Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [63]
The last principle was that transforming a command-and-control company is a radical undertaking—a break, as Zobrist calls it. He compares some would-be reformers to Louis XVI, the last French king. Like him, they are very intelligent, cultivated people, but they fold every time their reforms face opposition from the ruling class. Zobrist did try many nonthreatening ways to involve—and evolve—his “ruling class” of managers by “flowing around them” with his ideas. But unlike Louis XVI, he never folded to this class when they resisted and openly challenged the transformation. Instead, Zobrist charged, because frontline people needed to be treated well so that they would act freely for their own betterment and for FAVI’s.
It will not do to be a cautious radical, and Zobrist’s “ready, fire, aim” character was well-suited to swift action and decision making. Indeed, his first nine months at FAVI had been perhaps the longest period of inactivity that he had experienced in his life. His quick trigger finger was so well-known there that some of them would enter his office and place their hand over the receiver of his phone before they started speaking. “Please,” they would say, “hear me out to the end before you call anybody.” But Zobrist also saw his inclination to act in haste as a virtue of sorts. “It’s the risk-taking issue,” he told us. “Many people want to control it completely, so they analyze scenarios: ‘If I do this, then the other may do that, then I can do this….’ They have too much respect for intelligence … [so] they never actually act. I respect common sense and intuition. I act first and then deal with the consequences. If my action was ill-suited, I then simply change my course.”
To put this another way, Zobrist no more expected perfect decision making from himself than he did from his people. Many leaders, when they think about letting go of the “how” structures, can only picture the things that might go wrong. What if some employee does X? Or calls some client and costs us an account? Or crashes a company car while on a personal errand? One can come up with an infinite number of these imaginary disasters if one is determined to think about them. And mistakes happen—in fact, they happen all the time, even in the most tightly controlled companies. Top managers are not immune from making them. Zobrist’s willingness to accept mistakes and missteps by himself was reflected in his ability to let others take risks, too. Just as Bill Gore, on a different continent, was fond of saying, “If you haven’t made any mistakes, you’re not taking enough risks,” Zobrist accepted his own mistakes as the price of action. And he had the wisdom to expect no more—or less—from his people.
“Life is risk,” he used to say. “Once you wake up every day you’re at risk. There is only one state with zero risk—and it happens when you’re dead.” Talk about “live free”—with risk—“or die.”
TREATING PEOPLE WITH GRACE
SO THEY ACT BOLDLY
Changing the CEO’s behavior from talking to listening, removing bureaucratic symbols and practices that treat people as intrinsically inferior, and radically transforming managers’ “how” habits into “why” questions, is a hard, often risky, and always lengthy process. A hussard “ready, fire, aim” style may help to break a couple of hard rocks, but trying to transform people’s behavior takes a long time. Zobrist spent nine months trying to transform the incumbent managers’ practices before giving up and eliminating that layer of management altogether.
In some companies this transformation took months—as at FAVI. At others, such as USAA, Vertex, and Harley, it took much longer. But in all of them the change in the way people were treated by the company and its managers—now leaders—led to a change in how people acted. Instead of complacency in executing bosses’