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 not authority, it’s that we haven’t learned how to inhabit authority in a way that’s truly coming from our own heart and conscience.
The opposite of Good Authority isn’t Bad Authority—it’s Borrowed Authority. Borrowed in the sense that the authority is not our own. It’s the one we learned—from our parents, from our culture, from our teachers. And, for the purposes of this book, authority also consists of the strategies and tactics we’ve learned from the coaches, management consultants, and gurus who have promised us that they have the answer. There’s only one authority we haven’t tried, though it takes a lifetime to discover: our own.
I was working with the owner of a small technology company. In his early 50s, Mike was the picture of kind leadership. He was skilled in his craft, quick with a smile. He cared about the lives of the people on the team and had the drive of a man who knew that the world makes no promises. There was only one problem—his business had been stuck in neutral for the better part of a decade. No matter what he tried, he couldn’t get people to own their work. He wasn’t attracting a next generation of leaders, people who would carry the business beyond where he could on his own. The symptom, the day-to-day form that all of this took, was a lack of accountability across the organization.
One day, on a video call with half a dozen business owners I was working with at the time, we got into a conversation about authority—Mike’s. After a minute or two—I’ve never been able to play the part of the patient, “wait for it to organically arise” coach—I asked him a question. “Mike, what’s your greatest fear when it comes to authority?” (And, Mr. President, I have a follow-up question.) He pondered for a few moments and a knowing smile washed across his face. “I don’t know if this is what you’re asking, but I have a thought that comes to mind.”
“Oh, really … what is it?” You could hear the other six people on the call breathing.
“What I’m thinking about is my father. You see, he was an engineer—pretty high up in his firm but not the boss. My whole childhood all I heard about was how the higher-ups were screwing people, this, that, or the other way.”
“How do you think that informs the way you lead the team now?”
“Oh, it’s obvious now that you ask … everything I do is to not be that kind of authority.”
Without ever intending to, Mike had invented an antidote. In order to not be that kind of authority, he took on one of the three leadership archetypes that you’ll learn more about in Chapter Twelve, “Fixer, Fighter, or Friend.” He had taken on the role of the friend. The problem was that Mike’s cure, like each one of them, had serious, viral side effects. Your team can’t treat you as a friend and the boss at the same time.
Mike started to make the connections. He started to see that he had a real problem. In order to step into the role that his team needed—to be willing to be tough when tough was called for—he had to discover a kind of leadership that his father’s influence kept him from being able to see. He had to open himself up to a kind of tough that wasn’t cruel, as his father’s bosses were, but was simply firm and clear in its boundaries. In other words, Mike had to let go of the picture of authority that he had borrowed from his father.
The irony was that Mike couldn’t be that kind of authority—the kind of authority his father was so disgusted by—even if he tried. His style, the man he’d become over his many years as an employee before breaking out on his own, was one of personal warmth and curiosity. He knew what it was like to work for someone else, and erred, often to a fault, on the side of giving people the benefit of the doubt.
Over the next few months Mike took up this new challenge. He started showing up with some more toughness. Not tough as in harsh, but tough as in firm. He stopped being available at all hours on his cell phone. He stopped