Good Authority

How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting For

Jonathan Raymond

• Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781940858203
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

"Required reading for anyone who wants to do more than merely manage people. Good Authority is a modern classic, and it will redefine what it means to be the boss."
— Seth Godin, Author, Linchpin

Imagine a world where personal and professional growth are one thing, where improving your relationships and owning your strengths at work translate directly into the rest of your life.

Creating a company culture like that is not a dream. Through personal stories and real-life conversations, Jonathan takes you into the room with managers and employees where real culture change happens, and shows you a new kind of employee mentoring where each person gets the real-time feedback, support, and clear boundaries we all need to get beyond the patterns that hold us back.

In this provocative and timely new book, Jonathan brings together what he has learned over a twenty-year journey as an executive, entrepreneur, team leader and leadership trainer.

Combining his experience as the CEO and CBO of EMyth where he led the transformation of a global coaching brand with the lessons learned along his own personal growth journey, Jonathan walks us through a step-by-step approach that integrates the leading edges of both. You'll discover a way to lead your team that is both profoundly human and results-oriented at the same time.

Whether you re a CEO or business owner, executive, team leader, consultant, or coach, Good Authority will give you new ideas and inspiration you can put into practice. Most importantly, it will give you permission to be more of who you are at work than you ever thought possible.

PART I

WHY SHOULD I CARE?

CHAPTER ONE

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.

From a psychological perspective, you might see her behavior as the emergence of self-care, or maybe 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 ...