Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [43]
What sets these leaders apart from others is that they were not simply critical of their companies. They actually could not stand it anymore. Not content to just criticize their employers, or complain about what didn’t work while actually doing nothing, they were moved to action. The distinction between being critical and being exasperated is not just psychological hairsplitting. After all, when businesspeople are critical of something, they quickly act to ameliorate it. Right?
Not so fast. We know one division head at a famous American corporation who loves to tell internal audiences a story about his father, a crane operator. One night at dinner, the story goes, his father told him that a new boss had come in and said that the company’s goal was to improve productivity by 30 percent.
“Will you do it?” his son asked.
“Hell, no,” the father replied.
“But do you know how to do it?” the son persisted.
“Sure I do,” the father answered, showing his deep disengagement with the company and its “how” bosses and his unwillingness to help them. If they want to tell him how to do his job, well then, his attitude is, fine. But don’t ask me how to do it better. The father in the story was resigned to the idea that management didn’t value his ideas anyway, so he saw no reason to try to help them.
The executive who tells this story around his own company is convinced that people have the golden keys to improve performance, and he is critical of the “how” environment that prevents them from putting these keys to use. But he, himself, despite being critical of his company’s performance—where the annual turnover among salesmen has hit 40 percent—is not exasperated. Besides sharing this tale from his childhood, he has done little to create an environment that frees people in his own company. Telling people that they hold the keys to great performance is still, after all, a form of telling. Liberation demands more.
Yet, like this executive, thousands of CEOs and key players who experience poor performance and criticize their “how” environments, don’t change them. Instead, many row twice as hard. They blame certain employees or certain corporate fads—or, worse still, factors external to the company. Hence, the many periodic bloodlettings and fad “diets.”
Others don’t even row harder. Instead, they spend time criticizing and waiting for some instant alternative. Meanwhile, they don’t lead the necessary transformation so that the right boat can be built to take the company to a world-class destination. As the eminent leadership scholar and former executive Robert Greenleaf wrote:
So many… having taken their firm stand against injustice and hypocrisy, find it hard to convert themselves into affirmative builders of a better society. How many of them will seek their personal fulfillment by making the hard choices and by undertaking the rigorous preparation that building a better society requires? … Criticism has its place, but as a total preoccupation it is sterile…. If too many potential builders are taken in by a complete absorption with dissecting the wrong and by zeal for instant perfection, then the movement so many of us want to see will be set back. The danger, perhaps, is to hear the analyst too much and the artist too little.3
What did this hard choice concretely imply when the “artists,” the “affirmative builders” of the freedom-based companies, decided to act, to take the first step of the liberation campaign? For most,