Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [41]
At the time, he couldn’t understand why his wife never seemed to want to go on an impromtu camping trip with him, just the two of them. He took it personally. He was so exasperated that he even questioned her sanity to himself. But one night, sitting in the kitchen with her, he remembered something Covey had written, and he tried it. He attempted to set aside all judgment and just imagine himself in her place, to just listen to her. “And then,” Westphal told us, “this huge epiphany hit me: She cares more about the children’s safety than our romance.” Her reluctance had nothing to do with him or their marriage and everything to do with her concern for their children. But Jeff had been too wrapped up in his own interests and desires to see it.
“I realized I had never gotten it,” Westphal continued. “And it, literally, just totally changed my world. Because I thought I understood everybody, and I realized in that instant that I never really understood anybody. I understood what I wanted to understand about them, rather than who they really were and what their needs were. And my second thought was, ‘Oh my God, how many times have I been wrong before?’”
This is not the way a typical CEO begins a conversation with visitors who have come to learn about his company. But just as we began to worry that he’d mistaken us for itinerant marriage counselors, he tied it all together. “The application to business was this: ‘Whoa! I’m walking around thinking I get it. But I don’t get it. And other people are walking around thinking they get it, but they don’t get it.’” With each person, or each department, in a company operating from its own self-interest, conflicts are inevitable and unsolvable, so it seems natural to install someone above them—a boss—who can referee disputes between these competing interests, calling it coordination. But the boss is trapped within his own frame of reference, unable to listen and used to telling, giving rise to gamesmanship and the interoffice intrigue that we all know all too well. “Once you know that basically everybody is walking around not really understanding the people that they are relating to, you know that you have to do something about that,” Westphal said. “You can’t not do something about it; you have to. Because now you can imagine the superior business performance you could achieve by having people who actually understand each other,” and who can, by working together, achieve things that none of those involved could have accomplished while trapped in their own narrow perspectives.
“The very first ‘program’ that we implemented,” Westphal continued, “was for me to change my behavior. I started listening, I started actually involving people in my decision making.” Westphal realized that it was his top-down approach, telling people how to do their jobs, that made them stick to their individual perspectives and make choices that fit their self-interests and breed conflicts, instead of communicating and deciding among themselves on the best action to advance the company’s vision. So, instead of “tell, tell, tell,” he decided to try something different: “I came to work the next day after the experience with my wife and I started listening.” It was not so long afterward that this first and, apparently, small step of building a free environment delivered a huge result.
During a meeting to assess how to move forward with the failed software-development project, one manager observed how the tax-software field seemed to be moving in a different direction from the one their project was pursuing. Enterprise resource planning, this person argued, was the future of their business. Westphal recalled, “After this failed project I thought we should redouble our efforts… because I tended to be goal-target focused. But then I started to listen. And Gerry Hurley, who is our marketing VP today, had noticed that circumstances were