Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [134]
That sounded familiar, so we pressed him further. How would Koski define Sun’s essential characteristic, the thing that set its culture apart? At first, Koski said it was “hard to describe.” He added, cautiously: “Some people understand it and some people don’t, from day one.” The “core thing,” he said, is what he called “universal information,” which sounds just like Stan Richards’s idea that “there are no unimportant people,” and so information should go to everyone at once. Universal information is intimately connected with Koski’s idea of adult-to-adult relationships. It also echoes Bob Davids’s warning that “dual standards” are a cancer. Dual standards can take the form of reserved parking spaces and other perks, but they can also show up in the flow of information within a company. And when information is wielded as a source of power, it is a clear sign that people are not being treated as adults or as equals.
That type of behavior is all too recognizable in most companies. But when Koski said you either get it or you don’t, he was referring to something deeper than whether your manager treats every tidbit of information from on high as a state secret. This, in his words, was how he tried to illustrate the importance of “universal information” to Sun Hydraulics: “Take a look at what goes on on a factory floor, where all the problems are. The supervisor has two jobs. One is, a new employee comes in, he’s got to teach him the job. So in that respect he’s a mentor.” But that supervisor, at most firms, is also the gatekeeper to the outside world. “When the work is coming in, he’s getting the work, telling these people what to do and think.” In the first role, as mentor, the supervisor gives the employee the tools, the knowledge, and the resources he needs to do his job. He helps him do it. But in the second role, he denies him some of those same things: information about order flow, deadlines, and scheduling. Koski continued: “Now this person, this worker, is being held accountable for something he has no control over. He can’t pick what he does, how he does it, where he does it, or when.” All these things are under the supervisor’s control, and yet the worker is still held accountable for getting the job done on time according to a schedule being set by somebody else. The supervisor has his own goals and performance measures to meet, and so he, in turn, imposes requirements on those who answer to him in order to protect himself.
Koski said he didn’t “have a good vocabulary” for talking about these workplace dynamics, and that he didn’t know anyone who did. And he sometimes struggled with the words for what he was trying to express. But the strength of his grasp of the essentials was made clear by what he said next: “And that’s where the problem is in terms of psychology: ‘Hard’ drives out ‘soft.’ And over time, the new supervisor, who starts out being mostly unmeasured, and then very soft with telling people what to do, becomes very eager, or impatient, I would call it, and more driving all the time, because he’s being held accountable for the results. And that’s the problem.”
In other words, within a traditional, “how” system, the “soft” manager is either made “hard” or is driven off. If he goes easy on his subordinates, they will underperform because they lack the information and tools to motivate themselves to get their jobs done. A soft boss in a rigid system does not equal liberation. In fact, as Koski pointed out, it invariably leads to the opposite as that soft boss squeezes a little bit harder over time to meet his own targets.
“So how do you fix it?” Koski asked, and then answered his own question: “Provide all the information that anybody could want, and then teach them how to find out what they need to know.”
“Universal information,” in other words, is not simply about respect and equal treatment. It is