self-authority, or perhaps self-esteem. But as her parents, it was pure joy. She knew it was what we wanted her to do but she had discovered her own reasons for doing it. And she had discovered the best reason, the one that trumps all others: She did it because she liked the way it made her feel.
Is there anything more you could want for the people on your team?
She’s not our employee. But we are the central authority figures in her life. We tried carrots and sticks, the parenting variety, and that didn’t work. What worked was creating the space for her to own it for herself. One of the ingredients in creating that space was not cleaning up her world for her. Have you ever been given a gift like that from someone you worked for—the gift of them not jumping in and saving you, so you had no choice but to figure it out for yourself? The other ingredient was keeping our world clean. Have you ever worked for someone like that, someone who truly embodied their values, and didn’t say one thing and do another when doing the right thing was hard?
Change was not caused by what we said or how many times we said it. She didn’t start cleaning because we shared a bold vision for cleanliness, or a family-wide goal of a certain number of socks per week in the hamper. It didn’t come from a better explanation of the problem, a clearer process, or checking in with her to see how it was going! The source of change was contrast, her personal experience of a gap: the pain of feeling where she was compared to where she wanted to be.
Isn’t that outcome what we’re spending billions of dollars, and countless hours, trying to create at work? We go to leadership workshops to figure out how to inspire and create clearer visions. We send our people to management trainings to help them learn to prioritize and get better at positive reinforcement, motivations, and incentives. We drag people to cheesy team-building workshops to create a feeling of common interest. We buy ping-pong tables and catered lunches to try and make it fun. We try our hand at the power of positive thinking, the secret to manifesting success.
We devour leadership and self-help books. We learn inspiring new ideas. Hope is restored. We create systems, clarify policies, write and rewrite our values statements, try to discover our “Why?” and encourage our people to do the same. But no matter what we try, no matter how well-intentioned, no matter how smart or well-educated the leaders of the organization, the problem persists. We still find ourselves flailing around, looking for the magic key that will reach people where they live. We keep asking over and over again, “How can I get people to own their work?” We get no answer.
That doesn’t mean that nothing happens. Carrot and sticks, including the New Age variety, work to an extent. The dangling of promotions, the promise of raises and bonuses, chair massages, and yoga classes, all can elicit a general sense of compliance, more or less. We still reach goals. We get hard work—which is not the same as great work. But these tactics don’t give you what you really want. What you want is a feeling—the same feeling that every leader who has ever lived craves: “They’ve got this. I can relax.”
Why don’t any of these tactics get us to that place? It’s because they all have something in common. Can you see it?
It’s that they all start with the needs of the business, and put the needs of the individuals second, usually a distant second.
This orientation—this worldview that transcends any management theory—rests on a pillar that goes back to the Industrial Revolution. It says “The company has a goal. The people are here as a resource to do whatever the machines cannot, to reach that goal.” Hence the Orwellian term that lives on to this day: human resources. It follows from this that the job of authority, of all the layers of management, is to extract what they need from the people. At the heart of this approach to business is a subtle but powerful idea, one that we still haven’t shaken more than two centuries later: Work is for the boss.
But times changed. People started waking up to their options. The small business revolution that started in the 1970s and is still gaining speed began to cause a problem for the more established businesses. All of a sudden, their best people had an option that was more appealing and more realistic than ever before. It was still incredibly risky, but when people are feeling taken advantage of, the risk factor has a funny way of seeming a whole lot lower than it actually is.
The business world noticed. CEOs, leaders and managers, consultants and coaches, are not stupid people. They knew something had to be done. The company culture movement was born. And as this book is going to press, this industry is on fire. It seems there’s another company launched every day, including my own, to try and solve the latest version of the same problem: How do I attract and retain a team of talented people?
The voices of “what to do about it” come in different flavors. Some focus more on the compensation side of things, the direct and indirect financial perks and benefits. Others focus on increasing the “fun factor,” through culture activities and team-building exercises. The relative new kids on the block encourage owners to bring their personal and spiritual values into the office—we see business leaders talking about approaches based in mindfulness, conscious communication, and other forms of personal growth, and offering their staff opportunities to practice them on company time. There’s so much good intention in the mix, so many people trying to change things for the better.
But the numbers on engagement and culture are still as bad as they ever were and getting worse. Because all of the solutions you’re being offered—well-intentioned as they are—are asking you put a layer on top of the authority problem, to solve it by not solving it, as it were. That might have worked forty years ago, or twenty, or even five. Not anymore. Carrots and sticks, even the most sophisticated, spiritually wise, and compassionate-sounding ones you can find, will be spotted from a mile away. Millennials were seemingly born with this X-ray vision, but everyone has it now. We need to know “Why?” And the answer had better be good. People who have a choice will no longer work to serve your reasons, your goals. They will not work to serve your authority, they will only work to serve their own. Not because you’re a mean person. But because in our modern world, even people who are living paycheck to paycheck—which is just about everybody—are rising up and saying “No.” They’re saying, “I have a choice. I want something more than this. I don’t know what it is, but I’m going to keep looking until I find it.”
What does that mean for you, the modern leader? It means you have to offer something they can’t get on their own, a perk that transcends all others, a perk that has nothing to do with the business. It’s the offer of work that will—from the the day they start to the day they decide to move on—help them become a better version of themselves. It’s the promise that you will use your authority to help them discover theirs. It’s, in a fundamental way, learning to speak a new language. The language of self-authority. How do you learn that language for yourself? How do you help the people on your team gain fluency? What keeps you from speaking it today? Now those are a bunch of questions worth answering.
Borrowed Authority
When you make your peace with authority,
you become authority.
—Jim Morrison
We have good reason to mistrust authority—some of us more than others. We’ve been betrayed. We’ve been misled, sold one thing and delivered another, over and over. We’ve been manipulated, taken advantage of. We’ve been abused—sometimes subtly, sometimes not. You have all the experience a person needs to make a reasonable conclusion: authority is the problem. It’s reasonable but it’s not true. The problem is
