Anyone who, as part of their job, tries to get individual workers or managers to cooperate, has dealt with people who feel they can accomplish more on their own. Sometimes openly, more often without admitting it, they follow their own agendas. The science in this post may or may not be useful in persuading them …
Tag: ethics
Unlikely Agile Leader Provided Lessons, and a Warning
Skeptics of Agile—myself among them—are indebted to Dwight (“Ike”) Eisenhower, U.S. president from 1953–61. “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence… by the military industrial complex,” he said that last year. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”1 From this was coined …
Drop the Carrot and Stick: The Science of Motivation
In 1999, before I danced away the millennium on New Year’s Eve to Prince while ignoring fears about the Y2K Bug, a major study began changing the way researchers viewed worker motivation. Lead author Edward Deci was the first to propose in 1971 that workers might have internal motivations that had nothing to do with …
A Pandemic of Micromanagement Fails Ethical, Pragmatic Tests
Silly me. I thought a silver lining in the Covid Crisis would be that managers would learn most workers do not need constant oversight to do good work, and will be productive from home even with its distractions. Because they couldn’t monitor worker activity closely, some managers would be forced to empower their teams to …
Seeing Past “Willful Blindness”
I often tell the story of a project manager at Microsoft who wasn’t very good at it. Among other reasons, he didn’t use project management software to control the work, despite Microsoft Project being the industry leader. Once he and my office-mate drove separately to an offsite meeting. She got there first despite having left …