Leading Scientifically
Adapted from the upcoming book the Scientific Leader, co-published by Matt Barney, PhD and Juran Institute’s Richard Chua, PhD
More than a century has passed since Frederick Winslow Taylor created “Scientific Management” methods to improve industrial efficiency. Taylor was the earliest example of attempting to lead scientifically in order to improve the management of organizations. Like all scientific models, Taylor’s had flaws. He focused on a narrow, technical view of detailed work tasks at the expense of other important factors. Today we know that business strategy, brands, relationships, skills, values, interests, aptitudes, attitudes, culture, climate, and organization designs matter in creating value.
Even though Taylor’s approach over-emphasized technical components of production, he influenced many subsequent management movements. For example, the Human Relations movement grew in direct opposition to Taylor’s omission of emotional and relationship aspects of work. Nevertheless, he is a sort of Isaac Newton of applied science in the workplace. Ultimately his narrow scope, and perhaps his personal style, were fatal flaws. Nevertheless, the book’s title salutes Taylor’s pioneering efforts.
Today’s organizational sciences are Taylor’s great-grandchildren. Professions such as Operations Research, Industrial/Systems Engineering, Computer Science, Finance, Organizational Behavior, and Industrial/Organizational Psychology use science, like Taylor, to design and improve organizations. Practitioners have repackaged these methods and innovated throughout the years in a variety of ways, including T-Groups, Total Quality Management, Reengineering, Toyota’s Production System (“Lean”), and Motorola’s Six Sigma.
Leading scientifically involves using risk and uncertainty to frame the actions a business takes to achieve its goals. Scientific Leaders have a healthy skepticism about what works and wisdom about what they don’t know (Pfeffer & Sutton, 2006). Being a scientific leader involves the systematic application of evidence-based management methods by business leaders at all levels of a company in order to have a reasonably high probability of achieving organizational goals. What makes scientific leaders different than others is the care with which they take to mitigate business risk throughout the enterprise that threatens the achievement of specific and measurable customer and shareholder goals. While research and development leaders can also benefit (and will likely be sympathetic with our research methods), our intention is to be useful broadly to all types of leaders who seek to manage risk and uncertainty more effectively.
The Scientific Leadership approach we advocate begins with the big picture, in the opposite location of Taylor’s Scientific Management. Scientific leadership begins by fully understanding the ultimate organizational goals. Ultimately, organizations exist to achieve strategic goals. The ultimate vision that must be achieved frames the means by which it is realized. The work processes that convert inputs and resources into valued outcomes are slaves to the ultimate stakeholder masters. Scientific Leaders always have these ultimate goals in sight to avoid solving the wrong problems.
The crux of Scientific Leadership is the reality that leaders must constantly manage through uncertainty and risk to achieve these ultimate goals. Scientific Leaders use the best available information about effective management practices and use decision making methods that consider uncertainty and risk. Goals are inherently tough to accomplish, and there are many uncertainties that must either be managed to exploit the upside or mitigated to avoid catastrophic downsides.
But today’s managers are sometimes less than scientific in their approaches. Many modern “best practices” smack of Taylor’s “One Best Way”. In reality, benchmarks can sometimes influence managers to implement solutions that worked for one company but that might not work in another firm, with a different culture, structure, and business strategy. Still, other solutions have demonstrated consistent usefulness across many industries, but misapplied, they can cause significant damage. For example, more than half of the Fortune 500 use transformation methods such Lean Six Sigma and report multi-billion dollar impact since the origin at Motorola in 1986. Some Lean Six Sigma firms, such as 3M, have reported the inappropriate use of one Six Sigma toolset to the detriment of their Research and Development (Creveling, 2008). For us, leading scientifically involves two evidence-based components - personal and organizational leadership.
Individual or personal leadership involves the individual behaviors of people who hold leadership roles in organizations. Leadership roles include both formal managers, supervisors, and Vice Presidents; and informal “key opinion leaders” who inspire others to action, even though they possess no formal organizational authority. Both varieties of personal leadership include four types of leadership behaviors that science has shown to predict important business outcomes (e.g. Bass, 1999):
- Establishing a vision for the future state and the case for change.
- Transmitting enthusiasm among followers to follow the vision.
- Influencing others to adopt changes required to realize the vision.
- Making decisions effectively to mitigate risk and maximize returns, including managing employees, projects, and processes.
People who are in formal managerial roles are usually situated to make material decisions, as they have formal decision making authority. However, informal leaders can be powerful in their own right. This book focuses much more on managers who strive to lead scientifically, but many of the chapters, such as the chapter on influence, apply to individual contributors as well.
Since Taylor’s time, the various organizational sciences have developed practical methods that are rarely known to non-specialists. The intention is for this book to synthesize diverse evidence-based management methods into a useful whole. It consists of some of the most recent data driven tools that have been used as organizations try to minimize risk and still make business decisions that will enable them to be executed quickly. We hope this book will be useful to the inquisitive executives, managers, analysts, auditors, change agents, Lean Masters, and Six Sigma Black Belts that have been using classical methods to manage uncertainty.
Our hope is that the combination of advanced and innovative evidence-based leadership methods will be a “must have” reference for evidence-based managers, performance improvement practitioners (e.g. Auditors, Quality Experts, Industrial Psychologists, Financial Analysts, Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belts, Black Belts, and Green Belts) and instructors (e.g. Teachers, Trainers, and Professors).
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