Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [87]
Unlike the quiet Bill Gore, whose discontent seldom translated into lecturing, Harry Quadracci was extremely—and frequently—temperamental. One of the things that would set him off was when, instead of helping leaders to emerge naturally, an outside person would be called in. Steve DeBoth, a relatively new plant manager, found this out the hard way.10 Soon after he had hired an outside candidate for a customer-service-representative job, he got a call from Harry Quadracci.
“I heard you think you hired someone,” his boss said.
DeBoth explained that he needed an experienced person and found a woman who had already resigned from her previous company.
“How could you?” Harry Quadracci asked angrily. “Do you know that that job is one of the most coveted in the company by all the folks who are working on the manufacturing floor? How could you take that opportunity away from them?” Then, after he calmed down a bit, Quadracci explained, “Do you know how many tens of millions of dollars I have spent in lost productivity because I didn’t hire an experienced pressman and let a second pressman learn how to run the press? Don’t you think I know what it costs me? Here, you go ahead and take an opportunity away from them. Don’t do it again.”
DeBoth never repeated the mistake, and later said, “He was so angry because what drove him was providing opportunity for people. He really got his joy from seeing someone do something they couldn’t do years or months before, watching them grow.”
Bill Gore and Harry Quadracci had different—even opposite—temperaments. But they both created environments that helped people closest to a business situation develop into natural leaders.
These environments also helped natural leaders develop into nourishing leaders who enhanced others’ self-motivation. We saw this with Burt Chase as well as Karl Fritchen: Since the Quadracci brothers helped Fritchen become a leader, he was willing to do the same for others: “I’ve lived those experiences [of being trusted to take the lead]. The feeling you get as an employee to have that happen to you, you want all your employees to have that same type of feeling and commitment to your organization.” Today Fritchen is the CEO of QuadTech himself.
Of course, what liberating CEOs like Gore and the Quadracci brothers do is only one way to facilitate the natural emergence of leaders. At Gore, experienced associates—called sponsors—direct younger colleagues to areas whose needs are a good fit with their skills and inclinations; it is then up to the individuals to prove to the people working in that field that they can be useful. “When I sponsored them,” Burt Chase recalled, “I gave them a list of names, and I said, ‘Why don’t you go meet these people and talk to them about your experience, where you’ve been, and find out what they’re doing, what their business is. Take a couple months to do this. And I’ll hear from them, and I’ll hear from you. And maybe we can then decide where you might make a commitment, where you might start.’”11
At FAVI, work team members simply decide among themselves whom they deem best to become their next leader. Back at Gore, anyone who’s interested in initiating and leading a project can start doing so while continuing in his current role. If he succeeds—as a leader—in attracting enough followers, he can gradually migrate to that new role, as we saw Dave Myers do in developing Elixir guitar strings in chapter 1. At FAVI again, it goes even further. If nobody emerges to lead an opportunity, the company will not convene a meeting to search for an interested person. Instead, because no leader has naturally emerged, the opportunity will be deemed not worth pursuing. Here is how Rich Teerlink summarized a similar approach at Harley-Davidson: “I have a very simple philosophy: If a decision has to get made, it will get