Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [81]
This was followed by a systematic effort by Townsend and his thousand managers to identify every other work practice that prevented people from doing their best. They created a comprehensive list of questions that left no stone unturned: “What made you mad today?” “What took too long?” “What was the cause of any complaints today?” “What was misunderstood today?” “What costs too much?” “What was wasted?” “What was too complicated?” “What’s just plain silly?” “What job took too many people, and what job involved too many actions?”5 Townsend explained that you don’t ask all people all those questions. You try one on one person, then move to another area and try another question on another person. Then, Townsend and his managers got busy removing the ropes and barnacles that prevented people from showing how fast and how far they could go in their boat. This freed them, too, to adjust their sails on the fly when the wind changed.
It is easy to ask for these improvements. It is not easy, but it is necessary, to be rigorous about implementing them. If your company can’t remove all the work practices that deprive people of growth and self-direction, if it knowingly leaves in place even one—say, mandatory buying from a single, centrally chosen supplier—employers will point to this work practice as an excuse for underachievement. Instead of being self-motivated they will be resistant. That way lies the game of dangling extravagant tangible rewards to motivate—bribe—people to do what they are not willing to do or don’t believe is possible because of obstacles put in their way.
The good news is that leaders don’t have to take care of removing obstacles and solving problems by themselves all the time. They have to cut the ropes and clean the barnacles to get the boat going. Once people see the change, see the boat really moving with no one at the helm telling them how to do their jobs, the natural leaders will emerge to overcome the new and inevitable obstacles and challenges. Later in this chapter we’ll meet a few of these natural leaders.
But what about the boat’s helmsman, or company management? It may be objected that, however annoying the helmsman can be, he cannot be simply removed, because the management fulfills the vital role of coordinating business activities, of keeping the trains and boats running on time. This line of thinking would seem perfectly reasonable if we hadn’t already seen—at Gore, FAVI, and Harley—that the commanding helmsmen, the “how” managers, are not the only way to fulfill this role. Beyond the alternative work practices—how one accomplishes a task and in what conditions—there also exist alternative management practices—how one leads. In order for people to join a liberation campaign, management practices must be rebuilt. And Jacques Raiman, the chairman of GSI, the European leader in outsourcing payroll services, was more aware of that than anyone in France.
FROM HELMSMEN TO NOURISHING LEADERS
Or maybe he wasn’t. In 1979, Raiman was not yet thinking of how to transform his managers’ practices. Inspired by Townsend’s book Up the Organization, he dismantled and rebuilt dozens of GSI’s work practices—including the filing of financial reports and expense bills. But changing managers’ behavior was not on his mind back then. Instead, he was busy with a big issue: the conflict-ridden labor relations he had inherited in two newly acquired midsize companies. Jean-François Cottin, GSI’s human resources director—who was opposed to “managing human resources” and kept his “HR department” to one person, himself—introduced Jacques Raiman to Yves Tillard, a consultant whose approach appealed to Raiman. Tillard analyzed the labor situation and identified a common cause for tense