Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [79]
It is possible, by the way, that some senior managers were listening. However, remembering Kolind’s rough treatment early on, they were more likely to hide problems from him than to bring them to his attention—nobody would want to be branded as a “problem” manager. And Kolind himself had been taken up with other things too often to listen to his people and to act as an effective culture keeper. So tensions and frustrations built until the people rose up in open revolt. The culture was discredited. Kolind understood this danger perfectly, in theory. He even wrote, “The more freedom … we as a company want to give to staff, the more clarity we must create about mission, vision, strategy, and values.”33 And yet he still failed to maintain this clarity.
The backlash was predictable. Oticon’s employees had been promised freedom, but the hierarchy that was shown the door sneaked back in through the window—of the Products and Projects Committee. This loss of control naturally produced a counterstrike against the perceived source of stress—the top management.
People at Oticon had certain trappings of freedom—they could set their own work schedules and move their desks—that is, caddies—anywhere in the company’s open space. But when it came to the most important aspects of their work, managers had continued to exercise the power of life-and-death authority over the projects that, in theory, frontline people were supposed to organize their work around.
It is curious, but true, that people who are promised freedom but then denied it—whether they worked at Oticon or were enrolled at UVA in its earliest days—perceive the lack of freedom much more strongly and so behave unpredictably when confronted by it. A person who has no expectation of freedom may, in fact, see their situation as normal and prove more docile than one who has had it offered with one hand and taken away with another. Kolind had, in a sense, released his own monster by promising more than he, as leader, delivered in the end.
Kolind’s story is important because a liberation campaign isn’t easy to pull off, and Oticon’s case shows how even subtle mistakes can grow into serious problems down the road. Of the three universal needs discussed earlier, Oticon fell short most clearly when it came to self-direction, and as with Jefferson’s faculty, it was the layer of management between the visionary and the frontlines that short-circuited the nourishing environment. It was Kolind’s responsibility, as it was Jefferson’s, to listen for the signs of this before they blew up. He failed to act as Oticon’s “culture keeper”—a concept we’ll explore in chapter 13—and so he left his employees feeling betrayed.
But now let’s turn to building an environment that does nourish those needs. Done right, this will lead people to act both on their own initiative and in ways that serve the company’s vision. The leaders in the following chapters show that it can be done.
9
FROM MOTIVATION TO
SELF-MOTIVATION,
PART TWO
Work and Management Practices That Nourish
ROBERT TOWNSEND MAY have been the first liberating leader to transform a needs-depriving corporate environment into a nourishing one. In 1962, when he became a CEO of Avis, he already had one liberation campaign under his belt from his time as an executive at American Express. There, he had put into practice his radical approach to removing everything that stifles employee initiative. But that was on a smaller scale in American Express’s investment and banking division, where essentially everyone worked in the same building in New York. At Avis, he faced a different reality, with about one thousand rental offices—each with several branches—scattered all over the continent. He also faced a sleepy company that had struggled to make a profit for thirteen years without success. Making Avis profitable thus became Townsend’s first priority. To make it the top priority of Avis’s thousand or so offices as well, he turned each one of them into its own profit and loss center. In itself,