Don't master a skill that doesn't reach your full potential

FROM MY FILE: stand out in a smart way

Photo by Alex Kotliarskyi on Unsplash

Assume you find yourself good at a certain skill. You start practising it, perfecting it to the point you become a master. It is being recognised by your employer and your salary is increased. You're pinning a lot of hopes regarding your career growth but none of them materialises. Time is passing. Others are being promoted or receiving interesting job offers, whereas you stay in the same role and place. Not a surprise you become frustrated and no longer find work satisfying. Bad emotions damage relationships with friends and those closest to you. What went wrong?

For the answer, we have to recall a historical figure Frederick Winslow Taylor, who laid the foundations of the industrial revolution at the turn of the 20th century with his Scientific Management approach. It assumed that the principal objective of management should be to secure the maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employee. Let’s be honest, it was not a common view at the time. As Taylor noted, a large part of the organisation of employers, as well as employees, was for war rather than peace. Despite this, he argued that the true interests of employers and employees should be the same. Sounds attractive, doesn’t it?

The problem with Taylor’s management strategy today known as Taylorism is that he understood the prosperity of an employee in a very specific way. Theoretically, maximum employee prosperity meant not only higher wages but also his development to a state of maximum efficiency, so that he was able to do the highest grade of work for which his natural abilities fit him. Can we then say Taylor was a prophet of human capital development as we see it today? Unfortunately not. Taylor indeed wanted to develop employees but only within narrow frames of specific production needs. He explained it clearly:

(…) THE SELECTION OF THE MAN (FOR A GIVEN JOB POSITION) DOES NOT INVOLVE FINDING SOME EXTRAORDINARY INDIVIDUAL BUT MERELY PICKING OUT FROM AMONG VERY ORDINARY MEN THE FEW WHO ARE ESPECIALLY SUITED TO THIS TYPE OF WORK.

Well, it is worth reading his original book published in 1911 The Principles of “Scientific Management” to fully embrace the consequences of such an approach reaching today’s time. However, before you do, let me zoom in on some of the examples from my practice.

The input master

I managed at the time a team of a few hundred employees performing important but repetitive work. Each morning a number of lorries brought in sacks containing thousand or millions paper copies of bank transfer orders. That was just before the introduction of electronic banking. We were the largest transaction pre-processing centre in the country and one of the largest in Europe.