Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [50]
It wouldn’t hurt to assume, in short, that every man-and woman-is a human being, not a rectangle.
—ROBERT TOWNSEND, 19704
To convince people that they will be treated as equals, a would-be liberator must break down the barriers of distrust and status that exist in most companies. We have already discussed how important it is for the liberating leader to stop telling and start listening, but that’s only the initial step. Bob Davids has started or run seven companies in his life. When asked what is required of a leader in order to begin a liberation campaign, he replied, “To be able to subordinate himself to his employees.” By this he didn’t mean only listening. He also meant cleaning the floors of his latest start-up, Sea Smoke Cellars, himself because it needed to be done and because his employees had more important work to do. It also meant literally getting down in the dirt and digging a ditch alongside his fellow employees at his former company, Radica Games. In both cases, Davids was applying the advice of Robert Townsend, a friend, mentor, and eventual board member at Radica. The former Avis CEO held that a leader is like “a blocking back whenever and wherever needed—no job is too menial to him if it helps one of his players advance toward his objective,”5 and a water boy “who carries water for his people so they can get on with the job.”6 Because subordinating oneself to one’s people is the opposite of using one’s power and authority, it’s a way to build a genuine—“egalitarian,” as Davids and Townsend call it—relationship with them.
Seen in this way, it becomes only natural that liberating leaders, the “blocking backs,” the servants of their people, do not display the material signs of privilege.7 Mahogany executive floors and big corner offices with expensive furniture, company limousines and personalized reserved parking spaces are some of the symbols of unequal status that they avoid.
Even doors can be wielded as a sign of status in a company. At Harley, for this reason, they decided that even “open doors” wouldn’t do the trick of facilitating genuine relations. So if you walk into their legendary redbrick headquarters in Milwaukee, you will find no doors at all—they removed all of them, except where privacy is truly necessary: in the HR director’s office and—understandably—in the bathrooms. These gestures might seem purely symbolic. And if they are not accompanied by genuine changes in how a company operates, they would be, and employees would quickly see through them. Thus, when a leader says he will listen to his employees but routes all correspondence through a dedicated mailbox separate from his main, “work” email, people understand the fakery quickly. Likewise, a CEO who has several layers of “open door” guards will get little credit when her door, if you can reach it, is actually open. In neither case is this interpreted as “I listen to your ideas.” Bob Davids, when he built Radica Games’ Chinese facility, installed his desk—“the oldest, crappiest one at the company,”8 in his words—smack-dab in the center of the office. “Once our employees could see I was dedicated to fairness and supporting them,” he told us, “I had gained their respect and allegiance.”
But even the most concrete proof of intrinsic equality may not convince some people. And they shouldn’t be blamed. We’re willing to wager that you might have been skeptical at first that a company could afford not to control its people, not to tell them how to do their jobs, and that all these “dressed-down,” “egalitarian” CEOs were not hiding something up their rolled-up sleeves. Naturally, many employees don’t believe it either, at least at the beginning. We mentioned earlier that for a whole year after Zobrist removed the time clock at FAVI, employees would look nostalgically at the place on the wall