“What do you suppose thinking looks like?”

A recently published obituary for copywriter Arthur Schiff included a remarkable anecdote. Direct magazine quoted Ed Valenti, who co-founded the marketing firm Dial Media in 1975, describing how he hired Schiff and shortly afterward caught him sitting at his desk with his hands behind his head, smoking a pipe and staring off into space. When he confronted his new employee about not working, Schiff replied, “I am working. You hired me to think. What do you suppose thinking looks like?” (http://directmag.com/news/schiff-dies-090706/index.html)

Some time after that, Schiff came up with the name for Dial Media’s flagship product, the Ginsu knife, and wrote the copy for its famous television commercial. He is widely credited with coining the line, “But wait! There’s more!” In addition to being the very father of a pop cultural icon, he was a major contributor to the success of an incredibly profitable product. He made a lot of money for Dial Media.

His celebrity status tends to obscure it, but Arthur Schiff was a knowledge worker, and Valenti’s anecdote shows how tricky it can be to manage this type of worker. Tricky or not, however, it’s something organizations need to learn, and quickly.
An often-cited statistic tells us that in the world’s richest economies, more than half of the total GDP comes from knowledge-based work, and that knowledge work accounts for 80% of job creation. Most observers now put knowledge workers at 50%-60% of the U.S. workforce. Some projections have that proportion in the 90% range within the next decade.

The age of the knowledge worker

Peter Drucker, who coined the term “knowledge worker” in 1959, saw the conversion of the economy from the old industrial model as an opportunity to change the course of human history. “The weapon of fear — fear of economic suffering, fear of job security, physical fear of company guards or of the state’s police power — which for so long substituted for managing manual work and the manual worker, is simply not operative at all in the context of the knowledge work and knowledge worker.” (Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices; Harper & Row, 1973)

Knowledge work, in other words, doesn’t respond to coercion.

What knowledge workers respond to is communication. We can already see how they are changing the face of management. A survey of 4,125 recruiters by the Wall Street Journal and Harris Interactive published in the newspaper’s September 21, 2006 issue found “communication and interpersonal skills” to be the most important of 21 attributes they seek when considering MBA graduates. The second-place attribute was “ability to work well within a team.” The philosophically minded may be tempted to point out that the latter is simply a specialized case of the former.

Everybody wants to hire people with “communication and interpersonal skills,” but few people attempt to define those skills or know how to measure them. Press the recruiter who is seeking communication and interpersonal skills on what she’s looking for, and she will probably give you some variation on “he expresses himself clearly.” But long-term success in managing knowledge workers may require much more that.

Nor is this a purely academic exercise. As Drucker developed the concept of the knowledge worker further, he saw even more revolutionary implications. In a 1994 lecture, he noted that knowledge workers own the means of production. Yes, he said, organizations supply them with tools, and he used the example of a hospital providing a surgeon with an operating room. “But the surgeon’s true capital investment is the twelve or fifteen years of training and the resulting knowledge which the surgeon takes from one hospital to the next. Without that knowledge, the hospital’s expensive operating rooms are so much waste and scrap.” (“Knowledge Work and Knowledge Society: The Social Transformations of this Century,” the 1994 Edwin L. Godkin Lecture at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government: (http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/ifactory/ksgpress/www/ksg_news/transcripts/drucklec.htm)

Drucker felt that organizations need knowledge workers more than knowledge workers need organizations. Perhaps it’s no accident that the modern collegial organization began replacing the old-style hierarchical industrial organization around the same time that knowledge workers became a significant presence in the workplace.

Managing the modern organization, then, means managing knowledge workers. Without the power to coerce, managers must employ an alternative portfolio of skills. We emphasize three of these: the ability to maintain interpersonal relationships, the ability to persuade, and the ability to inspire.

The skill to maintain interpersonal relationships

Managers are beginning to recognize that the connection between boss and subordinate is a relationship. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a deep one. The context is, after all, business. But it depends on something that every human relationship needs: trust.

Traditionally we have all tended to adopt a pose in the workplace. We try to behave with a reasonable, unfeeling professionalism. This pose even has a name. We call it “businesslike.” The dictionary defines it as “carrying out tasks efficiently without wasting time or being distracted by personal or other concerns; systematic and practical.” (New Oxford American Dictionary, Second Edition)

But in the age of knowledge work, the need for trust means managers must be more authentically human than businesslike. That doesn’t mean they need to share their personal lives or wear their hearts on their sleeves. But in the context of the work, they need to be open with subordinates. That may mean sharing feelings, too, which means finding ways to do it that aren’t disruptive. And they need to be consistent and fair, because that’s the only way to gain employee trust.

The skill to persuade

Because coercion is ineffective in the knowledge workplace, managers need to know how to persuade their subordinates to a point of view. This means far more than presenting a clear argument.

The persuader recognizes that every point of view is reasonable to the person who holds it and that persuasion generally takes place when that person sees a benefit in adopting a new point of view. The task of the persuader is to present the new point of view in terms of benefits to the audience and to use as many communication channels (sight, sound, kinetics) as possible to present them. It’s the same whether you’re persuading one person or a hundred.

If it sounds a lot like selling the work to the people who need to do it, it is. Arthur Schiff said the name “Ginsu” came to him in his sleep. So remember that in the knowledge age, you are trying to get access to productivity that may actually be in the worker’s subconscious mind. That means the worker must be persuaded to believe in your goals, not just pay them lip service.

The skill to inspire

As Peter Drucker observed, knowledge work is self-directed. Managers often cannot even recognize when the work is successfully completed. In the knowledge age, only the worker knows whether he or she is supplying best effort. The most reliable way to get that effort, and those additional flashes of brilliance that can give an organization a competitive advantage, is to inspire the knowledge worker to the highest levels of passion and enthusiasm.

You inspire people first with passion and enthusiasm. But you need to learn a little stragecraft. You need to learn the behaviors that audiences perceive as charisma: the posture, the gestures, the vocal tone and volume. Getting your “stage presence” right may not necessarily make you charismatic, but it will go a long way toward eliminating anything that prevents your audience from seeing you that way.

Communication skills

You may have managers in your organization who are naturally skilled at maintaining relationships, persuading employees, and inspiring people. But you don’t necessarily need to go out and recruit persuasive, inspirational people to manage knowledge workers. All three of those skills can be taught. They are each made up of a repertoire of definable behaviors, which you can impart to managers and aspiring managers through close coaching and practice.

If these skills can be taught, they should be, for the stakes are high. As Peter Drucker pointed out, this is a chance to get it right so that future generations can find a workplace unburdened with a legacy of fear.

And there’s one more thing we will all need to learn: how to recognize thinking when we see it.