faculties about her. The young woman calls her up.
“Great-grandma, I'm making the family traditional holiday roast for the first time. The recipe says that you should cut the end off the roast before you put it in the oven. I asked my mother why you do that, and she didn't know, so I asked grandma, and she didn't know, so that's why I'm calling you. Why do you cut the end off the roast?”
After a long pause, there's a sigh on the far end of the phone line.
“We had a small oven.”
I've shared this story with countless groups over the years. It always gets a huge laugh, because the absurdity is all too familiar. People know what it's like to work at organizations suffering from “small-oven thinking.” So many aspects of their workplace don't make sense, and yet, just like the mom and the grandma in the story, they keep doing things the same way. Questioning the past is too risky. It's safer to keep doing things the way they've always been done.
Ultimately, the reason companies behave in a small-oven manner is that their leaders have a small-oven mind-set. They have a built-in immunity to change. As Lisa Bodell, CEO of Futurethink, an innovation consultancy, says, “The only thing more resistant to change than a human being is a company.”
Caught up in the pressure to constantly produce, many of today's leaders don't take time to stop and question their own methods. It's all action, no reflection. When it comes to how they lead, they do what they do because that's the way it was always done. Yet, isn't doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result the definition of insanity?
The nature of the workplace has radically transformed over the past 30 years. These changes didn't happen overnight. There was no blaring of trumpets or great dramatic flourishes pronouncing that a new era of work had arrived. It crept in slowly, one day at a time. And as the weeks and months and years passed, our work world has been irrevocably altered.
Consider, for example, the number of business communication interactions the average executive takes part in. In the 1970s, it was about 1,000 a year. Today, it's more than 30,000 a year.1 This tidal wave of information has dramatically changed the skills leaders need to function effectively today.
Maria, an executive vice president for a luxury retailer, describes it this way:
I was hired to head up marketing for this company. But do you know what my real job title is? I'm an email-processing machine. On an average day, I get 300 emails in my inbox. I'm not talking spam or junk or company-wide CCs. Three hundred items that clamor for my attention.
And of course I can't really give my full attention to these items because I'm booked into back-to-back meetings all day long. Most days, I get excited for 6:00 p.m. to come, because then I can get some of my actual work done. Look, if I'm really honest, in the constant hustle, things are slipping through the cracks. There's just too much to do on the to-do list. For one thing, I'm not spending enough time developing my team. Something's going to give. I'm just not sure what it is.
In addition to having to process more information, the boundaries between work and “life” are disappearing. People are working longer and harder than ever. A recent study found that although the 40-hour week is generally accepted as “normal,” adults employed full-time have reported working an average of 47 hours each week.2 They're also expected to check in more frequently: nights, weekends, and vacations. A survey of employed email users finds that 22% are expected to respond to work emails when they're not at work.3
Jasmine, a middle manager at a technology company, explains the stress this way:
When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I think about is my to-do list. It's never ending and seems to get longer every month. When I think about it, I get anxious, because I know I won't have enough time to do what I need to do. Then the day goes by, and I do what I can, but most nights, when I'm trying to wind down and get to sleep, my last thought of the day is “I didn't get enough done.”
Leaders like Jasmine, caught on the hamster wheel of activity, are too busy to deal with the complexities of leading in today's workplace. What's more, they're too overloaded to recognize or admit that the way they're working isn't working.
Although information technology has advanced, our leadership practices have not. Most of today's leaders are painfully unaware of how all the changes in the workplace have made it so much more difficult to lead effectively. They don't realize that they're attempting to lead in the early 21st century using early 20th-century practices. The practices they're using were designed for a very different world. Continuing to use them perpetuates small-oven thinking.
So what's a 21st-century leader to do? What's the best way for leaders to change their approach to leading? The way to go forward is to look backward. After all, to get a handle on the future, you must understand the past.
Like the young woman and her family recipe, you can't take what's given to you for granted. Becoming aware of your inherited leadership legacy is crucial, because you won't be able to change what you don't notice.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF LEADERSHIP IN ORGANIZATIONS
New parents often experience a moment that shocks and amazes them: the first time they catch themselves doing or saying the exact thing that their own parents did or said to them. Without even trying, they've internalized the behaviors of the previous generation.
Most people who go to work as managers and leaders in organizations don't study the history of organizational management and leadership. They're too busy doing their day jobs. They're not aware that their leadership philosophy (with all its assumptions and beliefs) is based on a worldview that has long outlived its shelf life.
Before the dawn of the industrial revolution, commerce was manufactured in people's homes and on small-scale farms. Work was done using basic hand tools and machines. For example, textiles were made on hand looms and then sold at local markets. The homemade nature of this work meant that production was limited.
However, all that changed with the arrival of industrial-era machines and tools. In the textile industry, the spinning Jenny (a form of power loom) changed the game. Before its invention, a worker could only work one spool of yarn at a time. The first spinning Jenny could work eight spools. As the technology improved, the number of spools on the power loom grew to 120.
With the advent of these new machines, a seismic shift occurred. The center of work moved from homes to factories. Mass production bloomed, and factory workers were in high demand.
For the first time in the history of human commerce, the birth of the factory era created a new necessity: the need for a large-scale labor force. Factory owners had sunk considerable investment into factories and equipment. They were keen to harness the newfound power of steam and electricity. To make their resources profitable, they recognized that they'd also need to find ways to harness the power of the human resource.
With this insight came a series of new questions. How would these employees be hired? Trained? Organized? Led? Which ways of leading were better than others? The attempts to answer these questions led to the discipline now known as management.
Organizational management was started by mechanical engineers: people who were trained to see the world as engineering problems to solve. The aim of scientific management (as it came to be called) was to improve efficiency, especially labor productivity. The goal of leadership was to get labor to do more work in less time.
For the manager, people were not the competitive advantage: the factory
