"If you want someone to do a good job, give them a good job to do."

This is a quote attributed to the American psychologist Frederick Hertzberg. It is associated with his "Dual Structure Theory" or "Two Factor Theory" which discusses work-place motivation.

Motivation of workers, while often tampered with by HR departments (and others) in Western style management structures, is most easily achieved by the replacement of traditional Western style management with methods originating within Japanese manufacturing in the 1950s.

This is the principle reason why well motivated workers are such a rare occurrence outside of Japan and Korea.

Ironically, one of the principle architects of Japan's 'economic miracle' was an American, Dr. W. Edwards Deming, who applied statistical methods of process control (SPC) developed by the physicist and statistician Walter Shewart, also American.

Although it sounds 'dry' or 'dull', this methodology is at the core of 'giving some a good job to do'. Another hugely influential person in this regard was Taiichi Ohno, who is considered the father of the Toyota Production System (TPS). TPS is often called 'Lean Manufacturing' by those companies that have adopted it.

A leading British figure in this field, who has done much to adapt the TPS to the work of service based organisations is John Seddon, an Occupational Psychologist and founder of Vanguard Consulting and inventor of the Vanguard Method.

Seddon's work has given service based organisations (including those in the public sector) the opportunity to give their workers 'a good job to do' by recognising the key differences as well as similarities between systems of work that deliver excellent customer service and excellent manufactured products.

The key success factor for both manufacturing and service based companies who want to give their workforces 'a good job to do' is; to employ 'Systems Thinking' in the way they design and manage their work.

Traditional, Western style management, (often called 'Command & Control' by Systems Thinkers) is based on Taylorism. It divides work functionally and keeps managers, who make decisions about the work (alone), detached from it. They use arbitrary, target driven measurements to judge the standards of the work and its outputs.

Systems thinkers on the other hand, design work by studying customer demand and considering the satisfaction (usually the delight) of the customer to be the purpose of the work. They create systems of work that deliver goods or services to meet those demands and use measures which are derived from the work and its purpose. Those measures are used by the workforce and managers to make decisions about the work and the way it flows through the system. This tends to be a highly efficient way to deliver excellent products and services and it also tends to eliminate waste within a system. As workers are responsible for their work and the decisions they make about it, they also tend to do a very good job. They are motivated because they have a good job to do. This methodology also has innovation 'built in', as everyone's job becomes 'improve the work' as well as serve the customer.

Flipping the coin, we might think about what demotivates a workforce. Command and control managers believe their activities, plans and measures and the decisions derived from them, put them in control and that any problems that occur must therefore be the fault of workers. However, this is not the case. Deming showed that 95% of problems are system based, only 5% can be attributed to the workforce.

People taking the blame for what is not their fault, clearly doesn't inspire or motivate them. Their 'best efforts' in a bad system will never amount to anything.

Command and control thinking removes decision making from the workforce and in so doing, divorces people's intellects from their work and robs them of most of the job satisfaction that they would otherwise have.

This is part of a quote, which illustrates the point, from Konosuke Matshushita a Japanese industrialist who built such companies as Panasonic and Technics.

"Your firms are built on the Taylor Model; even worse, so are your heads. With your bosses doing the thinking while the workers wield the screwdrivers, you're convinced deep down that this is the correct way to run a business. For you, the essence of leadership is getting the ideas out of the heads of the bosses and into the hands of the labour. We are beyond the Taylor Model; business, we know, is now so complex and difficult, the survival of firms so hazardous in an environment increasingly unpredictable, competitive, and fraught with danger, that their continued existence depends on the day-to-day mobilization of every ounce of intelligence. For us, the essence of effective leadership is precisely the art of mobilizing and pulling together the intellectual resources of all employees in the service of the firm. Only by drawing on the combined brainpower of all its employees can a firm face up to the turbulence and constraints of today's environment."

Systems Thinking in the Public Sector, by John Seddon

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Systems-Thinking-Public-Sector-Regime/dp/0955008182

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