TOXIC BELIEF #3: “Our company is like a machine.”

Listen to the way executives talk and business authors write about corporations. A successful corporation is often said to be a “well-run” or even a “well-oiled machine”; it also is said to be a “good system,” one that is “efficient” and “well-designed.” When you hear these descriptions or hundreds of others like them, you’re hearing the belief that employees should be cogs in the corporate machine.


But hold your horses, Hester!  Machines are, by nature, rigid and stable. Machines never grow; they never change on their own.  They only break, because machines are, by definition, comparatively brittle.  And isn’t a corporation actually a collection of human beings?  Organic creatures who adapt and change with relative ease?


The machine analogy creates other absurdities as well. For instance, machines need to be “run.” Therefore, the whole corporate machine mindset encourages top managers to visualize themselves in the control room of a big machine.  This is supposed to make them feel that they’re in control, but ironically it can create a sense of helpless.  A CEO of Xerox once confessed to a friend of mine:


I feel like the captain of an aircraft carrier. I turn the wheel and try to point the ship in a new direction, but I have no idea whether or not my orders are being followed.


Why is this belief so toxic?  It dehumanizes people. If you think that the everybody is just cog, nobody is essential; anybody can be replaced. What’s important is the machine and (by extension) the people who are running the machine.


That, in turn, creates wretched work environment that cannot and will not reward creative thinking or recognize the value of intellectual differences.  People who feel they’re just part of a machine aren’t going to go out of their way to help an organization achieve its goals. In the worst case, they might be tempted to exact some kind of revenge on the company that’s treating its employees like subhumans.


When managers treat employees like cogs, work slows to a crawl. People do the minimum, just enough to keep from getting fired.  Then some idiot manager gets the bright idea to “reengineer” the machine, thus creating even more misery and even more lousy management.


Resistance is futile.