Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [100]
The “miracles” continue today. Just a year before our interview, the company experienced some technical problems in delivering cylinder heads—the company’s key product—to Renault and Nissan. Worse, the two clients suddenly faced a surge in demand and put enormous pressure on Montupet to ship the parts. Nobody could find a solution until a team of operators—very much like FAVI’s operators do regularly—hit the road on their own and went to see the client plant’s operators and supervisors to explain to them the technical difficulties. This established both trust and cooperation between the two companies’ teams and the problems were soon resolved.
In other words, this talk of “treating people as equals,” “personal growth,” and “self-direction” is, in the end, all about allowing people to do a great job. The turnarounds accomplished by Zobrist, Teer-link, Westphal, Raiman, McDermott, and Magnan, and the start-ups founded by Gore, Davids, Forward, Quadracci, and others we’ll see, attest to that. Still, the question is worth looking at more closely. In “how” companies, most decisions, policies, and rules are made at the top, or near it. In this arrangement, the need for a “relationship” between company and employee is limited: Workers are given orders and told what to do and how to do it. They are measured—and controlled—according to whether they follow them. People, in turn, measure their employer according to how much they get for their complaisance in the form of compensation and perks—“goodies.” These goodies are then often used to satisfy the universal needs—to be treated as equal, to grow, and to self-direct—that are unfulfilled at work. When an employee restores a colonial house through hard work on weekends and over holidays, for example, he gets admiring reinforcement from family and neighbors, learns new skills, and runs his project as he deems best.
Nevertheless, many of these forms of control—those policies, procedures, and bureaucracy—are there for a reason. Some of them are, as Gordon Forward of Chaparral Steel put it, relics of some rare or singular mishap in the past that gave rise to a rule—his so-called managing for the 3 percent. But many rules serve another function as well: They are an institutionalized way of “communicating” with one’s workforce, even if the messages are often demoralizing, if not demeaning, frustrating, and likely to produce inefficiency.
The alternative communication means we have described—from CEOs’ listening instead of talking, removing the signs of executive privilege, of executives and managers being nourishing leaders to their teams, not raising their voices, removing bureaucratic symbols and practices, radically transforming or eliminating the HR and financial control departments—all these measures appear extremely diverse. For liberating leaders, though, they were undertaken for one common reason: to create a corporate environment that satisfies people’s universal need to be treated as intrinsically equal, with fairness and respect, so they can do a great job.
THE CASE FOR BUREAUCRACY
In 1922, the sociologist Max Weber could not know of liberated companies. The emerging corporate world was composed of “how” companies, and in an attempt to understand their success, Weber wrote an article on the necessity of bureaucracy. Following G. W. F. Hegel, he explained that unlike feudal organizations, in which relations were based on personal favoritism bestowed by authority holders to their vassals, bureaucracy treats everyone in an impersonal and absolutely fair manner by applying the same set of right regulations. Put aside the fact that many corporate regulations may be not only wrong but downright stupid and unfair to most. Weber seemed not to envisage a third way between personal favoritism and “fair” regulations: that relations