The Psychology of Management
Lillian Gilbreth, 1914
Why do some teams work willingly while others drag their feet? Lillian Gilbreth, an engineer and psychologist, looked at Taylor’s system through a psychologist’s eyes in 1914. You will learn how a visible personal result, an honest count, a written method and teaching change what goes on in a worker’s head.
Who it is for
For managers, mentors and anyone who wants to understand how the way work is managed changes a worker’s thinking, strength and effort.
A worker truly cooperates, not only with his hands but with his will and his judgment, only when he feels that his mind forms part of the mind that directs the work.
How many of you are down there?
Lillian Gilbreth tells an old story from the building sites. A foreman hurries round the site and stops by a deep pit being dug for a foundation. He shouts down into it: “How many of you are there?” The answer comes back from below: “Seven.” And the foreman snaps: “Half of you, climb out.” Gilbreth calls this scene an almost perfect picture of old management: a quick, confident decision, made without the slightest idea of what is happening in the pit.
In 1914, when the book came out, the ability to manage people was thought to be a gift you were born with. People believed it could be learned only by watching other bosses, and that anyone without a knack for it should not even try. Gilbreth, an engineer and psychologist, proposed studying management as a science. For her, the psychology of management is a question of how the mind that directs the work affects that work, and how the work then affects the worker’s mind.
Her central idea is simple: in good management the person stands at the center, not the work. Tools, materials and methods are adjusted to the person, because it is his mind that decides how much and how well he will do. According to Gilbreth, the trouble with the old ways was not the bad intentions of bosses. Simply nobody knew exactly how the work should be done or how much each person could do, and experience was passed on by word of mouth and distorted along the way.
Gilbreth examines the system of Frederick Taylor, which was then called scientific management. She wrote as a convinced supporter of that system, so her conclusions should be read as the views of her time. But she also asks questions that bear on today’s managers, and on the people they manage. Six ideas follow, about what goes on in a worker’s head at work and what can be taken from it for yourself. Let’s start with the simplest one: is your work visible?
The woodpile that grows before your eyes
Gilbreth recalls boys from the forest regions who chopped offcuts of board into firewood. The job is light, each boy has his own pile, and he watches his woodpile grow with pleasure. But in a faceless crew where nobody knows who has done how much, a person is rarely noticed: only when he works noticeably better or worse than the others, and even then by chance.
This leads to the book’s first pillar: the unit of management is not the crew but the individual person. When each person’s result is seen separately, the person gains responsibility, eagerness and clarity. Above all, he gets the chance to be a personality rather than part of a crowd. In those years Taylor’s system was condemned for turning people into machines. Gilbreth replies that it is the reverse: separate counting gives a person back his face.
She also thinks it matters that the trace of the work remains. In old times a stonemason put his mark on a dressed stone, though he knew almost no one would see it in the wall. Actors and singers of her time were happy to record on film and discs, because the work of the stage dies with the evening. Gilbreth believes the same hunger exists in a worker, only without the applause. She quotes the psychologist William James on how hard it is to go unnoticed.
Gilbreth advises not to stop at a board with numbers on it. Let each person record his own output: then he knows every minute where he stands and pays closer attention to the work. Photographs of the best workers can be sent home so the family sees what the person does all day. And the task card is signed by the one who wrote it, and a line in large letters says: if the instructions cannot be carried out, the foreman goes straight to the person who signed them.
How to apply this today, if you manage people: make each person’s result visible separately, at least in one line. And if you work where everything is poured into one common pot, keep your own count of what you have done. This is not surveillance, but a way to see your own woodpile.
About the author
Lillian Moller Gilbreth (1878-1972) was an American engineer and psychologist, one of the founders of industrial psychology. Together with her husband Frank Gilbreth, she studied the movements of workers and raised twelve children.
All books by this author: Lillian Gilbreth
Terms from the book
- James
- Taylor
- scientific management
- time study
- batch: A portion of concrete mixed at one time in a concrete mixer.
- formwork: A temporary mold, usually wooden, into which concrete is poured until it hardens.
- dictaphone: Here: an early twentieth-century device that recorded speech onto a rotating cylinder so it could be typed up later.
- mouthpiece: Here: the horn you speak into so that your voice gets recorded.
- apprentice: A craftsman’s pupil who learns the trade by helping an experienced master.
- Gantt: Henry Gantt (1861-1919), an American engineer and Taylor’s associate, who designed a system of bonuses for completed tasks and the well-known chart for planning work.
All terms
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