Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Good morning. Today I would like to talk about democracy versus autocracy and not so much about politics, but about business and the implications of politics on business. So we're living in a period of time where tech billionaires and other business executives and leaders of the private sector are exercising control over the public sector through political action committees, roundtables at Mar a Lago, and so forth. And the underlying philosophy or belief behind this is that the corporate leaders know what is good for the country because they know what is good for their companies. And therefore, if the government listens to the corporate leaders, we'll have a stronger democracy and a better country for everybody. And the philosophy under that is that a single person representing a large number of people makes better decisions than a collection of people voting in a more messy way. And in a company that happens a lot. CEOs have to make decisions based on the information that they have. And the rank and file don't have the same level of information they do. So they can't necessarily allow every employee to vote on every issue, nor do they really want to, because in a lot of cases there's self interest involved too. There's plenty of stories of CEOs lining their pockets for a variety of reasons, or behaving badly, having affairs with their heads of HR and so forth. But nevertheless, this is a legitimate issue in governance. And the way we run our companies for the most part is somewhat democratic in the sense that employees have the right to leave or quit or protest or quietly quit or misbehave or strike out if they choose, if they don't believe the company is doing the right thing. And all sorts of times the employees are the ones that tell the executives and the leaders what's working and what's not. And we, we call that employee activism or employee activation rather. And it's a good thing because employees voluntarily join the company with their livelihoods and their lives and their time and their day and their energies and their creativity. And they expect to have a say in their work life and their environment.
[00:02:14] So in the business world we have this semi democratic process where the top executives are making difficult decisions in uncertain situations all the time and the employees and mid level managers are feeding them back, hopefully, information to help. Now what happens of course, in organizations is there's a lot of psychological fear at the rank and file level that if you speak up in the wrong way, you're going to look like a troublemaker and you'll be fired. It's not exactly easy to create a company where employee activation works, but it's definitely a best practice. And if you look at the greatest companies in the world, and we do talk to some of them, a lot of them, they have very activated employees and they spend a lot of time listening to the employees because actually it's the employees that know what's going on with the customers and the stakeholders and the internal operations. So on the. In the political sphere, however, this is a more political discussion of autocracy versus democracy and the founders of the United States, Jefferson and others, although it, you know, if you look at the founders, some of them did believe much more in a strong autocracy oriented president. But nevertheless we have a balance of powers. We have three branches of government, we have state governments, we have local governments and lots of checks and balances all over the place, which makes it extremely messy and extremely slow, extremely, extremely inefficient. But the ultimate benefit of that messiness is better decisions in the long run. And I do believe that is true. Despite the mess and confusion. Now I'm living in a left wing area of the country, a left wing state, sort of left wing, but not really. California is kind of mixed and my particular city has lots of governance problems because it is a very heterogeneous city with a lot of lower income people living near moderate to high income people. So there's just a lot of complexity to the decision making on where resources should be spent. And I respect that and understand it. And I choose to live here because at least for me, I enjoy this kind of a culture. But you could also argue that if you're entitled or wealthy or rich or healthy or whatever the thing is you measure yourself by, why should you squander your resources on people that are less fortunate than you? So since it is a dog eat dog world, I made it myself. So therefore those that didn't make it get what they deserve. And to some degree the big beautiful bill is a little bit like that because it does reward wealth much more than it does the underprivileged or the unfortunate people that are sick. And if you've ever been sick, or if you've ever been disabled, or if you've ever had a child who's sick or disabled, at least in the United States, you know what it's like to have no power. All of a sudden there's nothing you can do. You can go to the doctor, maybe you can aff, maybe go to a specialist, but you really don't have a lot of resources to help you. And you find out that when you do that there are all sorts of wonderful, human caring people in the world that would like to help you, even though whatever situation you have may be difficult to solve, you might have cancer, you might have Alzheimer's, you might have a whole variety of things.
[00:05:20] So to me, the autonomy versus or autocracy versus democracy idea actually gets back to something even more fundamental, is do you believe in the human rights of every individual? As an individual, I mean, I don't know how you can get beyond that is the fundamental problem for those of us that have grown up and lived in heterogeneous environments. We see it now as a business level getting beyond politics at a business level. Here's my perspective. What I've observed in all of the companies I've talked to, all the HR people I've met, all the business situations I've been in, is that every single human being, regardless of age or gender or educational background or other characteristics, has enormous potential to contribute, to grow, to solve problems, to add value. Enormous. There is something about the biology of the human being that has allowed us to grow and flourish over millions of years. In fact, I'm reading a really interesting book about Africa that's teaching me a lot about the history of civilization. We are a very powerful, adaptable species, we humans. And one of your jobs as a leader or a manager is to unleash this power, this spirit, this will, this energy, this creativity in people. And if you believe that they're not capable or entitled to making certain decisions, you're not going to unleash that power. And that's why the companies that perform well are very democratic, not because they believe in some form of simplistic or messianic view of the world or whatever it may be. It's not philosophical at all. It's just that the people at all levels feel more empowered and more energetic to do the right thing. And, you know, in the United States today, at least for people in my ilk, we don't feel that way at the moment because we disagree with so many things going on at the top. So we feel unempowered other than to maybe protest. But so we're stuck not contributing the way we should. And I think that leads to a feeling of power, powerlessness and victimhood and employees saying, that's not my job, that's not my problem. Somebody else can fix that. We used to call it watching the train wreck when I was at Sybase, and it's very easy to slip into that culture by accident. I've been in about six or seven companies in my career, most of them went through good times and bad times, and during the tough times when the culture didn't feel empowering, there was a lot of watching the train wreck, blaming the leadership, but not doing anything about it, quietly not accommodating the strategy of the company because we didn't believe in the leaders, because they were making decisions without us being involved. So in my experience, the more democratic model of leadership in the business setting, and certainly in the politics too, leads to a complicated, more messy, but highly energetic company. Now, there are times when you have to be autocratic. There are times when there's a reorg or a change in strategy or a merger or a layoff or whatever it may be, and people just have to deal with it. And you're entitled to do that as a leader if you have that level of credibility and followership amongst your employees or team. If you don't, those decisions are even harder to make. And our entire body of research on that dynamic organization and irresistible leadership in my book, are about building that well of trust and followership so that when the difficult decisions do need to be made, people don't post stuff on social media about how horrible the company is being run, but they actually pull up their bootstraps and do what needs to be done to make the organization more effective. And when that happens, you have this well of trust and energy and creativity and power in the whole organization. You know, you see this in sports teams all the time, where the great coaches are not really that autocratic. They're empowering. They're developers of people. They are good listeners. They focus on teamwork. They focus on training and education and practice. They focus on health. They don't force people to hurt themselves or play when they're injured. And, you know, sports in some sense is the ultimate battle or war because there's rules and there's referees. In the rest of the world, the referees are a little bit hard to find. So, you know, take some examples from them. And I'm not that big of an athlete or sports fan, but I see it all the time. Now. The reason I sort of felt interested in making this topic a podcast was two things. First of all, the debate about autocracy versus democracy continues here in the U.S. so we're all kind of thinking about it.
[00:09:52] The second is we are soon to launch the Galileo for Managers version of Galileo. And as part of that whole strategy, we're going to be getting into the leadership development space. We've always been in that space because we've been doing Research and giving you guys tools and education on leadership development as an HR person going back to 2004, 2005 was the first time. But we decided that this stuff is so important that we would turn it into tools for managers. And interestingly enough, because of the power of AI, Galileo is a really good management tool and management coach because it knows a lot about hiring, performance, management, pay rewards, diversity, teamwork, org design, jobs, roles, leadership experience, employee experience, all that stuff. So it's actually trained on all of the dimensions of leadership. We've been training it on some of the more basic things like okrs, meetings one on ones, check ins, stuff like that, which we have a lot of experience in that too. And so what you're going to be able to do with Galileo starting in August is give it to your managers and allow them to use it as a coach and a tool. Which means if you load your management development materials or your pay practices, your hiring practices into the corpus by adding it into one of the folders, your managers will have an end to end management tool for their teams. And that goes for everybody else who uses it too. But there's more we now have. I looked last night. 730 courses in Galileo Learn, which used to be the Josh Person Academy. Those courses are 10, 15, 20, 30 minute, one hour long modules on almost every human capital topic in business, including economics, leadership, case studies, examples, technology and all the dimensions of being a leader and dealing with the issues that managers and supervisors and leaders face. By the way, everyone is a leader, so I don't think anyone is immune from these topics. In fact, everybody should pay attention to them at work. And so what we're doing is building a course to sort of summarize all that, which is modeled after my book Irresistible and that will be available this fall. So stay tuned for more on the topic of leadership. We have a lot of research, we have hundreds of interviews and case studies with companies and I've been wanting to do this for many years and it's something that's very exciting to me. So to sum up sort of the beginning topic, as you think about your role as a leader or as a follower or as a project manager, you will definitely be thinking about autocracy versus democracy.
[00:12:39] There will be times when you're frustrated and you want to just make a decision and barnstorm it through the team, regardless of their opinions. And there will be times when you don't know what to do and you like them to figure out for you and you'll empower them and those are tricky, tricky situations you run into every single day. And even when you think you're right, you sometimes find out that the rest of the organization disagrees. So you will be grappling with this dichotomy in most of your career. Now. The reason that it's a fascinating topic is that almost everything else in business and human capital has somehow revolves around this diversity. Pay, hiring, promotion, succession, management, mobility, skills development, job design, all of that. The reason I also think that this empowerment idea is so important now is that in a world of superworkers where Everybody has literally 10 times the information access than they ever did before, maybe it's 100. We, we can't assume that any employee doesn't know how or doesn't have the resources to do something. By the way, that's true in the United States too. With the social media and the other tools we have, we're all pretty powerful as individuals. So. So I think this ongoing debate of are you a top down leader or are you a listener and in some sense an organizational follower continues. One final point I'll just point out before I knock off here. You know, I spent a lot of time in Europe and other parts of the world and I meet a lot of very senior people and I actually met the King and Queen of the Netherlands and had a cocktail reception at their house, at their state and so forth. I do find that in the longer, more enduring, long lasting companies and societies, they are much more democratic. They are not run by one autocratic leader. Some are, some of the luxury brands for example, but, but they're very democratic. And what that shows me is that if you want to be a long lasting, enduring organization or country, bringing the people or the team or the employees with you is a very, very important strength. Okay. I'm curious of your thoughts on all this.
[00:14:50] Talk to you soon. Bye for now.
