Why Managing Sucks and How to Fix It: A Results-Only Guide to Taking Control of Work, Not People

Chapter 6

Results

Not for Every Job?

“A Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) will never work for doctors and nurses.” “ROWEs could never exist in schools.” “I would never want my child care provider to be a ROWE!” Over the past 10 years, we’ve heard these comments umpteen times . . . and they used to make our blood boil. After all, aren’t health care professionals, teachers, and child care providers all people we want focusing on results?!

Fortunately for our boiled blood, we can now say that ROWE is working in these settings. And we get to add a cherry on top: not only is ROWE working in the social sector, it’s taking off in the public sector as well. We won’t lie; we love hearing skeptical comments now (in fact, we hope we hear them) so that we can immediately disprove them. Being able to talk about how these arenas are being positively impacted by the ROWE mind-set brings us great satisfaction. That’s what we’ll be sharing with you in this chapter.

When we broke off from Best Buy and started implementing ROWEs in other private sector organizations, we were sure we’d find ourselves in one office building after the other. We assumed that all of the Dilbert-esque workplaces across the globe would be the ones pulling ROWE in. Yet much to our surprise—and to our delight—we began hearing from educational institutions. Many of these organizations immediately saw the link between how they as an industry needed to reinvent themselves and how a ROWE could pave the path for a new trajectory. ...