Democratizing Work: Empowering Teams and Maximizing Value

 

After a long travel day yesterday, I'm home from a wonderful visit to London. It was a great experience presenting at the Gartner event about the value of democratizing the way we manage work.

After attending the conference, one thing is very clear: the workplace is changing, and that includes the workforce. The way we lead project teams needs to change along with it. Most of the methodologies we have chosen for managing work are 50 to 100 years old. Next to accounting software, project management software is the oldest software product (and unfortunately, most of it feels that way).

It's time to take a fresh look at what we do and how we do it. We need to fully engage individual team members in the process (I think that's our greatest  challenge). We have the most technically savvy and empowered generation to ever join the workforce. I think we should be asking ourselves, "How do organizations work with the Facebook generation?" Taking a strong handed command-and-control approach isn't going to work.

In my opinion, there are two keys to engaging the individuals on a project team:

1. Empower them to do something more than simply show up. Give them the opportunity to do something truly great. Give them a voice in what they do, how they do it and when they're going to have it done. You might be surprised at the result.
2. Acknowledge what they do. When asked (in a survey sponsored by AtTask and conducted by Forrester), 40 percent of knowledge workers say their manager doesn't understand what they do. The number swells to 60 percent when asked about their executives. So, even if you feel like you have a handle on what's going on within your project team, the truth is that you team doesn't think so. Have you ever felt that way?

I can't help but come away from these types of events excited for the future. Sure, the times are changing and the way we do our jobs is changing, but isn't that great? Isn't that exciting? For those of us able to make the transition to the needs of the coming years, there will be energized and exciting careers full or challenges and rewards. Those who can't or won't, will find themselves becoming increasingly irrelevant.

Embrace the new paradigm. Re-evaluate how you lead your project teams. Empower them to do something great and recognize that greatness when it happens. You might just be surprised at how well they do and how smart you'll look in the end.