Watch the Work, not the Workers

This pithy expression describes a key behaviour for leaders who want great results.

In too many companies, the opposite happens, and the consequences include:

Late deliveries
Low morale, trust, and engagement
Excessive waste

I don’t know who coined the expression, but notice that it says “workers.” Not “people.” What does watching the workers look like?

Measuring individual productivity, with a particular focus on output rather than value delivery
Collecting detailed timesheets to know exactly where time goes
Looking for unused time and then filling it up

Managers don’t do this with nefarious intents. It’s due to a worldview: the workers cost a lot, they shouldn’t be idle, and spending their time on manager-assigned work is a net positive.

Watching the work, by contrast, includes:

Managing work intake to prevent clogging the pipeline
Monitoring and facilitating work items’ progress through the pipeline (such as with a Kanban board)
Managing quality
Looking after continuous integration and delivery

This is a different worldview: finishing good work early is important, even if people are not 100% utilized the whole time.

“Watch the workers” goes back to the industrial revolution. It’s woven into the organizational fabric — structure, process, rewards, accountabilities, status.

Lean methods, and then Agile and other modern methods, have sought to replace it with “Watch the work (and enable the team).” The change hasn’t quite taken hold, even in companies that use Agile practices.

If you’re a leader, here’s an exercise for you. Identify one situation in which you watch the workers (your team) more than the work. Do a root-cause analysis on that using “5 Whys.” What are you realizing about your worldview?

“Watch the work, not the workers” is one of 14 proactive behaviours for leading improvements that I describe in my book Deliver Better Results. If you read it and would like to chat about applying them in your work context, write to me.