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By Root 1077 0

came the people’s need to self-direct. The service agents were organized into self-directing teams focused on specific clients and then turned loose. Each team—based on the local knowledge of its market—decided what their growth and profit forecasts would be and created a budget to achieve them. Joronen admits to being “quite nervous” the first year, waiting to add up those numbers and learn what all those self-directing units had decided SOL’s budget would be: “If the budget had been very low, what could be done? Or the reverse, if it had been very high?” Joronen remembered the budget game she had played herself at the bank, where everyone used to put down low growth targets because they always expected the higher-ups to add something on the top.

When the teams’ budgets came in, she was surprised: Most of the teams put up ambitious forecasts, and, remarkably, they met their forecasts—despite a sluggish economy at the time. And these self-directed teams have never stopped since: From 1992 through 2008, they produced 15 percent average annual growth and 8 percent to 9 percent profit margins. But something more happened when these equally treated, highly trained people were turned loose on the customers. They did not merely provide cleaning services to the clients’ full satisfaction—they even started to sell these services. While cleaning and interacting with the customer—recall, it’s daytime—and while analyzing customers’ satisfaction they often discovered new customer needs. It could be a customer unhappy with a wooden floor that needed waxing or with dirty windows that needed cleaning. Whatever the need, these service agents would then go to see the client’s buyer, explain the newly discovered needs, and propose a price to do the job. This was possible in part because all the service agents were fully familiar with the company’s pricing policies, margins, and finances. They also knew well that the margins on these extras are much higher than on the main cleaning contract itself, which must be won through competitive bidding.

So at least in SOL’s free environment—“it’s a company policy not to have policies”—there were no paradoxes: It was built on a consistent logic of self-motivating people through satisfying their universal needs. But what is the role of the CEO once the freedom environment has been built?

“Let’s ask her.” Joronen deflected the question to SOL’s current CEO, Anu Eronen, Joronen’s former right-hand woman, who replaced her in 2002. Eronen was coming out of the “summer cottage” built for meetings (in the picture’s upper-left-hand corner), and Joronen asked her this question from up on the balcony where we were standing. Showing no evidence of surprise, the CEO thought for a moment and then replied, “Managing is organizing the success, organizing the kind of environment, [physical and, more important] mental…and providing the tools to…activate all the success.” Joronen added that when she was the CEO, Anu Eronen helped her, but today it is Anu who is “organizing the mental environment,” stressing, for example, the company’s focus on growth, profit, or what-have-you. “What you speak, you get,” she concluded. This may sound deceptively simple, but it matches the importance placed by other liberating leaders on constantly sharing the vision with everyone in the company. The current CEO has maintained the freedom environment, so there is not much for President Joronen, retired to her French farm, to do. From time to time she’ll fly from France to host visits like ours or to participate in external events. She has also continued to groom her children to succeed Eronen. But besides that, Joronen stays away from the company. Yet when her son was asked how he feels about his mother’s absence, Juppe Joronen was clear: “Liisa is all over the place, every day.” This was the ultimate paradox: Joronen was nowhere and everywhere all at once.

These paradoxes are no accident. In fact, these apparent contradictions, found not only in the example of Joronen but of all of the liberating leaders, are not a sign of sloppy