The answer to this question will determine how you manage your organization.
Irina Rokosz
The current management system views companies as machines. A well-functioning company is a well-oiled machine. People are merely cogs in the machine.
Cogs don’t change their behavior: they are predefined for a given purpose and do exactly as engineered, with no improvisation. If their behavior becomes unpredictable, that is, if they become a faulty element, they can easily be replaced. The fault never lies with the machine, but with its individual parts.
A person, however, is a living organism, not a machine cog or a robot. A large group of people, therefore, is a community — living, breathing, reacting, and adapting. It only stands to reason that a company, being a community, is a giant living organism, not a machine.
That living organism has a legal company name, body, entity, and identity, separate from our own. And we want it to sense the environment and react to prevent risks and issues, because we can’t be everywhere all the time. We want it to adapt and evolve, because we know our baby has to grow up and become independent.
We also want it to have a purpose, i.e., something to strive for. And we want it to have morals and ethics in how it achieves that purpose, like any other person. Machines don’t have morals and ethics — people who use them do (or so we hope).
When you realize your company is a living organism, not a machine, your focus shifts from profit to purpose in everything you do and every decision you make. That’s not to say your company stops being profitable — quite the opposite, in fact. Research shows that purpose-driven companies are more profitable than their competitors.
But more importantly, you realize control is an illusion: you can’t control people. You’re wearing yourself thin trying to be on top of absolutely everything. You want your people to have autonomy AND to do the right thing. You want to be able to trust them and to pull back. And you achieve that by inspiration, motivation, and engagement (i.e., system incentives), not by command, control, and punishment.