People leave managers, not companies

January 31, 2012

This is the result of a Wilson Learning research on staff retention, presented in an article on HC Online a couple of years ago. It holds true today since little has changed in most companies.

As a consequence, the answer to higher staff retention may well be liberating management, or liberating leadership we’d say. Indeed, liberating leadership relies on trust, respect, consideration, exactly the kind of “managerial” practices the study has identified as achieving greater employee fulfillment.

You can read the article here

Nurses hate their job? Managers hate theirs more, and this is why.

January 28, 2012

An article from FORBES caught our attention this weekend: a survey of hundreds of thousands of employees conducted in 2011 by CareerBliss determined The 10 Most Hated Jobs.

Surprise, surprise– they’re not the ones you think! No low level jobs, but rather management or technical ones, in which people feel held back by hierarchical bureaucracy.

Interestingly though, the pointlessness shared amongst these people is a clear reflection of the bigger picture: the drop in life expectancy of the firms they work for. A liberating transformation could help tackle the issue, and this is why we think it’s worth the read.

You can read the article and find the list of The Ten Most Hated Jobs here

If you don’t give a damn about anything, no one will give a damn about you

November 30, 2011

FORBES’ has a funny section which uses “visuals to tell stories, jokes, and truths.”

Recently the section published an illustrated list of 10 stupid-simple steps that help you “to be interesting.”

Though obviously useful do meet your future significant other, the steps contain quite a lot of wisdom for future leaders. This is why we mention it here.

You can read the article here

December 20, 2011

On December 6, 2011, we have visited a school in a desolate Brooklyn neighborhood, The New American Academy. We do believe that there would be more Freedom Incs. if only our schools stopped churning out people who succeed through complacency and number crunching (it takes a lot to “reeducate” such people—who are the majority). Yet, we went there because this school’s leaders found many parallels in a way their teachers work and the way people work in the liberated companies.

Here is the school’s agenda in their own words:

The New American Academy (TNAA) is a model designed to revolutionize the current industrial educational framework. Engineered upon the tenets of collaboration, empowerment, reflection, and transparency, TNAA transforms the fundamental structures of schooling to promote a culture of learning and innovation for both students and teachers. 15% cheaper than comparable industrial schools, it is a bold solution intended to generate change system wide.

At the TNAA, teachers work in collaborative teams and students learn and explore in small, differentiated groups. With its four-person teaching teams, a mastery-based career ladder, and six year looping cycles, each classroom is driven to become a center of educational innovation. Moreover, through daily ninety-minute meetings and weekly reflection sessions teachers have the time to continually analyze and improve on their practice

But there is more. The school is unique because unlike other alternative schools it has been developed in partnership with the teachers’ unions.

You can find more on the school here

NOVEMBER 5, 2011

Listen to the podcast here

We’re back from the last week’s event organized by Freedom, Inc’s Czech editor Peoplecomm.
It was a whole day happening full of presentations (one of which was ours), theatrical and musical performances, and videos on companies with outstanding cultures (more on it below). Food and drinks were available throughout the day. All that in a wonderful former Art Deco cinema hall with a revealing name of Vzlet, meaning Takeoff. So, how many people took off in this full-day event?

Four hundred.

This is, to our knowledge, the biggest audience that assisted an event on the topic of freedom in organizations. It was also amazing to see the type of people who assisted. Most young, extremely enthusiastic, some taking a day off for a takeoff (we couldn’t resist this one), others having left “big companies” and looking for a freer place, yet others forming an eco-system for building freedom at work: young coaches, organization and transformation consultants, and more.

Not all companies featured in the event were full-blown Freedom Incs. Yet, we agree with Peoplecomm’s president Tomáš Hajzler who suggested that many companies demonstrated something that can be called a freedom-at-work mindset. Such a mindset puts them definitely on the runway and makes the take-off to freedom easier.

To give a glimpse at the day’s contents here are two videos produced for this event :

The Swedish editor Bookhouse is at the vanguard of books on new ways of organizing and working. Our Freedom, Inc. appears there along the books by Jim Collins, Gary Hamel, Dan Pink, and Jonas Ridderstråle & Kjell Nordström.

We’ve heard that freedom and egalitarian workplace fit very well with the Swedish culture and values. Indeed, every Swede will tell you a local saying: “You are not better than others.” It is indeed perfectly in line with the Freedom Inc.’s first principle, that of intrinsic equality. Yet paradoxically, the same saying may be inimical to Freedom Inc. Freedom in the workplace is freedom to take initiatives to advance the company’s vision. What will be the reaction of the Swedish colleagues if one of them voices up publically a bright idea—better than the ideas of others?

We leave this question to our Swedish friends and again thank everyone involved to make this new foreign edition happen.

Here is John Wooden’s rare talk given in 2001 for TED where he explains his leadership principles.

Leaders of the Free Culture

by Isaac Getz

AUGUST, 2011

Truman is said to have mused about Eisenhower taking over the president’s office, issuing orders only to discover that nothing gets done in the bureaucratic swamp. But this fine politician underestimated “Ike.” President Eisenhower realized the bureaucracy problem on day one when an assistant handed him a sealed envelope: he promptly changed this time-wasting procedure. Later, he asked for memos to be kept to a one page maximum—instead of several-dozen. Letters from congress were similarly summarized into mere one-liners. He signed only with initials, again, to save time. Yet, despite these and other streamlining measures, Eisenhower still kept the bureaucracy.

Of course, the White House and bureaucracy are pleonastic, but Eisenhower’s efforts raise a fundamental question relevant to any organization’s leader: if bureaucracy is so bad for performance why stop just at streamlining? Why not get rid of it completely? Many agree that eliminating bureaucracy is the ideal, but argue that a real organization is impossible without it. Like barnacles dragging on a boat and yet inevitable, bureaucracy is an inevitable cost of running a company, coordinating its activities.

However, some leaders looked at the bureaucracy phenomenon from a different angle. To them it is the epitome of how people who take initiative to advance the company—the best people—stop trying and either get depressed or leave. In an ocean cruiser this cost on people may not be felt immediately but in a small boat—98% of all companies—the effect is stark and is of sinking.

Read more here

The Czech editor Peoplecomm made his specialty the books on freedom-based organizations. Our Freedom, Inc. appears there along Ricardo Semler’s Maverick! and Tony Hsieh’ Delivering Happiness.

Here what its editor  Tomáš Hajzler writes:

Coming from the Czech republic, ex-authoritarian society, the concept of freedom is still misunderstood by many. It feels like back in 1989 we were released from a gigantic jail house. Living in a command and control society we had no need nor chance to learn the concept of responsibility and thus freedom. Twenty years later, corruption seems to be a new religion of our region.

The bigger the chaos and also a lack of trust in our society, the bigger the challenge to grasp a concept of freedom in a workplace.

Just two years ago, it felt like I came from Mars trying to share the ideas with some of the local businesses. Last year we decided to take three of the best books (in our view) on the topic of workplace freedom, translate them into our language and publish them in the Czech republic and Slovakia in a hope to spread the idea to a much larger audience.

Read more here

Hungary lived through very similar experiences freeing itself of the authoritarian regime in 1989. Today Hungary hardly resembles that old “workers’ paradise.”

Yet, perhaps as in the Czech Republic, Hungarian subsidiary of Wolters-Kluwer found that our book is very relevant for the transition going on in the workplaces and the minds of those working there.