The Dangers of Commodity Work

Several years ago Deborah Mayer taught elementary school in Indiana. Then she was fired. The reason was four words: “I honk for peace”. That’s the reply that she gave a student who asked her if she would ever take part in a peace march. The case is wending its way up the court system’s food chain, and legally, it revolves around the issue of free speech. As a citizen, the case would interest me, as I’m sure it would you. But from a business perspective, what strikes me as also worthy of discussion is the rationale given by a federal appeals court which denied Mayer’s claim that her speech was violated. The court stated that the teacher’s speech is “a commodity she sells to an employer in exchange for her salary.” Did I hear that right? This is another reason why courts and legislators should be carefully bridled before being unleashed on an unwitting economy. The best leaders (including school principals) understand that any organization in which employees simply do “commodity” work is an organization doomed to mediocrity and inevitable decline. Commodity work—defined by job descriptions, employment contracts, official company directives, and such—are the bare minimum standards in today’s hypercompetitive environment. They highlight the kinds of performance that in aggregate, allows companies to survive—for the time being. But to thrive, organizations need to have employees fully engaged in not just “doing” their work, but regularly critiquing it and changing it in order to continually create more value for the organization and its customers. And by achieving these higher hurdles, employees ought to be psychologically rewarded and financially compensated well beyond conventional wisdom commodity benchmarks.I tell my clients repeatedly: If you recruit and pay for commodity work at any level and any function, you’ll get commodity output, which is the kiss of death in today’s marketplace. Further, I advise them that if they see chunks of their organization buried in commodity work, then they must consider these alternatives:: 1. Lay out new (higher) performance expectations, create a new culture of empowerment and accountability, train the dickens out of people, help them overcome their fears of the new, and then get the heck out of the way. 2. Reward the creative contributors generously. Terminate the chronic nay-sayers..3. Hire and promote talented people—the kinds that want to be treated as “businesspeople”—the kinds that are eager to learn, are excited to set more ambitious goals, and who want to take initiative and responsibility. 4. Whenever you can’t do #1, #2, or #3, then go another route: eliminate, digitalize, divest, outsource or offshore the functions and activities (including total jobs) that cannot be de-commoditized. My point is that no healthy vibrant organization would accept the federal court’s perspective that an employee or manager sells commodity work for a (commodity) salary. But I’ve seen unhealthy organizations with leaders who can’t understand why their “industry-standard” wages and “clear job descriptions” don’t generate groundbreaking products, services or cost-cutting efforts. And I’ve seen tort lawyers sue companies who terminated an employee who would only do commodity work on the grounds that the employee was “adequately” performing the “job description” or “terms of the contract.” And by the way, notwithstanding how Deborah Mayer’s case turns out, this little discussion is so very applicable to our public school system. As I’ve written in my February 15 blog “Are Teachers Overpaid? What a Stupid Question!” (see http://www.harari.com/blog/), if we’re to compete in a knowledge economy, we desperately need to attract and retain teachers who don’t view their work as a commodity.