I don’t know if this prediction will come true or not.

But I’m making it because history has shown that big changes often start at the edges before catching on.

So spotting these edges is one way to spot what’s coming down the track.

The edge I refer to in this instance?

What I’ll call “trust-based management”.

Over the weekend, I read a Harvard Business School article about how Netflix has binned the usual corporate rule book. They’ve ditched performance reviews. The expenses policy basically boils down to “act in Netflix’s best interests”. And rather than running every big decision up the corporate flagpole for approval, the leaders at Netflix trust their staff to make the call.

That doesn’t mean everyone at Netflix gets to put their feet up and do whatever they fancy.

But the basic idea is simple:

Give people the context, trust them to use their noggin and let them get on with it.

Doesn’t sound that radical, does it?

Yet this sort of approach is basically unheard of in corporate.

Hence my prediction that a whole raft of current corporate habits built around control rather than trust will be extinct within a decade.

Here are some of the habits which will go the way of the dodo:

*** Policies written because one person once upon a time did something daft and now an entire organisation follows these policies too

*** Decisions bouncing between three managers, two committees and a steering group when the person actually doing the work could have made the call in five minutes. Companies seem to think that more people signing something off means a better decision. But all it really does is slow things down and make it less clear who’s actually responsible

*** Measuring how many days people are in the office, how many hours they work, which meetings they attend and what boxes they tick rather than if they’re actually doing anything useful

*** Related to this: assuming that if people aren’t visibly busy, they’re not working. As though staring thoughtfully out of a window couldn’t possibly be more useful than firing off another 17 emails. Or that one ten minute convo could never prevent three weeks of wasted effort

*** Hiring staff for “culture fit”. Which often means “hiring someone who reminds us of us” then wondering why the company can’t pivot or do things differently

*** Performance reviews where you sit someone down, tell them what they’re doing wrong and then expect them to leave the room fired up and ready to improve

*** The whole idea that motivation is something managers need to somehow “inject” into people. So we have incentive schemes, engagement surveys, away days and motivational workshops designed to get people to care about work while we give those people less and less freedom over the work itself

The thread that runs through each of these corporate habits?

They assume people need to be managed into doing a good job.

But this misses the fact that humans are inherently creative, intelligent and resourceful. And the more you monitor, control and incentivise their every move, the more they start to switch off what made them good at their job in the first place.

Anyway, you might not be able to stop your company treating people like machines.

But you can change how much you let this get in the way of how you operate.

My program Trust Me, I Work Here is a way to access your creativity, intelligence and resourcefulness when you work in a system that seems almost designed to knock those things out of you.

Hop over here if you want to find out how that works:

https://tomgrundy.coach/trust-me-i-work-here

To fulfilment,

Tom