Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [6]
So the “funny time” ended. No supervisors ever attempted to write rules and policies again, because there were no more supervisors at Gore. And the leaders, who took the place of the supervisors, were busy helping people—instead of telling them how they had to work. But it would take more experimentation and time before Bill Gore fully implemented his second big idea of a radically different way to work.
THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD
Fast-forward to the mid-1980s. Thirteen years ago, Lewis had left the company for greener pastures. After spending this period in more traditional command-and-control companies, he’s now decided to return to his native Newark, Delaware, and give W. L. Gore & Associates the benefit of knowledge and experience he’s gained about managing big companies. Gore itself had gotten a lot bigger over the years, with several manufacturing sites in the United States and abroad and several thousand associates. The circumstances looked perfect. The plant had just been moved to a brand-new facility and Lewis, a newly minted manufacturing leader had a big corner office, making him feel important: “I was feeling very confident—‘I have arrived,’ you know?” There was a lot on his plate. Operations were inefficient and the manufacturing techniques people used appalled Lewis: “Instead of computers they were using a columnar pad with numbers they were ticking off to run manufacturing operations by hand.”
So Lewis decided to change all that, to instill some discipline, show people that they were working in a backward way, and push them to use a newfangled tool called a computer spreadsheet.
It looked like the right thing to do. Though quite big already, the company lagged behind its main competitors in the use of modern, computer-based operations management. Lewis’s proposed course of action was unimpeachable and would have been accepted in any other company. What Lewis couldn’t see is how different Gore had become since he’d left.
His efforts lasted six months and the only result was personal—he was ready to leave the company again. And it wasn’t because of then-president Bob Gore’s—Bill’s son—hatred of computers (“Bill hated forms, Bob hated computers,” Lewis explained) but because no associate would ever listen to him, never mind follow him. “I was using the techniques that I had been practicing for thirteen years elsewhere. More power, more influence, more whatever, and suddenly it dawned on me—an epiphany: ‘You know what the Gore organization is like. You were in it. Why are you trying this top-down kind of a way?’”
And so Lewis rediscovered the values and principles of leadership Bill Gore had taught him and others at their Socratic dinner meetings. Lewis dubbed it the “yellow brick road.”
“You ask your associates ‘Where do you want to go?’” Lewis told us. “And they say, ‘To the Emerald City.’ So you don’t tell them, ‘Follow the yellow brick road,’ the road your own knowledge dictates is the right one,” Lewis explained. “You don’t, because all they will say is, ‘You’re crazy. We’re going off through the woods.’ So you take your bricks and go with them, and throw them one by one in front of them—not giving the answer, but ideas, information, letting them find their own answers. And with every new brick they step on, [your] credibility goes up.” Lewis summarized: “I had no credibility, but little by little each of those bricks brought my credibility up.”
Lewis had rediscovered that, with all his responsibility for leading a big plant, all his knowledge and experience about how to run operations better, associates wouldn’t follow him until he filled what he called his “credibility bucket.” He was learning that a “leader” is not just a manager with a different title. A leader is someone whom others follow naturally. At Gore, when Lewis returned, that culture was already so strong that he ran into it face-first, and it nearly drove him back into the command-and-control world. But even at more traditional companies, this same dynamic holds. It’s