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Nanobots are a hot new thing in medicine. Check out nanobots flowing through a blood vessel here. That's one kind of nanobot.

There's also a management version. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal ran an article titled "Away From the Desk...Always." In the management world, "nanobot" stands for "Nearly Autonomous, Not in the Office, doing Business in their Own Time." Somebody deserves a buzzword award for that one.

The article is about these newly-named workers. Evidently they don't work in teams much. But, since they are a new thing, we're told that they require "a new breed of manager."

Maybe. Or maybe they require the kind of supervision we should have been doing all along.

Most supervisors in most companies get next to no training in the supervisory parts of their jobs. They tend to fall back on the conceptual model of the supervisor on a factory floor.

Those supervisors were much like my third grade teacher, Mrs. McKinley. They had all the answers. They ruled with the threat of discipline. And their supervision was purely line of sight.

That worked fine in an era where most supervisors were experts in all the details of the work, when workers didn't expect praise, and when all the work was right in front of them. In a knowledge economy none of those conditions remain true.

This has been sneaking up on us for a while. While we've been paying attention to other things, workers on our teams have become independent experts who increasingly work where we can't see them.

When Jeff Senne and I wrote Net Income in the mid-1990s we found companies where a third of the workforce was out of "the office" at any given time.

Earlier this year I worked with a US government agency. Eighty percent of their people work outside the "office" for at least part of every week.

The landscape has changed, but we've got plenty of models for management of people we can't see. Most sales managers with field sales forces have been doing this for years. So have trucking companies. So have most police departments.

In all those situations, the people doing the work do most of it when their supervisor isn't there. The good supervisors in those situations do things all supervisors should do.

They set clear expectations. They monitor results. They touch base a lot.

You can do that, too. Even if you're managing nanobots.