Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Unmanaged: Master the Magic of Creating Empowered and Happy Organizations
26 Plays5 months ago
Jack Skeels never wanted to be a manager, but when his career inevitably led to a management role, he decided that he had to find a better way than simply following the established norms of command and control.
That eventually led to the establishment of Agencyagile a California, USA based consultancy that focuses on supporting agencies to manage people better and be more productive and profitable.
In Unmanaged, Jack advocates that it only by managing less that organisations of all kinds can create empowered and happy organisations, which in return will result in more profitable organisations.
In this episode of The Independent Minds, you will Jack Skeels explain to host Michael Millward why managers need to manage less and why that will require an element of magic.
The Independent Minds is made on Zencastr.
Zencastr is the all-in-one podcasting platform, on which you can create your podcast in one place and then distribute it to the major platforms like Spotify, Apple, and Google. It really does make creating content so easy.
If you would like to try podcasting using Zencastr visit zencastr.com/pricing and use our offer code ABECEDER.
Travel to California
Jack Skeels is based in California, USA. If you would like to visit California a good place to plan your travel is The Ultimate Travel Club. It is where you will get trade prices on travel including flights, hotels, and holidays. Use our offer code ABEC79 to receive a discount on your membership fee.
You can find out more about both Michael Millward, and Jack Skeels at abeceder.co.uk.
Three – the network
If you are listening to The Independent Minds on your smart phone, you may like to know that Three has the UK’s Fastest 5G Network with Unlimited Data, so listening on Three means you can wave goodbye to buffering.
Visit Three for more information about business and personal telecom solutions from Three. And the special offers available when you quote my referral code, WPFNUQHU.
Matchmaker.fm
If you are a podcaster looking for interesting guests or if like Jack, you have something very interesting to say Matchmaker.fm is where matches of great hosts and great guests are made. Use our offer code, MILW10 for a discount on membership.
Being a Guest
We recommend that potential guests take one of the podcasting guest training programmes available from Work Place Learning Centre.
If you have liked this episode of The Independent Minds, please give it a like and download it so that you can listen any time anywhere.
To make sure you do not miss future editions please subscribe.
Remember, the aim of all the podcasts produced by Abeceder is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to make you think!
Thank you to you for listening.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:05
Speaker
Made on Zencaster. Hello and welcome to The Independent Minds, a series of conversations between Abisida and the people who think outside the box about how work works with the aim of creating better workplace experiences for everyone. I'm your host, Michael Millward, the managing director of Abisida. The Independent Minds is the podcast where we don't tell you what to think, but we do hope to make you think. As the jingle at the start of this podcast says, the independent minds is made on Zancaster.
Promoting Zencastr with Special Offers
00:00:40
Speaker
Zancaster is the all-in-one podcasting platform on which you can create your podcast in one place and then distribute distribute it to all the major platforms like Spotify, Apple, Google, etc. It really does make creating content so easy.
00:00:56
Speaker
If you would like to try podcasting using Zencastr, visit zencastr.com forward slash pricing and use my offer code ABACEDA. All the details are in the description.
Guest Introduction: Jack Skeels and His Journey
00:01:09
Speaker
Now that I've told you how wonderful Zencastr is for creating podcasts, we should make one that will be well worth liking, downloading and subscribing to. In this episode of The Independent Minds, my guest is Jack Skeels, the author of Master the Magic of Creating Empowered and Happy Organizations. I have to say that when I read the title of the book, my brain wants me to say, master the art of creating empowered and happy organizations, because that's
00:01:43
Speaker
the way in which we're almost conditioned to think, but master the magic of creating empowered and happy organizations. It is about the surprising, the unbelievable, that magic brings into it. But hello, Jack. Hi, Michael. Thanks for having me. How are you? Not too bad at all. Thank you very much. um Hope you're well. Yeah, thanks. You're based in California and anyone who fancies a trip to California should use the Ultimate Travel Club to get trade prices on their flights, hotels, and other travel options. ah There is a link and a membership discount code in the description.
What is 'Unmanaged' About?
00:02:21
Speaker
Now, Jack.
00:02:22
Speaker
Please, could we start by you explaining a little bit about your own personal backstory and how you came to set up agency agile, what it does, and then we'll talk about your book Unmanaged, Master the Magic of Creating Empowered and Happy Organizations. Yeah, thanks. um i I think I could describe myself as a lazy and reluctant manager by origin. I'd started out as a programmer and It was in the 80s and I knew a lot about programming and most managers didn't. And I almost felt like managers were just sort of a waste of time. And then I became one, of course, and did my best to not be a waste of time, but I had a very mixed relationship with managing for much of my career, including building a management consultancy in the 1990s. And then I landed at a research institution, Rand Corporation, for four years and they went back there another time as well.
00:03:16
Speaker
But I started digging into what management meant, right? And what is that what is it that you should really be doing? I tell a much longer story in the and the introduction of the book. The idea that maybe we could do something different or different and better came to me in the mid-2000s.
Does Less Management Increase Productivity?
00:03:37
Speaker
Before I write a book on it, I better try it out, and I did. and that was the That's the genesis of a company that's still somewhat archaicly named, Agency Agile. We work with agencies and we started by using agile techniques.
00:03:50
Speaker
But really what we do today is actually teach organizations how to manage differently and better and with some amazing results and the like. And and then after 200 of those organizations, 200 plus, I thought maybe it's time to write a book about it finally. And that is the book that just we just released unmanaged. ah When you talk about having being a managed person and becoming a manager and as a managed person not having a very good relationship with some of your managers, I totally relate to that. I totally know what you mean when you are being managed by somebody who's just not doing the job that well and then you become a manager and it's almost like
00:04:35
Speaker
When you say, I don't want to be the adult that my parents were, I don't want to be the parent that my parents were to me. and But you end up sort of thinking like, yeah, this is the way you fall into, I think, the the despite your best intentions. you really can just fall straight into that this is the role of the manager. This is how managers are supposed to behave. This is how managers talk to people. And like you say, it's it's not always the best approach. Yeah, I think you had a key word in there as well. and And I think that the idea of behavior, a lot of our behaviors
00:05:17
Speaker
As humans, we pick up um sort of ambiently, like observing how managers operate and and essentially how they behave. And and in fact, we think of things like the the sitcom, The Office, which I love both the across the pond version and the American version because they they portray this idea that um of sort of feckless management. i just said the The plot is generally the manager comes in and tries to do something managerial that feels managerial and gets spit out by the organization and their own
00:05:52
Speaker
Managerial and competence if you will ah the american version ends up with with michael in the parking lot at the end of the episode trying to figure out what happened right and i think that that there's a truth inside of that. the and The truth is that we don't really understand managing like we think
The Evolution of Workplace Dynamics
00:06:10
Speaker
we. we We think we know what managers should do, but the understanding of the why and and are you being effective and all that kind of stuff is something that most managers don't have much knowledge about.
00:06:23
Speaker
yeah I know what you mean. I will admit, I've never been, ah as an HR person, I have never been able to sit through a whole episode of The Office, the American version, or the British version. i and My head in my hand isn't going like, I've lived that. I've lived I've lived that. It's filled with truth. It's not. Oh, no. Too painful too painful, but the first thing I think we need to to talk about with the book is unmanaged the title and You know it goes against all sorts of different aspects of of management theories and people who've sold millions of books on on how to be a manager this is about and managing and
00:07:13
Speaker
When I looked at it, the first thing I wanted to do was just to check in my own mind that I'd got it right, that that quotation, what gets measured gets managed, and which is a Peter Drucker one, which is also slightly paraphrased by Bill Hewlett, who's the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, who said, you cannot manage what you cannot measure, and what gets measured gets done. And you're going against Just in one word you're going against probably ever since people started talking about managers, yeah it was all about managing and you're talking about not managing unmanaging and we really need to understand.
00:07:57
Speaker
what you mean by the word unmanaged? Yeah, I think there are a couple of things. It's a great great question. ah you know One is, you i mean to be honest, you always look for a title that's Unmanaged almost sounds like an insult, like you're you you are a manager and your and your boss says, your team looks unmanaged. and to To which I would probably reply, yeah, isn't it great? Look how productive they are. The ethic core of the idea is maybe we're over managing. And in fact, the what I think I probably beat the point home pretty well in the book is we are, in fact, incredibly over managing. And there's tremendous loss of productivity, happiness, quality, and all kinds of other things that you can measure as a result of that over managing. And in fact, you can measure over managing.
00:08:50
Speaker
Okay. It's very interesting because when you stop managing as much, you see some very important measures. I just named some of them actually get better. So the question not is you manage what you measure, but the question really comes to also, but what are you measuring?
The 'Magic' in Management: Empowerment
00:09:07
Speaker
Is it the right thing? Yes. Listening to you there, I'm thinking Yes, I know what you mean. The situation at the moment, I think, is where after the Second World War
00:09:23
Speaker
the were The way of work changed and ah more people in offices, more people doing professional type roles, or you know there's a whole plethora of people who ended up administrating the work of other people. And you hear about managers who are over-managing, who are constantly watching and monitoring the people in their teams. And that becomes constricting for those people. Nowadays we talk about empowerment and we need to get to the point where we're able to, and to feel comfortable to not be monitoring people as opposed to managing people. All of that, what have you done today? What are you going to do tomorrow? What did you do this morning? How did you do it? You're doing it wrong type of controlling management, monitoring what people do.
00:10:22
Speaker
we need to that's the part that we almost need to unlearn in order to then create this this better way of working which all of the research is telling us that new generations are going to require. With this title the second part of the title is master the magic of creating empowered and happy organizations and The thing that jumps out to me about that is the word magic. yeah My brain is telling me that it should say something like master the art or science of of creating, but magic. it's It's not a word you often see on management books. I mean, are you a Harry Potter fan or it what's the reason for the word magic?
00:11:08
Speaker
Yeah, I think we wanted to find an adjective that actually described the experience, right? And I think the one one of the things about business books is they sort of fall into two categories. one is the very didactic you thou shalt do x kind of thing, right? And the other is the what I call business porn. they They tell you stories about companies that are not companies you will ever run and decisions made by people that you will never be and all that kind of thing. And they're all noble and beautiful, but it's it's you know it's you're watching from a distance. It's maybe inspiring a little bit.
00:11:44
Speaker
the The act of magic itself and the act of the magician is in fact to to have a lot of craft, if you will, art, experience, talent and cleverness that to the external observer looks amazing, right? Looks simply amazing. In fact, the the art of unmanaging, if you will, and that was originally we were going to use art as the word, the art of unmanaging, the result of it is a magical transformation of teams into being
00:12:15
Speaker
far more empowered. and And the research shows, of course, that empowered teams create better work, they're more productive, they're more happy doing
Stretching Capabilities with Objectives
00:12:24
Speaker
it. All these beautiful things are unleashed, destroying all these notions of ah how you need to manage more to get more productivity and all that kind of thing. it'd say It's an amazing transformation that if you manage less, especially, and you hit the point very well, especially today's Knowledge Worker teams, managing less makes more productivity. Yes. Yeah. There's lots of research on that. Listening to that, you made me think about, and I was running a training function, learning and development function for a high tech business. And we were trying to get people to think about objectives and using the same old acronym of smart.
00:13:07
Speaker
And in there, of course, you've got the word, the definitions of the letters vary depending upon who you're talking to. But people talk to me about how achieve within smart, they were achievable and they were realistic. And I said, well, we'll take those out. Because if it's achievable, we know we can do it. There's no excitement. there's no There's no stretching in that. If it's realistic, people said, well, you wouldn't ask somebody without the skills to do something. And I said, well, fine. Yeah, but we'll take that one out as well. And we'll replace it with you, the letter U. And we'll use that because that means unbelievable.
00:13:47
Speaker
because what we want people to do is go home having done something that day which they never believed that they would have been capable of doing. So we were stretching people and showing them what they were capable of by giving them something of the in their objectives which would have been unbelievable six months ago. You have to show people that the development of how they go. And that that word of magic, is a it's about surprise. It's about being able to do something that other people look at and go, I wish I could do that. How did you do that? What's the secret? All these sorts of things. But actually that creates something that is unbelievable.
00:14:28
Speaker
So when you talk about people who are you know companies that you'll never work in, people you'll never be, or decisions you'll never get to make, it's like, well, why not?
Toyota's Quality Control Revolution
00:14:40
Speaker
If you want to, the magic of being empowered and happy in an organization must mean that We can do the things that are unbelievable. We can do things that are beyond what people expected us to be able to do, because it's magic. It's magic. If we if we learn how to do the trick, we can perform magic. Yeah, you know, if you talk to a magician, they ultimately will say, aside from the practice required, that most magic is actually quite simple.
00:15:13
Speaker
And in in that way, one of the very simple ideas in all of this is we squander massive amounts of talent, innovation, imagination, to your point that you were just making. We squander by assuming that somehow because someone is in a managerial role, and they usually feel like they have the behaviors that should reflect this, that they are the smartest in the room and that they get to decide exactly how things should be done. And this is all harkens back to the industrial era when we were doing repetitive processes and it was just about doing them repetitively. But today's knowledge workers,
00:15:53
Speaker
they They bring so much skill and talent to the workplace. And to like you said, to to have different perspectives on the work and different perspectives on how to do the work and improve the work. and and And largely, the old management model just says, shut up and do it. And part of the magic is, what if I stop doing that? What if I say, hey, here's what needs to get done? How do you want to do it? What do you think we should do, right? That we turn we change that posture of managing to something that looks like more passive on managing. Yes. Yeah. I mean, that takes us back to this idea of like what gets managed gets done and the requirement to have managers. Whereas what you're almost advocating for is the self-managed team and talk about stories. One of the stories that I like in in the book is
00:16:48
Speaker
is about the different, well, the handyism and the tailorism and the, well, the global car industry in the 70s where, you know, cars, there were lots of cars being made, but there weren't an awful lot of good quality cars in terms of the production and there were stories going around about make sure you don't get a car that's been made on a Friday. It's Wednesday. Get a car that's been made on a Wednesday because that there'll be fewer problems with a car that's been made on a Wednesday. And yeah cars, from regardless of which country, without this or which company that was making it,
00:17:24
Speaker
Carbs weren't being produced to very high standards and yet in the book you don't put that down to the the fault of materials or workers but you you explain the impact of the management techniques of the time on the performance of the employees and the things that they were measured on resulted in the production of poorer quality products because the wrong things were being measured.
00:17:58
Speaker
Yeah, yeah very you know of course there was always a the zero capitalist organizations we're talking about and nothing wrong with capitalism. The the desire though to make sure we hit a production quota And if you're making very simple things, probably is a useful measure. If you're making very complex things with a lot of variability as they were back then, by the way, I mean, like the sheet metal panels that assemble, you assemble onto a car were nothing and nowhere near a uniform, for example, right? And so everything was sort of hand fitted and the like
00:18:35
Speaker
the The problem really was that the work had become more complex than any single manager could manage. No manager could be at every assembly station all the time to make decisions and see things. And what the Japanese did quite amazingly, and this
Trust and Collaboration: Are They Key to Productivity?
00:18:52
Speaker
is known as Toyota production system, a man named Taiichi Ono, and he worked with W. Edwards Deming, and a U.S. American quality control and quality assurance expert. And they put together a couple ideas, and they're really, really simple ideas, and you'll recognize them as unmanaging. The first thing they did, they installed a thing called the ANDAN, A-N-D-O-N, is a cord that's stretched across the assembly line.
00:19:19
Speaker
And they said, when you pull the cord, by the way, they the assembly line stops, okay which is just frightening if you're the capitalist owning this organization. But the they said, and and that cord, if anyone on the assembly line sees something going wrong, you pull the cord, it stops, and we're going to come and figure out what's going wrong. right and And then they established another thing called quality circles, which were they would take groups of workers and sit around and talk about what's not working for quality. And in a single handed way, they took the idea of managing quality
00:19:53
Speaker
and took it out of managers' hands. And they put it in the hands of people who decidedly, and and by the way, today's, it's interesting, you don't even need to do the parallel with today where we have these highly educated YouTube watching knowledge workers who know more than us and all that kind of thing, very savvy young folks. these were these The Japanese factory workers back then were fifth to seventh grade education on average. okay These were not worldly, smart, big thinkers, but they were human beings who had actually cared and had a brain and they're problem solvers. and They literally set the Japanese auto industry on its trajectory, still leading the world in terms of first unit quality and all that kind of thing.
00:20:40
Speaker
All basically by saying managers can't manage quality as well as as makers can if you will. Yeah. Yeah. So I had a similar experience working in the food industry as a HR and training person. And we wanted to improve the quality of the products that we were leaving the factory. And quality was was the responsibility of a separate department to production. here Quality control. Yeah. And We switched it around and instead of the complaints being something that was secret, we shared every single piece of feedback that came in about this with the people on the shop floor. And you could tell from the information that the customer provided about the product, the box, for example, has the information on that tells us when down to the time of day that a particular product was made. So we know which shift was making it, which production line it came off.
00:21:39
Speaker
Well this sort of thing, so we were able to give people on the production lines direct feedback about the products that they were making, you know, this is good, this is good, then this person wasn't happy, this is the reason why they weren't happy, what could we have done to make sure that it, that doesn't happen again. and And exactly, these were people who worked on production lines in a food factory. They hadn't been academically successful, not everybody is, but they were able, and it shouldn't be a surprise, but give people the information about their job.
00:22:14
Speaker
and they don't need managing. What they need is the opportunity to be able to use the information that you've given them to then decide what needs to happen next and then you as the manager enable them, facilitate them by providing them with the time and the resources in order to put that solution, that improvement into action. It sounds so straightforward and simple, but the whole system of management is based around a complete lack of trust of the people that we actually aim to manage. And yet we can't be successful managers unless the people who we manage are also successful. We don't operate like ships in the night, do we? We're all part of the same team.
Learning from Past Management Mistakes
00:23:06
Speaker
But one of the things that coming out from the book it is, for me, was that understanding of, and I'm sure there'll be lots of people listening who were be sitting there thinking, I'm a manager, I'm frustrated by what I have to do in order to be perceived to be a manager. Exactly. And yet I haven't got the time or the, um, the knowledge myself to work out what I need to be doing differently. And yet, I suppose this is the commercial part. This book explained to me when I read the book and thought about my career as a manager, anybody listening to this, if you were ever was ever in a team that I led or managed. And I just want to say, I understand what I was doing wrong now, and I'm sorry.
00:24:00
Speaker
but Forgive me, I have sinned. It is.
00:24:06
Speaker
Forgive me, I have sinned. But it it is it is that sort of book where you have you know those moments as you're going through the pages of saying, yeah, I know exactly what that means. I have lived that experience. I have been there. I have done that. And yes, I can now understand what I should have been doing and what I could do in the future. so so You know, Jacket is a fantastic book. Thank you very much. And I wish you all the best with it. Bill, thank you very much. Thank you very much. And thank you for taking the time to meet with me today and helping me create what I hope for our audience has been a very interesting episode of The Independent Minds.
00:24:48
Speaker
A pleasure, really really enjoyable speaking with you, Michael. Thank you very much. Thank you. I am Michael Millward, the managing director of Abecedah, and I have been having a conversation with the independent mind, Jack Skeels, the author of Unmanaged, Master the Magic of Creating Empowered and Happy Organizations. You can find out more about both of us at abecedah.co.uk. There is a link in the description. I must remember at this point to thank the team at matchmaker.fm for introducing me to Jack.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:25:22
Speaker
If you are a podcaster looking for interesting guests, or if like Jack you have something very interesting to say, matchmaker.fm is where matches of great hosts, that's me, and great guests like Jack are made. There's a link ah to matchmaker.fm and an offer code in the description. Descriptions are really well worth reading.
00:25:42
Speaker
But if you've liked this episode of The Independent Minds, please give it a like and download it so that you can listen anytime, anywhere. And to make sure that you don't miss out on future editions, please subscribe. But most importantly, remember that the aim of all the podcasts produced by Abecedah is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to make you think. Thank you.