Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

If you stop any employee, at any level of the company, in the break room or the elevator and ask what are the five most important things the company is working on for the next six months, that person should be able to tell you, rapid fire, one, two, three, four, five, ideally using the same words you’ve used in your communications to the staff and,

“Can you help me understand what leads you to believe that’s true?”

One of the biggest mistakes is fixating on metrics that don’t matter.

inculcating a core set of behaviors in people, then giving them the latitude to practice those behaviors—well, actually, demanding that they practice them—makes teams astonishingly energized and proactive.

If you don’t tell them about how the business is doing, what your strategy is, the challenges you’re facing, and what market analysts think of how you’re doing, then they will get that information elsewhere—

People need to see the view from the C suite in order to feel truly connected to the problem solving that must be done at all levels and on all teams, so that the company is spotting issues and opportunities in every corner of the business and effectively acting on them. The irony is that companies have invested so much in training programs of all

“fact driven,” not “data driven.”

“I was too kind,” he told me, “and that means you’re a bad manager in a lot of ways. You end up sugarcoating things, and that’s doing them a disservice.”

That respect for one another’s intelligence and genuine desire to discover the bases of colleagues’ views drove intense mutual questioning and kept it mostly productive and civil, if often quite colorful. The team also modeled this vigorous questioning for employees in many forums, openly debating one another.