Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [135]
Koski’s insight was another version of creative problem redefinition. Instead of asking how to improve the mechanisms of employee and information control, Koski solved the problem of how to properly equip people with information about their jobs and the authority to act on that information. When you remove the need to have the supervisor detail how and when to get the job done by giving people the information they need to make those decisions themselves, you change the whole dynamic between the leaders and their people. Koski again: “Then the leaders, as I prefer to call them in the company, managers or whatever, are mentors. And they never have the drive to become hard. [Because] they’re never holding anybody responsible for their performance, or not often.” The workers’ jobs have been “enriched,” in McDermott’s words, by both information and knowledge, and the managers’ jobs have been made more fulfilling. And neither is being held responsible for factors that are outside their control and in the others’ hands.
“One of the things we tell our boys,” said Kevin Grogan, plant manager of Chaparral’s Petersburg mill, “is that the best decisions are not always made at the top.”10 Jim Macaluso, in charge of melt-shop maintenance, added: “The people on the floor are making decisions in our mills worth millions of dollars. So we have to support them, give them tools and knowledge, and show them how to be better at that.”11
Placing these responsibilities where they belong satisfies the needs of both the leader and the led to direct their own affairs and, therefore, eliminates stress. It also treats those frontline people like the adults they are. Another creative redefinition: The problem of “how to soothe relations between managers and subordinates to reduce stress” becomes “how to transform the hierarchical relationship into one between equals in order to eliminate stress.”
It is no accident, then, that some variation on “universal information” came up with every liberating leader we met. It is an essential corollary, as Koski framed it, of altering the traditional “how” company dynamic. Perhaps butterflies can’t fly in formation because they aren’t well informed about their destination. Thus, they become—to use David Kelley’s expression—sheep, herded from place to place by a sheep dog who is merely following the commands of a shepherd who, alone, knows the destination. And we shouldn’t be surprised, as Liisa Joronen remarked, that these sheep look unmotivated or just plain lazy: “Everyone wants to do good work. [People] are not lazy … Everyone wants to be good … It’s like animals.
They are not bad. We treat animals in a bad way,” and you get bad behavior in return.12
Joronen, once she retired from her CEO position, achieved a result remniscent of the peaceful Forest Troop baboons on her French farm. Having seen the film Babe five times, she gradually built a similar environment, acquiring several dozen domestic animals, including a pair of extremely smart piglets. But Joronen outdid Babe, and not only because her farm is real. Wild animals—deer, boars, rabbits, and foxes—moved onto the farm’s land, too, and seem to coexist peacefully “because,” Joronen explained, “we don’t hunt and we give them food.” Talk about the benefits of tender, loving care.
Employees, of course, are not sheep nor dogs nor wild animals, all of which have the rather simple need to be treated