Thinking impacts behavior. This is true in all aspects of life, but its effects are particularly pronounced in leadership thinking about employees, where expectations and assumptions can create self-fulfilling prophesies — for both the better and the worse.
Douglas McGregor, former professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, was one of the first business authorities to explore the impact of this relationship between thinking and doing in the workplace. He clearly articulated the power of what we here at Management Associates have called below-the-line mental models and beliefs.
His Theory X /Theory Y model provided one of the earliest illustrations of how leadership thinking impacts leadership behavior. Central to the model were a set of propositions about basic human nature as it pertains to the workplace, adapted below:
- The average human being can find work a source of satisfaction.
- Most employees have the capacity to exercise a relatively high degree of imagination, ingenuity, and creativity in the solution of organizational problems.
- Man does not need external controls or the threat of punishment, but will exercise inner self-direction and self-control to attain organizational objectives to which he is personally committed.
- The potentialities of the average human being are far above those that are typically recognized in organizations today.
- Under proper conditions, the average human being in an organization learns not only to accept but to seek responsibility.
- For many organizational tasks, managers can rely on the individual to exercise self-control.
- Even the lowliest untalented laborer seeks a sense of meaning and accomplishment in his work.
- Most employees are capable of exercising a certain amount of autonomy and independence on the job.
- In most organizations one can generally trust one’s subordinates.
- Giving greater independence to most employees would be good for the organization.
How many of the above propositions do you agree with? How much do you think your boss would support? How many would those who report to you, if asked by a neutral third party, say you believe in?
These questions are anything but idle, for participants in our workshops have, without exception, indicated that they would work with enthusiasm and commitment for a leader who held these beliefs. Similarly they expressed reservations about any leader who disagreed with more than a handful of them.
Why is this? Because we all know that the decisions, actions, and relationships of such a leader will be based on trust, mutuality, and the value of the human element in the workplace. Similarly, we know that leader whose below-the-line beliefs are contrary to those principles will tend to create work environments that are authoritarian, untrusting, controlling, and micromanaged. And no employee wants to work in those circumstances.
Improving your effectiveness as a leader, then, requires reflection not only on what you do and accomplish, but on what you believe and value. For your views of employees and their role in the workplace will determine your leadership of them, for better or worse.