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By Root 886 0

for authority. It is bred into the system. Senior people are seen as being in possession of some superior wisdom, to be revered if not downright feared. The reality is that the company’s most senior executives are just people who happened to get promoted and who daily face the insecurity of wondering if they are doing the right thing. The good leader deals with that insecurity by putting forth his or her ideas, then letting subordinates dissect and critique them. At Chrysler, we often had chaotic meetings, where some of my direct reports engaged in behavior that an outsider would have termed insubordinate bordering on mutinous. But that’s when we had the clearest communication and surfaced ideas and opinions devoid of the buffering wads of tissue paper designed to avoid hurting someone’s feelings.

At GM meetings, I often found that not a lot got said. Other than “the presenter” (often hardly listened to, because everyone had seen all the material in advance), no voices were heard. In fact, for the most senior meetings, GM invented a crazy system wherein not only the subject presentation was seen in advance, but questions and comments based on the presentation were also distributed. By the time the meeting actually occurred, everyone had read the presentations as well as the usually sycophantic comments (intellectual tours de force, many of them, designed to display the depth of thinking and profound knowledge of the commentator), and only “questions” were dealt with. The answers had also been created in advance, appeared on the big screen, and it came down to asking the original questioner if the written answer satisfied his or her curiosity. It always did.

What was lacking in all this organizational, almost ritualistic perfection was the spontaneous, productive, healthy, sometimes angry discussion that ensues in a less structured format. It was as if the system had been set up for the sole purpose of promoting “smoothness” and lack of discord. An admirable societal goal, perhaps (though I doubt it), but hardly the sign of a high-performance organization.

In my area, Product Development, I could set the tone. I chaired my early meetings—with my staff and the dozen or so vehicle line executives—with my usual blend of outrageous statements, deliberate exaggerations, mild sarcasm, and funny stories. This has usually proven effective for me: people see through it, realize it’s a bit of an act, feel more at ease, and begin to relax and contribute.

Not so in some of my first meetings with the Product Development folks. As I delivered my usual soliloquies, I saw nothing but heads bent over the table, pens scribbling furiously on notepads!

“What are you people doing?!” I asked.

“Well,” they told me, “you’re talking, and we want to remember what you’re saying, so we’re taking it all down.”

“Look, people,” I replied, “I tend to have a lot of ideas and strong views, which are not necessarily correct. But I want you all to know what I think and believe about a lot of subjects. I know I’m full of crap a lot of the time, but that comes with the territory.Your job is to provide me with honest feedback. I don’t know everything, especially not in this company. I guarantee I will never be angry or hold a grudge if you argue intelligently with me. You can even, with impunity, tell me that I’m full of crap, but you will need to preface it with the phrase, ‘With all due respect, sir, you are full of crap!’” That brought forth the first genuine laughter, but the group was still wary.

A few weeks later, during one intense meeting, a stocky, powerfully built VLE and successful amateur race driver named Tom Wallace looked first at me and then at the group, took a deep breath, and said, “OK, here goes, I’m gonna try it. . . . ‘With all due respect, sir, you are full of crap!’” There was the slightest moment of tense silence, and then I congratulated him on being the first to test me. We all laughed; the meetings got progressively better after that. (By the way, Tom wasn’t right in his opinion on the subject, but it didn’t matter.)

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