Peter F. Drucker writes about the future relationship of managers and knowledge workers in his essay “They’re Not Employees, They’re People” (Harvard Business Review – February 2002). He writes:
Similarly, leaders in knowledge-based businesses must spend time with promising professionals: Get to know them and be known by them; mentor them and listen to them; challenge them and encourage them.
I think Drucker picks up a very important thought here. The whole essay is about relieving managers from routine work, so that they have more time for investing in people. This is a very important thought, in my eyes.
I always felt uncomfortable to refer to employees or project members as “human resources”. I think this is a term that was coined in the ages of industrial revolution. There are “human resources” and “financial resources”, “natural resources” and “production resources”. A resource is a source that can be used to achieve a goal. And – the use of it can be planned. I might agree that it makes sense to call the routine work of a person or his ability to perform it a resource that can be planned – although I would still not call the person a resource.
In my eyes knowledge work is different. The key to knowledge work, as I believe, is creativity. And creativity is the one thing that cannot be preplanned, nor demanded, nor predicted. It is like pulling a small tree that it might grow faster. It is obvious, that the tree needs certain conditions to grow, sometimes it needs nurturing. In the same way knowledge work needs an environment, where it can grow, as well as nurturing. Knowledge workers need nurturing and mentoring. That is how they learn to become productive.
In the same way the role of the manager of knowledge workers needs to adapt. I would call the future role a knowledgeable manager. The reason is very obvious. In the industrial age, work was comparatively easy to plan. Repetitive processes had to be established and maintained. It still was difficult – but it was easier than planning today’s knowledge work. Managers often have to decide. How can they decide, if they do not understand, what their people are talking about? How can the manager guide the discussion into the right direction, if the manager is not himself an expert of the subject matter?
How does a manager become knowledgeable? He must have gone the way before us. I know that this is a challenging statement. Is this part of today’s management curriculums? I have doubts. The knowledgeable manager cannot know only from books. He must have been through it. Then he has the practical wisdom plus the current state of expert knowledge that is needed. And then he is able to mentor his people. This is the best way to become knowledgeable. The other way is to listen to his people. Listening is hard. It takes time. Sometimes it is 6 months of listening, sometimes a year before it dawns to the manager, where the real problem lies.
I am only mentioning these thoughts to argue, that classical management methods will change and have already changed with the advent of knowledge work. The style of management will be less prescription and more collaboration, even mentoring. Good managers will need to know more and good knowledge workers will need to manage more.
Knowledge workers are only successful, if they are able to align their goals with the goals of many stakeholders and with many projects, where they are stakeholders, and with peer projects and groups. This is quite some management. They can’t rely only on their manager to organize all of this for them. They will take the initiative and be responsible for the result.
So the manager becomes more knowledgeable and the knowledge worker becomes more of a manager. What then is the difference between the two? I think the difference in the type of work they do is only marginal. Yes, the manager has a little more to manage and the knowledge worker has a little more to know. Maybe the difference grows with distance in the number of management levels. But I still believe that even top management will need to know a lot about the subject matter they are responsible for. I think the main difference between the manager and the knowledge worker is their individual set of relationships they need to maintain. The knowledge worker has more contact to his manager than to his manager’s peers or his manager’s manager. And he has more contact to his peers than his manager has. So the quality of work is similar, but the relationships are different. This is what is called self-similar. In my eyes the quality of work of knowledge-intensive organizations is and will be self-similar on all levels. That’s why there is common glue between them. Today it is email and the meeting calendar plus spreadsheets and documents of different forms. In the future – that’s what we believe – it will be ACM.
There is a third role in organizations that I want to discuss, the business process analyst. The classical task of a business process analyst is to develop and maintain the enterprise process landscape, monitor process performance and planning the process portfolio. This is applicable to routine work, while it has also been tried to apply it to knowledge work. It is a cross function in the organization. However the difficulties with that have already been discussed when comparing classical BPM with Adaptive Case Management (ACM). One of the difficulties is that knowledge work processes tend to be unique and tend to be very much influenced by the knowledge that results from earlier process stages. I other words it is very hard for an external observer, that is not part of the process itself, to plan the process. Also it does not make much sense in this instance to include the process into a process portfolio, if it is only executed once or a small number of times. The lifecycle of the process may be very short, which makes it very ineffective to observe it, document it and measure its performance based on that by an external observer.
But: measuring process performance is still necessary. It’s only, that it is not a preplanned process. Everybody would be interested in measuring process performance. The knowledge worker is interested in his own performance or the performance of processes that deliver results to him. The manager is interested in the overall performance of his team and related teams. And the business process analyst would want to focus on cross functional process performance.
Knowledge workers and often also managers do not care so much about formal process performance measuring. They are certainly interested in the performance of the processes, but it’s often not formalized. Business process analysts know many ways to measure process performance. Now with ACM this can become reality also for knowledge work processes. If business process analysts buy in to ACM, they are the best people to mentor managers as well as knowledge workers in how to measure performance. At the same time the business process analysts will find it useful to understand more about the content of the processes they are measuring, what they are about. They might find themselves helping the manager to solve process performance problems (which in many cases in knowledge work are full stop blocks instead of tuning percentages). For the manager and the knowledge worker it is then a little bit more formalized, but not overdesigned.
I believe the future of the business process analyst in knowledge work will be more like an expert for one area of expertise, which is cross functional process performance and adaptive case management. Managers and knowledge workers will need to know how to make best use of ACM to achieve best cross functional performance. For example some case templates may be needed to speed up work with another department. This is an area that ACM mentors would take on.
There is a lot more to say about mentorship in knowledge work, but maybe that’s a good starting point for further discussions.