Leading Teams of Knowledge Workers:

Thomas Davenport:

"Robin feels out of control. She’s the head of press and analyst relations for a large professional services firm. Eight people report to her, all of them knowledge workers. Some deal with particular types of press relationships, others with technology industry analysts. She manages some relationships herself. Her job is to improve her company’s image with these external audiences—even to her, a somewhat vague and difficult-to-measure mission. Only half of the people on her staff are with her at headquarters in New York, and only one of the four in New York are on her floor. They’re all pretty independent in their work habits, and she doesn’t see most of them very often. Several of them frequently work from home. The team used to try to get together monthly, but the company has put restrictions on travel budgets, so they can’t do that anymore. Robin feels that much of the time she doesn’t know exactly what her people are doing. Sure, she hears about meetings they’re having in their weekly conference call, but what are they doing when they’re not having a few meetings? She thinks she trusts them, but always has nagging doubts about how hard and how effectively they’re working."

"she’s reluctant to criticize what seems like poor performance too directly; she can’t afford to lose the relationships and insights her people have built up over time. Some of her analysts are definitely more productive than others, however. One, for example, generates twice the press coverage and meets with twice as many industry analysts as anyone else in the group. Other analysts in the group discount her performance—“The service lines she represents just have more to say than mine do”—but Robin thinks it’s something this analyst does. Robin has tried to figure out the secret to her success, but has never directly discussed it with her. She’s afraid that the high-performing analyst will ask for a raise if she addresses her sterling performance too directly.

Robin is always trying to think of ways to get more out of her team members, but is rarely convinced she’s found the answer."

"In fact, the situation is worse than they suspect; she’s been told by her boss that she may have to lay off one employee due to a budget cut for next year. Everyone will have to do more with less; everyone needs to be more productive. But Robin finds it difficult to imagine how she can get more results from people whom she rarely sees, and who know their jobs better than she does. In the short run, she decides to just call a reporter she’s been trying to build a relationship with—it’s easier to do her own knowledge work than to improve that of others."

"Like Robin, you and I—and most of our friends and colleagues—are knowledge workers. We all think for a living. Like Robin, many of us manage other knowledge workers. We’re all doing our work the best we can—or are we? Can we, like Robin, figure out a way to get better results from knowledge workers? Most of us have never even analyzed our own performance, or had much help from our employers in making us more productive and effective. We want to become more efficient at doing our jobs—and to help others do so as well—but we just don’t know how. We know more about our own work than just about anyone else, so it’s hard for a manager to improve our performance—and in any case we don’t like to be told what to do. We’ve never thought about the fact that we are knowledge workers, or about the implications of that fact for how we carry out and improve our daily activities. What difference does it make that we are knowledge workers? It’s certainly not a new thing. This category of work has existed for centuries—think about medieval monks, or the first professors at universities—so why write about them now? Well, as I’ll argue a little later ..., if nothing else they’re important because they are a large category of workers—probably larger than ever before as a percentage of the workforce in sophisticated economies."