03-23-2026LEADERSHIP NOW

Our whole way of thinking about leadership is a century out of date

Here’s how to think instead.

Frederick Winslow Taylor [Photo Illustration: FC, Wiki Commons (source photo)]

Think about how we commonly seek to motivate human performance in our workplaces: Employees are treated as costs to be minimized rather than people to be invested in. Performance is managed through fear of consequences. Supervisors closely monitor daily tasks, requiring frequent check-ins or reports. Being available at all hours is treated as evidence of commitment. Directives flow one way—downward. Feedback is delivered as judgment rather than support. In practice, if not in intention, we still manage people more like machines than human beings.

How did we get here—and, more importantly, why have we never left?

Most of what we call “modern management” isn’t modern at all. It was born on factory floors over a century ago, in an era when work was often dehumanizing: repetitive, physical and performed by people who needed a paycheck and had little choice but to show up. It was Frederick Winslow Taylor—the father of scientific management—who gave it shape. He believed workers were inherently unmotivated and therefore had to be told exactly what to do, how to do it, and when. Control and even micromanagement was seen as essential to driving performance.

The problem isn’t that Taylor was wrong for his time. The problem is that we’re still using his model in a completely different era of work. Today’s workplace runs on judgment, adaptability, creativity, collaboration, and discretionary effort—none of which can be commanded or controlled. When the nature of work changes this fundamentally, the philosophy we use to lead people must change with it. So far, it really hasn’t.

A Deeply Entrenched Mindset

Over time, Taylor’s ideas became the blueprint for how organizations everywhere learned to manage people. They shaped how business schools taught leadership, how organizations were structured, and perhaps most powerfully, how one generation of managers trained the next. The underlying assumption—that people are fundamentally unmotivated and need to be pushed, watched, and held accountable through oversight and intimidation—became so entrenched, it stopped feeling like an assumption at all. It started feeling like common sense.

But it was never really common sense. As far back as the 1920s, the Hawthorne studies revealed that workers became more productive simply when they felt noticed and valued. People, it turns out, want to contribute. They want to grow. They want to do good work—when given the conditions to do so.

Despite these findings, little changed because Taylor’s ideas had already become so deeply rooted in business that his assumptions were no longer questioned. His rigid ideology was simply passed on from one generation of managers to the next.

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