It’s time to look at managing through a new lens that is tuned for our complex and varied knowledge work and our talented workers and teams. At AgencyAgile, we call it “unmanaging,” and have seen it regularly boost productivity, quality and engagement in high-performance organizations.

Most managers still operate using the “manager-knows-all” model that was only marginally effective when it was created for the Industrial Era over one hundred years ago. Compared to that era’s factory-based production lines, today’s knowledge work workplaces are almost the exact opposite, each piece of work produced is different, and the machines now serve the workers. Where rigid conformity was the desired worker behavior, today we want people to bring their insights and creativity to their work product.

The problem and opportunity are actually bigger than all that, because the old way of managing creates less productivity in this new workplace, a paradox that has existed for over a century but is now in sharp relief against today’s business needs.

Today’s Workplace Has an Over-Managing Problem

Most managers think that they are responsible for productivity, and yet the opposite is true: Productivity is inversely related to the level of managerial activity. That can be seen clearly in the old factory model — if a manager interrupts or distracts their factory worker, production stumbles. Back then the urge to “be managerial” was constrained by empirically verified factory metrics (parts per hour, for example).  Want to over-manage your factory workers? Go ahead, but you’ll need to explain why your department didn’t hit its numbers.

But in today’s highly variable knowledge work, no such metrics exist. How long does it take to write that report or build something that has never been built? We’ll just have to wait and see. Managers rely upon estimates, but in busy knowledge work organizations, the numbers are almost always too low.

The lack of an objective metric means a key constraint on managerial behavior is gone. It is almost impossible to separate the costs of over-managing from the error in a poor estimate, or from the rarer worker underperformance.

Optimistic estimates set up workers and teams for disappointing performance, a shadow which often hides over-managing and poor managerial practice. Our research into the causes of reduced productivity in workers, sampling over two hundred professional services organizations, shows that its greatest single source, constituting well over half of the productivity loss, are poor managerial practices.

Ironically, it is not unusual for an organization, seeing how slowly work is getting done, to decide that more managing is needed. In reality, less managing almost uniformly unleashes productivity. This clever approach of  unmanaging includes both avoiding poor behaviors along with an important shift in managerial style, emphasizing a posture of enabling and responding versus commanding and controlling.

What Agile Taught Us

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development, a cleverly named set of techniques assembled for large-scale software projects in 2001, had several early years of successes, but the last decade has not been so kind. Organizations and consultants have tried to deploy its very-specific techniques to a wide range of businesses for which it was never designed, with lackluster (or worse) results. Yet, Agile methods succeeded at proving one important thing: that less managing makes for more productivity. Implemented properly, Agile allows managers very little interaction with workers and teams, save for a few key moments when they share their understanding of the work, or provide feedback and mentoring.

The core principle of unmanaging extends this idea: today’s workers are tremendously capable of self-management of many aspects of the work. Managers instead rely upon a framework known as the “Four Key Managerial Moments” to guide their actions and the “unmanagement shift.” The framework encompasses the following:

• The Why Moment: This is the most neglected yet most needed managerial behavior in our modern workplaces. The Why moment is a meeting of minds to address the natural human reaction after being told “What” to do: the asking of why it’s needed, understanding the bigger picture. In Japan, where it is prevalent, managers call this practice “Ba.” It invites workers to take ownership and requires managerial patience and humility to deliver well. The Why Moment enables the What Moment, of course.
• The What Moment: This moment is mostly about scope, “what” is needed for a successful delivery. This moment, also, is poorly done in today’s workplaces, where managers harbor legacy factory-managing notions that they should know more than workers. The opposite is true.
• The Go Moment: The Go Moment is when productivity happens. Managers must lean back, effectively unmanaging during the windows of productivity that workers need. This also transfers a sense of control to the worker, which is a powerful motivator. If the Why or What Moments have been poorly managed, then workers in the Go Moment will struggle.
• The Grow Moment: The Grow Moment is when managers’ actions are directed toward moments of opportunity and inclusion, learning, measurement, reflection and mentoring. Too often managers today, having failed the Why and What Moments, overmanage the Go Moment, neglecting to focus at all on the Grow Moment.

The New Metrics of Unmanagement

One of the most surprising things we’ve discovered in our work is that workers themselves, because of their intrinsic desire to excel, are the best barometer of managerial effectiveness. They are more accurate in reporting challenges than managers, and often are the best source for determining whether managers are doing well. Management consultancy Deloitte, in its own internal research, discovered that the strongest factor in worker success was whether managers had optimally enabled workers, as judged by this affirmation: “At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.”

In unmanaging, the manager attunes their actions to the needs of workers and teams, enabling and unleashing their natural capability and energy, while also avoiding many of today’s productivity-killing behaviors.