Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [129]
Now, the freedom to wear a tie or not is hardly the most important business decision a company can make. That is precisely the reason that Forward likes to tell that story: The way he sees it, if you need to make rules about trivial matters, how can you trust employees to make important decisions on your company’s behalf?
TIES, MIDRIFFS, AND THE DESIRE FOR RULES
This view of dress codes in particular was echoed at both Sun Hydraulics and Vertex. Greg Hyde, Sun’s human resources director, connected dress codes with a theme we encountered earlier: the use of rules to avoid what would otherwise be considered normal human interaction. “Why have a dress code?” Hyde asked. If someone is offended by someone else’s state of dress, “Aren’t they the ones who should talk to them about it?”2
The dress code is a means of replacing that conversation—admittedly, a potentially awkward and tense one—with a formal rule. And a hierarchy to enforce it: “If you have a hierarchy,” Hyde explained, “now you have to go to him [the boss] and say, ‘Hey, he is violating the rule! Can you go tell him?’” Hyde added, wisely: “And now you create animosity between the people.” A minor conflict that might have been resolved amicably becomes an occasion for one employee to wield the company’s authority against another. That use of the hierarchy increases animosity, suspicion, and tension. A rule—in this case, a dress code—designed to maintain civility and decorum has, in practice, diminished both. And in the process, as Gordon Forward would put it, the appeal to rules has diminished everyone involved from responsible adults to rebellious children.
Now, again, dress codes are not the most pressing issue facing any business, and yet they came up repeatedly in our encounters. At the request of some employees, Jeff Westphal once let a committee meet to establish a dress code for Vertex. But after they had discussed such weighty questions as how much midriff exposure was too much, they returned to common sense and to the answer offered by Greg Hyde at Sun: If an employee is dressing in a way that makes someone uncomfortable, those two people should be able to talk without having to send the discussion through official “channels.” Stan Richards had a formulation almost identical to Hyde’s: “Dress so that you are comfortable, so long as it doesn’t make someone else feel uncomfortable.”
This topic came up spontaneously in the first hour of our visit to Chaparral Steel’s mill—now owned by Gerdau Ameristeel—in Petersburg, Virginia. “The system Gordon [Forward] had implemented is of informality and of no symbolism,” Gary Titler told us. Titler started at Chaparral’s Texas mill in 1982 after a prior stint at a unionized plant in Michigan. When we met him in 2008, he was raw materials manager for the Petersburg mill. “The only time you’d see a tie other than a funeral would be in the case of a new-hire interview and that was it. At other times that tie was symbolic in the industry in the early days of the haves and the have-nots.” Then, without pausing or even acknowledging the shift, Titler moved from talking about ties to talking about more profound freedoms. “So when I got to Texas, what I found was that the culture expected me to use my mind, to have ideas, expected me not to sit there and tell my fellow employees what must be done but tell my manager how I could help him.”3
Quad/Graphics has taken a somewhat different approach, which relates to the nature of its business. Those working in the company’s printing plants must dress in a certain way both for the sake of safety and because working around barrels of ink all day requires certain concessions in matters of fashion. But Harry and Tom Quadracci wanted to avoid creating an obvious distinction of status between the “suits” in the office