all the challenges we have, that’s not just a business issue, that's a society issue. We cannot afford to have a majority of people at work highly emotionally, intellectually and creatively constipated. 

My sincere thanks to Gary for his insight and to all who joined us for the conversation. If you missed it, you can find the full video here. And tell me, what do you need to thrive and unleash innovation, creativity and ownership in your organization? How can we make work better? How can we make work awesome?

Professor Gary Hamel is on the faculty of London Business School and is the author of Humanocracy, the book which lays out the blueprint for creating organizations that are as inspired and ingenious as the human beings inside them. The Wall Street Journal hails him the world’s most influential business thinker. He’s been delivering insights to leaders for over 30 years and if you haven't read this latest book, maybe you’ve read one of his many others.