In their book ‘An Everyone Culture’, Robert Keegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey say that today’s workforce are doing two jobs. One is the job you are paid for (lawyer, banker, candle stick maker) and the other is the job of covering your back. Most people, they say, are:
“spending time and energy covering up their weaknesses, managing other people’s impressions of them, showing themselves to their best advantage, playing politics, hiding their inadequacies, hiding their uncertainties, hiding their limitations. Hiding.”
This reminds me of the introduction of lean management back in the 1980s and 90s. In ‘The Machine that Changed the World’, James Womack and Daniel Jones estimated that most organisations spend around 90% of their time on activities that add no direct value to the customer. 20% of this is what they call ‘necessary, non-value adding activities’ (the customer doesn’t directly benefit if you fill in your timesheet, but you still have to do it) and the remaining 70% are totally unnecessary and added zero value to the customer (hint – do less of these things to increase your effectiveness).
In lean terminology these activities are called ‘waste’ (or ‘muda’, if you prefer your business jargon in Japanese) and the worst form of waste is scrap. In the case of scrap, not only are you wasting your time doing something customers won’t pay for, but you are actually spending time causing damage – taking perfectly good raw materials and turning them into garbage.
The second job Keegan and Lahey describe is not only a waste of the organisations time and focus, it actually causes damage. It increased stress, stifles innovation, limits personal development and replaces constructive challenge (seeking new ideas and information) with destructive conflict (based on competition and personality). Taking a perfectly good organisation and turning it into garbage.
Introducing lean thinking required a significant cultural change, over decades, to overcome resistance to change – ‘we’ve always done it that way’, ‘everyone else is doing it, so I need to as well’, ‘what if this (highly unlikely) event happens?’. The organisations that managed it survived, and those that didn’t, well, they didn’t. Asking employees to resign from their ‘second jobs’ is likely to face even greater resistance as it requires them to demonstrate courage, self-awareness, emotional intelligence and humility and to embrace vulnerability. The leaders in creating a ‘psychologically safe’ workplace have already started (see Google’s ‘Project Aristotle’, or check out Amy Edmondson or Brene Brown), but unfortunately many organisations are yet to start.
Cultural change, of course, needs to be led from the top, but in the meantime, what can everyone do? If you are feeling brave, you could choose to resign from that second job and focus on getting the first one done.