Managements have tended to reject ideas for the self-governing plant community and for the responsible worker as an “encroachment” on their prerogatives.
Of all my work on management and “the anatomy of industrial order,” I consider my ideas for the self-governing plant community and for the responsible worker to be the most important and most original. A self-governing plant community is the assumption of managerial responsibility by the individual employee, the work team, and the employee group alike for the structure of the individual job, for the performance of major tasks, and for the management of such community affairs as shift schedules, vacation schedules, overtime assignments, industrial safety, and, above all, employee benefits.
But managements have tended to reject these ideas as an “encroachment” on their prerogatives. And labor unions have been outright hostile: they are convinced that they need a visible and identifiable “boss,” who can be fought as “the enemy.” Yet what was achieved in these areas in World War II went way beyond anything that is being trumpeted today as a breakthrough, such as the highly publicized attempt to replace the assembly line at some Swedish automobile companies. This actually goes much less far than the assembly lines that have been standard in American industry, not to mention the responsibility factory-floor work teams have assumed routinely at IBM, hardly a particularly “permissive” company.
ACTION POINT: Delegate responsibility to all employees once you are assured they have been trained to assume this responsibility.
Adventures of a Bystander
* Source: The Daily Drucker by Peter F. Drucker