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finds that 22% are expected to respond to work emails when they're not at work.³

      Jasmine, a middle manager at a technology company, explains the stress this way:

      When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I think about is my to-do list. It's never ending and seems to get longer every month. When I think about it, I get anxious, because I know I won't have enough time to do what I need to do. Then the day goes by, and I do what I can, but most nights, when I'm trying to wind down and get to sleep, my last thought of the day is “I didn't get enough done.”

      Leaders like Jasmine, caught on the hamster wheel of activity, are too busy to deal with the complexities of leading in today's workplace. What's more, they're too overloaded to recognize or admit that the way they're working isn't working.

      Although information technology has advanced, our leadership practices have not. Most of today's leaders are painfully unaware of how all the changes in the workplace have made it so much more difficult to lead effectively. They don't realize that they're attempting to lead in the early 21st century using early 20th-century practices. The practices they're using were designed for a very different world. Continuing to use them perpetuates small-oven thinking.

      So what's a 21st-century leader to do? What's the best way for leaders to change their approach to leading? The way to go forward is to look backward. After all, to get a handle on the future, you must understand the past.

      Like the young woman and her family recipe, you can't take what's given to you for granted. Becoming aware of your inherited leadership legacy is crucial, because you won't be able to change what you don't notice.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF LEADERSHIP IN ORGANIZATIONS

New parents often experience a moment that shocks and amazes them: the first time they catch themselves doing or saying the exact thing that their own parents did or said to them. Without even trying, they've internalized the behaviors of the previous generation.

      Most people who go to work as managers and leaders in organizations don't study the history of organizational management and leadership. They're too busy doing their day jobs. They're not aware that their leadership philosophy (with all its assumptions and beliefs) is based on a worldview that has long outlived its shelf life.

      Before the dawn of the industrial revolution, commerce was manufactured in people's homes and on small-scale farms. Work was done using basic hand tools and machines. For example, textiles were made on hand looms and then sold at local markets. The homemade nature of this work meant that production was limited.

      However, all that changed with the arrival of industrial-era machines and tools. In the textile industry, the spinning Jenny (a form of power loom) changed the game. Before its invention, a worker could only work one spool of yarn at a time. The first spinning Jenny could work eight spools. As the technology improved, the number of spools on the power loom grew to 120.

      With the advent of these new machines, a seismic shift occurred. The center of work moved from homes to factories. Mass production bloomed, and factory workers were in high demand.

      For the first time in the history of human commerce, the birth of the factory era created a new necessity: the need for a large-scale labor force. Factory owners had sunk considerable investment into factories and equipment. They were keen to harness the newfound power of steam and electricity. To make their resources profitable, they recognized that they'd also need to find ways to harness the power of the human resource.

      With this insight came a series of new questions. How would these employees be hired? Trained? Organized? Led? Which ways of leading were better than others? The attempts to answer these questions led to the discipline now known as management.

Organizational management was started by mechanical engineers: people who were trained to see the world as engineering problems to solve. The aim of scientific management (as it came to be called) was to improve efficiency, especially labor productivity. The goal of leadership was to get labor to do more work in less time.

      For the manager, people were not the competitive advantage: the factory was. Having the latest and greatest machine was of primary importance. Employees were subordinate cogs in this mechanical worldview.

      The man considered to be the father of scientific management was an engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor had a deep-seated belief: he thought employees were only out to take advantage of their employers and therefore must be controlled. Taylor was certain that most of the employees on the shop floor spent a lot of their time on the job goofing off and working slower than they could.

      Left to their own devices, Taylor believed, workers would work at the slowest rate possible, a behavior commonly known as soldiering. From Taylor's perspective, soldiering wasn't just bad business; it was morally reprehensible. He wrote of soldiering as “the greatest evil with which the working-people…are now afflicted.”⁴

      Therefore, employees were not to be trusted. Taylor felt employees spent every possible moment conniving new schemes to take advantage of their employer:

      Hardly a competent workman can be found who does not devote a considerable amount of time to studying just how slowly he can work and still convince his employer that he is going at a good pace.⁵

      For Taylor, the perfect worker was the one who questioned nothing, understood everything, and did anything he was told to do. Taylor wrote that the ideal worker should be “so stupid…that he more nearly resemble[d] in his mental make-up the ox than any other type.”⁶

      With the publication of Principles of Scientific Management in 1911, Taylor's ideas spread like wildfire. His ideas became the dominant mode of business thinking for the first half of the 20th century.

Taylor's beliefs set the norms of how a workplace should work. In a very short time, the prototypical relationship between leader and employee was born. It was a relationship forged in the cauldron of power, fear, and control.

THE TAYLOR APPROACH TO LEADERSHIP

      In Taylor's system, work was firmly divided between management and labor. Management did all the “thinking” and laborers did all the “labor.” If you were a manager, communication meant telling people what to do.

      Moreover, that communication was top-down: no questions asked. After all, in a giant machine, what “parts” ask questions? Telling people what to do became the norm of factory floor communication. The job of the leader was to give orders and maintain order.

      Think for yourself? Speak up? Challenge authority? If you were a worker, raising your hand and speaking out might get you killed. Not metaphorically, but literally.

      Labor-related violence usually began with workers speaking up and wanting better working conditions. In fact, between 1850 and 1920, in the United States alone, there were at least 74 separate incidents when workers calling for safer conditions were killed by law enforcement officials, members of the company militia, armed detectives, and guards.

      In the industrial era, workers were expected to do, not think. They were meant to show up, shut up, and do as they were told. For the jobs at hand, there wasn't much need for analysis and complex problem-solving.

      Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company (and one of Taylor's best-known disciples), pioneered the use of the assembly line in the auto industry. His disdain for the aptitude of his workers was quite well known, famously quipping, “Why is it every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?”

Taylor and his engineering disciples (known as Taylorites) were obsessed with getting workers to do more work in less time. Using stopwatches and some very fuzzy math, they originated what became known as time-motion studies. They believed there was one best way to do things, and management's job was to find it. Once “the way” was found, management's job was simple: command-and-control.

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