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By Root 1063 0

where it used to be. No doubt some of them were suspicious that, without the clock, they were being underpaid. And Ricardo Semler—who transformed Semco, a small “how” company he inherited, into a world-famous freedom-based poster child of Brazilian industry—recounted that, in the early liberation days, after he ordered security to stop searching people on their way out of the plant to check if they’d stolen something, people asked him to restore the searches.9 They explained that they wanted to be searched because that way they had proof of their innocence if something did go missing. Clearly, they suspected that somewhere, controls—and punishments—were still intact. Indeed, people don’t believe and interpret what leaders say but what they see them do—day after day, month after month. If everything a leader does satisfies people’s need to be treated as intrinsically equal, the leader will earn their respect.

DON’T SHOOT THE MANAGERS!

At Harley, the process of building trust was sometimes halting and often fraught with difficulty. At the outset, its centerpiece was what Teerlink called “the Joint Vision Process.” This was the process he exhorted the unions to join him in during the 1988 contract negotiations to define a “vision of the ideal future” through input from all levels. It was essential, because it would ensure that everyone would row toward the same, jointly agreed upon destination—that people would use their freedom to implement the jointly defined vision. It was a process because it was important not to foreordain the answer. If taken seriously, the process uncovers valuable information dispersed throughout the company about what it should be doing. A so-called vision that is simply imposed from on high—sometimes accompanied by a “buy-in” plan—won’t become “theirs” without “their” input. In that case, the vision won’t be emotionally embraced and owned by the people, who won’t, in turn, be committed to implementing it.

But even if the liberating leader succeeds in involving frontline people, the task of enlisting everyone is not yet accomplished. Indeed, companies are composed of more than just top management and frontline people. Managers and executives—with whom people interact much more often than with their CEOs—have to join the effort of building genuine relationships for the company to succeed. Whether they will depends largely on the relationship the liberating CEO succeeds in building with them.

For Rich Teerlink, developing genuine relationships with managers didn’t come naturally. In fact, deeply involved in building relationships with the unions, he simply forgot about them. The first warning sign that some managers were feeling neglected came from the unions themselves. On May 20, 1988, unions and top management met for the culmination of the year-long process of hammering out Harley’s twelve-page “Joint Vision” document. All went well until one union official said he had a question for Tom Gelb, the vice president for manufacturing.

“What would happen if managers under your supervision failed to behave according to the terms of the agreement?” he asked.

“Easy,” Gelb deadpanned. “We’ll just shoot them!”10

But before any firing squads could be organized, the next step in the Joint Vision Process demanded sharing the vision with employees, including frontline managers. A top executive and a union representative were to make the presentations as a pair.

The first session, to a couple hundred workers at a town hall-type event, went “magnificently”—Teerlink thought. One could barely distinguish between an executive and a union representative—until he opened the floor to questions. The first hand to go up belonged to Tom, the head of accounts payable.

“Rich, that is really great,” Tom began. Teerlink braced himself—every time Tom said that something was “great,” trouble came next. And it did: “But who represented people like me in this process?”

Teerlink was stunned. They had been so focused on the relationship with the unions that it hadn’t occurred to the executives that middle management needed