Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [127]
A HAPPY WORKPLACE, NOT A CULT
Even so, you may think that all this shaping of the corporate culture is simply an alternative and disguised means of employee control. And it is true that, instead of directly controlling their behavior through orders, policies, and motivational schemes—carrots and sticks—the freedom-based cultures use a number of norms—“unwritten rules”—that every employee must respect or face “soft excommunication.” No culture is without norms, and some sense of “how things are done around here” is inescapable.17 In a “how” culture, the norm may be “Always consult the hierarchy,” while in a “why” company, it may instead be, “Inform and consult all persons potentially affected by your future decision,” as it is at IDEO. This perception of the “social control” that a corporate culture exercises over behavior can be so strong that to outsiders, some liberated companies start to look like cults. And indeed, at Vertex, the Richards Group, and others, junior employees talk a little bashfully about how it must sound like they’d “drunk the Kool-Aid.” But a liberated company’s “rules of the game” are not imposed from on high. They grow up organically from people’s own interactions with one another. And in keeping with their bottom-up nature, they are self-enforced; there is no managerial class authorized to enforce policy on those at the bottom of the pile.
The Kool-Aid drinkers are not in the grips of some nefarious cult leader; they are happy about where they work—and to their friends, this can be highly suspicious. To many people trapped in “how” companies, the very idea of being happy at work is unthinkable. But in this happiness lies one of the key differences between “how” and “why” cultures. “How” companies are never called cults because very few people are happy in them. And they’re not happy because the cultural norms in these companies, instead of helping to meet people’s universal needs, are designed to meet the corporate nomenklatura’s particular ones. As a result, many employees are not merely unhappy; they are chronically stressed out, with all the damaging health consequences that result from that. Seen in this light, it’s the “how” companies that resemble real-life cults in the way they take advantage of new recruits for the benefit of the cult’s leaders, and in which domination and stress are not far from the surface. Liberated companies, on the other hand, are built to meet people’s universal needs so that they are self-motivated to act for mastery and happiness.
Finally, building a freedom-based environment is not a socially deterministic project. Unlike a “how” environment, which explicitly seeks to determine and control employees’ actions, the freedom environment seeks to make employees free to act for their own and for their company’s best interests—and to take full responsibility for it. Think again about Kelley’s design process—it is a set of work practices intended to facilitate coming up with the best solution humanly possible. These practices exist to support the arena in which the best ideas come forward freely and can be acted upon.
One of the many good reasons that liberated companies all practice some form of IDEO’s “consult with the affected” rule is that one never knows whose idea and feedback will be crucial to solving some problem. So while a liberated company’s norms and work practices constrain in some sense, they are liberating in another, far more profound, sense. Because these practices are “epistemologically humble,” they remain open to the contributions of all. “The goal,” as IDEO CEO Brown put it, “isn’t to finish. It is to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of the