about the customer in the ways you want. And it’s why every single meeting you have ends with talking about how people need to communicate better.
Good Authority is based on three core principles that we’ll be teasing out and developing along the way. As you embark on the rest of this journey, keep them in mind. Let them work on you. If you’re anything like me, they can be a source of growth to you for years to come, helping you re-evaluate old assumptions about what it means to lead, about the purpose of work, and giving you permission to challenge people to go beyond where they are today.
1 The deepest purpose of a business is to change the lives of the people who work there.
2 The role of leaders and managers is to show people how professional and personal growth are inseparable.
3 The way to get people to be engaged is to be more engaged with them.
Now a few words about what Good Authority is not. This is not a book about achieving great wealth or tripling your sales this quarter—though I’ll be the first to congratulate you if you do. It’s not a substitute for the many other things you can do to humanize your business, like improving benefits packages, offering more flexible hours and remote work options, and so on. It’s a call to invest in a process that speaks to a different level: to our experience of work itself. To go all in with each person on your team. To discover who they are, what they’re about, and how you can help them grow.
Before we move on, we need to reframe the question the coaching and consulting industry has taught business leaders to ask. The right question isn’t “How do I get my people to engage?” The right question is: “How can I get better at engaging with them?”
This book is for anyone with a passion to change the status quo, anyone who believes that the world—your world—can be better than it is. It’s for leaders and managers in any industry, for-profit business, or not-for-profit business. Above all, it’s for anyone who has the awesome responsibility of having authority over another human being’s paycheck. This is a book about caring—for the heart, spirit, and financial future of the people in your charge.
What you’ll find throughout are methods and tools to help you have a new kind of conversation with each person on your team. I encourage you to use the tools as you see fit, to trust yourself, to make mistakes and learn. It isn’t magic, though I hope it sometimes feels that way. It won’t turn everyone on your team into a perfect team player overnight. You may get it wrong more times than you get it right. But if you invest in the journey, if you seek out feedback on how you’re doing from people you trust, and keep working at it, something amazing can happen to you.
Here’s a short overview of what you’ll find from here on out.
In Part One—Why Should I Care?—we’ll take a fresh look at the company culture problem. We’ll confront the most common myths about employee engagement, offer a new way to think about strengths and weaknesses, and close with a new vision for how everyone can share in the transformation instead of waiting for it to happen from the top down.
In Part Two—Personal Growth at Work—we’ll attempt to bridge the gap between the personal growth revolution that’s exploded over the last half-century and our current management theories that are bogged down by obsolete ideas about human motivation. We’ll offer a new method for creating a culture of accountability that helps people grow at work and in life at the same time.
And in Part Three—More Yoda, Less Superman—we’ll focus in on the specific tools and strategies you can use to develop your mentoring skills, including a new leadership archetype system in “Fixer, Fighter, or Friend?,” as well as a new perspective on how to draw out each person’s individual strengths in “The Five Employee Archetypes.”
You’ll quickly see that this book isn’t really a business book. It’s a book about relationships, about bringing the best of who we are to work, and slowing down the moments that matter. It’s about changing the world—starting with the people just down the hall.
WHY SHOULD I CARE?
Why Should I Care?
You’re only as young as the last time
you changed your mind.
—Timothy Leary
I like cleaning the kitchen. I don’t love it—it’d be nice if the kitchen would clean itself every once in awhile—but I like it. The more time I spend looking at screens and living in our digital world, the more satisfaction I get from the analog side of life. My daughter, on the other hand, has not yet discovered the joys of household cleaning. In fairness, she’s only eleven.
Nevertheless, my wife and I are slowly but surely giving her more responsibility around the house. She’s a slippery student though. Her delay tactics are many and wondrous—the “I’m hungry,” the innocent doe eyes, and when all else fails, “Well I have to do my homework first, right?” We started as you’d expect, explaining why doing her chores was important, and the describing values we were trying to instill in her. We issued our share of gentle and not-so-subtle reminders. We tried to raise the stakes with all the typical parenting bribes—a little more or less allowance, a little more or less screen time. But it didn’t catch. No matter what tactics we used to try to cause the problem to go away, it didn’t. We dropped the subject for a while. The stakes weren’t all that high. It’s not that we weren’t frustrated, but she’s a great kid and the process had us all laughing more than anything else. And then it happened.
It was early evening on a weeknight. I was in my home office wrapping up my day when my wife peeked in. “Follow me,” she said, with a stealthy wave of her hand. We walked quietly down the stairs and turned the corner to get a view into the kitchen. And there she was. Our daughter, moving gracefully around the kitchen, sponge in hand, dish towel on her shoulder … she was cleaning … and humming her favorite song. I may have cried.
Isn’t it amazing how simple and beautiful it is when someone owns their work? How in an instant, the conflict between the self-interest of “the worker” and the self-interest of “the boss” just disappears? And isn’t it strange how rare an occurrence that is in our world? So, being a pest—and being in the middle of writing a book about authority—I had to know why. But I also knew that my wife, the person who’s taught me the most about what inhabiting authority with grace looks like, was the right person to ask her. Turns out, it all started with cleaning her room.
Or, better said, with not cleaning her room. And then one day, she was sitting and reading on the comfy chair in the corner of our bedroom (which was clean, thank you very much) and something hit her. “It just feels better in here,” she thought. “My room is so cluttered, so much stuff lying around. It’s hard to find the things I want. In here I just feel more calm.” In the hour before we discovered her in the kitchen, this is what she’d been doing: organizing her room—including what I can assure you is the world’s most ecologically diverse collection of stuffed animals—cleaning off her desk, and stacking her clothes neatly in her closet.
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