Your Job Is the Future—Theirs Is to Keep You Honest in the Present

Blair has David expand on his recent article titled “You’re A Dictatorship That Gathers Individual Democracies—Good For You.”

Transcript

Blair Enns: David, we have a fork in the road in front of us, and that is we could talk about one thing or we could you talk about the other thing. I'm going to keep you guessing.

David C. Baker: Oh, I have a feeling you've got a preference here.

[laughter]

Whatever we talk about, this has the potential to go off the rails. Any topic we talk about could go off the rails. I am having a more and more difficult daily struggle with firing up the filters that I need in my life. It's like I've got a tire with a pretty significant leak in it, and every morning I got to fill up and say, "David, do not say what you think today. We almost made it through this year."

Blair: [laughs] I have got you right where I want you. Oh, my God. I was going to say, I want to talk about me. [laughs]

David: Your usual favorite subject.

Blair: Okay. This is good, challenge accepted. Let's see, we're recording this mid-December of 2021. Originally, we're going to talk about checks and balances building on an episode I really liked that we did earlier in the year on tensions. I've referenced that a few times. I learned a lot from that episode and I carried those lessons with me forward. This one was unresolved tensions that keep us alive, but one of the tensions is the employer-employee tension, and you wrote a post about it this week that I just read this morning and it's really good. My suggestion is let's just go deep into this employer-employee relationship because you framed it in a really interesting way, and then if we've got to fill time.

David: Yes, if we got to fill time.

[laughter]

Blair: If we've got to fill time, I'll reference some of these other tensions that we might want to come back to. Does that sound good?

David: Yes, it does. Except I do have a couple of questions. You didn't read my thing right when it came out. I need an explanation for that.

Blair: Busted.

David: The other is you seem surprised that it was so good, which doesn't make any sense at all because all of them have been good. [laughs]

Blair: Well, I've said before, I sip your information. I'm already more influenced by you in my work than any other human being in the planet. I'm careful not to consume everything you've written. I tend to binge your work. [laughs]

David: There's bullshit, written all over what you're saying.

[laughter]

Blair: I was busy getting a massage. I had other things to do.

David: Well, you know what the impetus for this thing was, is something that you and I have seen all over the place and it keeps popping up in things like, should everybody be on commission if they help bring a client in or who makes a decision around the positioning of the firm and who should be involved even in those conversations and-

Blair: These tensions, yes.

David: There's dozens of these things where you're trying to figure out what is the right path between you as a leader, an autocratic or dictator versus the team's role in helping you make decisions, and then it was also prodded forward by a client of mine that recently it wasn't a unionization sort of a thing. Although I have another client where that's happening, but it was more of a public ownership. It was a different version of an ESOP, and just thinking about what are the implications of that. On the one end, we have a pure democracy.

The other end we have a pure autocracy. What's the right balance here?

Then as I started thinking about that, it's like, "Oh, no, we don't need to resolve this. It's both." As a leader, you've got to be a dictator, but you can't ignore the fact that every one of your employees is an individual democracy deciding whether or not they want to hitch their future to your dictatorship? It was a really interesting concept to me, and I decided just to sort of, "Ooh, I'm going to write about this. I don't know where to go."

The response to it has been really crazy good, and it wasn't like people wrote back and said, oh, I really agree with that or I really disagree with it. Almost everybody said, "Oh, that got me thinking a little bit differently." Which is my goal. I don't really want to tell people what to think. I just want them to think a little bit more deeply.

Blair: Yes, it's the value of a point of view. The title of this post is you're a dictatorship that gathers individual democracies. Good for you. I need the challenge this. How can an individual be a democracy? I didn't look it up because I don't do any research as a point of pride, but I think the word demo in democracy. I think it's Greek for crowd, isn't it? [laughs]

David: Let's stop and talk about that for a minute. I don't do research as a point of pride. I am allergic to data.

Blair: That's this works because you love to do the research and I like to fly by the seat of my pants

David: You're right. It's not an accurate use of the term, but I'm talking about an individual with agency. The idea of a freelancer, a freelancer wasn't the subject of a king. A freelancer could sell his or her services to whoever they wanted and so they were democracies even though they weren't.

Blair: Got you. I'll just say to the listener, go hunt down the post on davidcbaker.com. It's really worth the read. I'll leave the pause for it. The implied unlike most of his stuff. Wow. This one's really good. The open politically to catch everybody's attention and then you, you, so your business is not a democracy, rather it's autocracy or a dictatorship and you say, I think that's good. I wouldn't have it any other way. Then you give us three statements that build on each other that I thought were really astute and insightful. Do you want to talk about those statements?

David: Yes. After saying that in the article, I really didn't want people to misunderstand me. The first was your team is essential to what you want to accomplish for clients. That is if, what you want to accomplish for clients requires people, right?

Blair: Yes. Acknowledging the importance of the team?

David: Right. Exactly. Then their effectiveness depends in part on harnessing the combined skills and outlook of those individuals around a common goal, positioning culture, whatever. As a leader, it's your to make a final decision about, what's going to distinguish your firm in lots of different ways and then find people who share your belief and then maintain that over time because over time, its entropy kills things. Sometimes it's really fast, like in a helicopter other times it's really slow, like in an airplane, there are little forces every day that are trying to de purify your decisions, and so over time, you have to harness all of these people together if you really want to accomplish something.

Then third as a leader, your job is to set that agenda, and then we have a great team together. That agenda should be a lighthouse. It should be different, not better or worse, but just different than other people. I'm not saying that a dictatorship is wise because you don't need these other people. I'm just saying you need to be a certain kind of dictator because your mission as a firm is going to depend on harnessing the combined efforts of all these other people.

They are making individual decisions for themselves. You go to bed with a huge head feeling good about yourself being a dictator, but in the morning, you're going to realize no I've gotta be a certain kind of dictator. I've always felt like a benevolent dictatorship is the best form of government because the biggest problem with democracies is that the more you democratize decisions, the few great decisions are made for the long-term benefit of the crowd. We are set up to vote in our own short-term self-interest and employees are no different. They're no different. That's that innate tension. Your job is to think about the future and they keep you on path because their job is to think about the present, generally.

Blair: It's funny, I've been thinking that thought recently too, about, you know what? I don't think democracy is cutting it. This idea of a benevolent dictatorship in Canada is often accused of being a benevolent dictatorship. I don't think that's true at all, but this idea of a benevolent dictatorship, the key is the benevolence. I've started thinking maybe I should run everything. Bla Topia.

David: My filter is kicking in.

Blair: Your three statements here, number one, acknowledging the essential nature of the team. The team is essential. Number two, their effectiveness. There's no point in having this team of individuals if you can't harness them, get them all going in the same direction. Number three, as a leader, that's your job to set the agenda, to set the direction. When you do this properly, you use interesting language.

You say, people will gather, you'll gather those that are committed to the agenda. You won't round them up as you might in a dictatorship and say, "Okay, build that pyramid or whatever the work project is." You have to have this benevolence because leadership in a benevolent dictatorship or in a democracy in your business, it's really about saying, "All right, here's where we're going and inspiring people to want to follow.

David: Right. More like a lighthouse than rounding them up on the Prairie. Yes exactly.

Blair: You mentioned a couple of client situations. I don't know how much you can talk about either of them. I'm really interested in the unionization. I'm imagining it's probably not a story you can tell.

David: Not yet.

Blair: It's a little bit off-topic. Not yet. Maybe next week, but I remember early in my consulting days, offering advice to agency principal who would push back and say, "Yes, I got some team members that just aren't going to be on board with that decision, which they acknowledged was the right decision. I was a consultant. I didn't have any employees. I had been in positions of employment before, where I had people reporting to me, but I didn't have that firsthand experience that I do now of having people report to me the Supreme leader and having to get them to buy into the vision. I couldn't understand and I still can't today.

I can't comprehend a situation where it just struck me so hard that somebody would be in this position and unable to rally the troops to do what needed to be done. When I think back now using the terms that you've used in this post and we've been discussing. I think they were too much of a democracy. There was not enough leadership coming from the business owner and you see that yourself, I'm sure.

David: I do and the way I typically phrase it in my head and then sometimes in conversations with clients is that, one of the biggest mistakes that we make as entrepreneurial leaders is assuming that other people are like us. Particularly, in the area of aptitude for risk and the acceptance of variability. The acceptance of uncertainty and lack of process.

Those are two characteristics that really help entrepreneurs thrive, taking risks and changing the decisions quickly, and adapting fast.

People who aren't like us, who want to work for us, who have their own little democracy and they want to make decisions, they don't share the same aptitude for risk. They also value the structure and rules that you hate. I think it's actually motivated by the right things. We just assume that, partly, what's happening is we just really don't want to manage people. The way we justify it is, okay, let's trust that they have the best interest of the firm at heart, that they're going to make accurate judgments and think about the future, and so on. We don't need these rules.

I wouldn't want these rules. They probably don't want them either. Then it devolves and it's not a democracy. It's more chaos and it's definitely not led. I think there's something really powerful about not giving up on either idea. Every one of these employees is a democracy that brings individual agency to use an economic term. They bring individual agency and yet they respond well to strong helpful benevolent leadership.

Leadership by definition doesn't always look benevolent. It requires decisions where some individual is going to be inconvenienced and somebody else isn't. When we fail to take on the burden of those sorts of decisions, then the firm begins to the top slows down and eventually, it drops because there isn't enough motion to keep it going. It just starts to devolve. If there's anything I'm trying to counter here, it's this idea that our firms need to be more democratic. I do not think they do. I think they need to be less democratic, but I think the leadership still needs to be very empathetic and benevolent, but it needs to be leadership. You need to keep making decisions. I read this great Twitter thread yesterday.

This was an entrepreneur. I don't know him personally, but he was talking about the biggest things he's learned. I was expecting to read 21 different things in his thread on Twitter. Actually, I went back and I noticed 5 of these 21 things they say basically the same thing. It's like, you have got to keep making decisions and every decision you want it to be as accurate as possible, but it's way better to keep making decisions and leading than it is to just stop making them because decisions are always going to be made.

If you don't make them, someone else is going to make them for you. We can't go one way or the other. If we're too much of a dictatorship, then these individual democracies are just going to go work somewhere else. If we don't provide enough leadership, you're going to end up keeping the least qualified employees who are chasing comfort.

The rats who can swim are going to go somewhere else. You'll just be left with the ones who can't. It's like this ship starts to go down. All the rats that see it happening can swim. They're jumping, but the rest of them are staying. Those are the people you're left with.

Blair: The metaphor king of the creative world. Ladies and gentlemen, David C Bakker.

[laughter]

Blair: You see the more common mistake is leaning towards a democracy.

David: Yes.

Blair: Really, as you're describing it, it's more anarchy than it is democracy because democracy implies that we all get together and elect the leader and then we follow that leader until it no longer works and we elect another leader but I'm not asking you to rewrite the post. I think it still works. In your mind, you that listen at the leader, you think of it as democracy but it's really a tendency towards anarchy.

I was once on the board of a not-for-profit organization that had a consensus-based decision-making model and I thought, "Oh, this is the stupidest thing. We're never going to get anything done." It was a real divided board, completely polarized with half had one ideological point of view and the other half had another point of view. I think at some point we all agreed that this consensus-making decision model where we all have to agree 100% unanimity, it allowed us to make the decisions that we all agreed on. It kind of worked in a way but we were never able to make the big decisions.

We were never allowed to deal with the contentious issues and as I read this post and listen to you talk, some firms that I've worked with come to mind. I can see that pattern where it's like everybody's voice is important here, everybody has a say in what we're going to do and therefore, you make the easy decisions but not the difficult decisions and as you've already pointed out, the easy decisions tend to be the short-term ones. If somebody is not standing up and taking responsibility for the long term, the group rarely makes the right decisions for the long term.

David: Right. In fact, they almost never do. Absence some sort of really unique pressure that means that they cannot look away. That there's a very specific cause and effect from a prior bad decision that should have been made more in the interest of the future and it didn't happen and so they're looking at it. The kinds of decisions that fall under this umbrella are different based on what's happening in the economy.

Blair: What do you mean?

David: Right now I think the biggest decision that you need to make as a leader revolves around how much additional salary load are you willing to absorb because the people that you're looking to recruit are demanding more and more money than they ever have, they are setting the agenda whether you agree with it or not that says, in many cases, they will only take this job if they can work remotely.

You are sitting there thinking, "Well, I think that the way I viewed remote work in the past is a little bit antiquated and I've been forced to see this and it's worked out pretty well. Yes, I'm going to embrace it." Or you have somebody who says, "I've seen what's happened over the last two years. I don't like the result. I'm going to double down and have a firm where we're still very flexible but people are generally going to see each other every week."

Anyway, that's just one example of the decisions that you're being dragged along and some of you aren't following your instincts because you feel like you don't have the power. Then in other economic scenarios, it's more like, "Okay, here's a downturn. We don't have enough work." Which isn't true right now. "We don't have enough work but oh God, I'm close to these people, I know I should lay off 20% of my team but I can't do it and what's the public going to think in this town. The reputation that we have."

You talk yourself out of all of these decisions which you're having a conversation in your head and that's exactly what should happen but in the end, the leader in you needs to rise up even when there's insufficient certainty because it's more likely, even if you don't know for sure that the decision you need to make is the right one, it's much better for you to make it because decisions will always be made. If you aren't going to make it, somebody else is going to make it.

Leadership is like a vacuum and something will always rush in to fill it. If you're not leading your firm then there are two or three other strong personalities that are leading your firm but their butts are not on the line like yours is. It's just interesting how I just think this pressure is always there but the pressure is over different kinds of decisions based on where the economic indicators are.

Blair: Not to get too into the weeds on your specific example here but I think the work from home or working remotely has a specific challenge and the nature of how the power shifts, depending on the economic cycle, it's either shifts to the dictator, the employer or to the employee, the individual democracies in your model. The work from home one is really interesting. I know agency principals, I've never liked this remote model, I've never liked to work from home model, but I've got to accept the times of change and this is the new reality.

Then others are adamant. No, I don't like it. We're going back to work. What I think I'm hearing you say is, doesn't matter, make a decision, and if you really believe that the firm you want to run requires people to be together full time, then make that decision and do what's required now, depends where we are in the pandemic that might not be allowed, but let's just fast forward. Whatever the appropriate length of time is seven years probably.

David: Yes. Seven years.

Blair: Then you can imagine a scenario where somebody takes that position and it eliminates so many people who might have otherwise work for them but I would also imagine that it would draw a certain amount of people to them. Here's an example. One of our kids lives in a different city. He works for us. He's in his 20s. He's been working from home for the last 18 months or two years or whatever it's been.

At his age, he would really benefit from being in office so we don't have an office in the market he lives in, but we could make that happen. We could embed him in a client's office or another co-working space. It would be the best thing for him at his age and I would imagine there's that whole cohort of people who are itching to get back together so they can rub up against each other.

David: That's for sure. Already happening and I haven't seen it yet, but I'm expecting that some firms are going to use this as an intentional marketplace advantage where they'll say, "We're not a remote team." I haven't seen it yet. I just think it's probably going to happen. Somebody's going to say, "Oh, I could use this as a benefit," Let's say they go down that path and the marketplace says, "No, you're wrong." You're not going to get great people if you got to find them all in this city and I'm certainly open to that but the point is you got to keep making decisions and at the moment, the power is shifting more towards a democracy.

That's the point of the whole illustration because employees feel pretty empowered because are defined good ones and because they have the pandemic as a legitimate reason to think about this, and they're saying, "No," and so you're faced with this push-pull that's a little bit out of balance at the moment because these little democracies are not as eager to hitch themselves to your dictatorship as they were in the past because they have the power and this balance of power is really useful because it always bounces from one party to the next and you got to just be aware of where you are in the cycle, I guess.

Blair: Do you ever see the problem? I'm sure you do, but I'm curious how much, on the other end of the spectrum where a firm is run too much like a dictatorship?

David: Oh, yes, absolutely. I've seen it a lot and it makes me really angry. The other side of it doesn't make me angry, it just makes me sad, but this makes me really angry because it really hurts people and it borders on abuse for sure and you end up having really smart, thoughtful people who are coward and so they're withholding some of their very useful advice in that environment, but it's rare and rare to find, it's really hard to make that work unless you're in some very remote town and people that are working for you just don't have as many choices as they would've.

Blair: I've worked in a firm like that back in my employee days and you see these great people, they don't stick around, but they're around long enough to be beaten down and you look at the talent around you and you think, "Wow, we are not getting the best out of these people including myself in that situation." It's a real crime and it takes a fair amount of time to recover from on an individual basis.

I don't see it in the work that I do. I don't get as deep a glimpse into my client's businesses anymore as a training company so you would see all of the awards, I imagine in a total business review, there's not much that can be hidden from you so you'd see it more often than I do. I'm always surprised when I see it. To me, it's rare, but for you, it's not so rare.

David: No, it's not. For 25 years, I've been using a really great survey instrument, that's a mix of qualitative tools and it surfaces so much and it's all valuable information. Recently, we decided, without charging any more for it, we decided we would pay to have all of the surveys summarized but anonymized so nobody would be able to know who said something. In a fresh new way, it's not just me reading through all the surveys and making some mental summaries in my head. There's actually a summary and it's anywhere between four and 10 pages long and we'll send it to the principal and one time I said, "Normally I would send this to you, but I'm not sure I should, are you sure you want this?"

Of course, they wanted it. Then three other times I've said, "You need to know this is brutal. This is really rough." I think you all are well intentioned, but the way your team is experiencing you is not good at all. You're going to have a massive turnover problem. Your control freaks. I went on I was very specific and I said you need to read this. This is part of what it means to work together. We need to be transparent with each other. The interesting thing in every case the is I'm waiting by the phone to see when they're going to call all angry and none of that has happened. In every case, they said, "Oh, thank you so much for being honest with us and actually none of this surprises us.

That's the part that surprises me that none of it surprises them. Yet, they have felt like we can hold this difficulty underwater almost like you're holding an inner tube underwater. The minute you let go it pops to the surface and everybody sees it. We can hold what's happening under the water because there are other bigger things that we have to solve first and in many cases, it's rapid growth. I know we got to hire people and we can't train them. We can't orient them the way we would. We have to throw them behind enemy lines and there's 10 other excuses.

Well, here's what it comes down to. When you grow, when you add people you're running a firm and it almost doesn't matter what industry it's in. You're running a firm that depends on maintaining this appropriate balance between you as a benevolent dictator and all these other people with individual agency, and the way you would manage these folks isn't all that different than if you were running a law firm, or a accounting firm, or something like that and that's the decision you're making to be in this field.

It's not about the fun work and the creativity. There is a lot of that. Those are the parts that draw us so much but this is a leadership play. This is a management play. That's who you are and you happen to be in this field, but first of all, you're a leader and then you're in this field, and you got to keep that order right. I feel like I'm lecturing.

Blair: Well, you lost me on the distinction between running a stable firm versus running a firm that's rapidly growing.

David: Just because they're having to hire people so quickly and they don't have time to manage them well or ease them into things. The client demands are more important than the management demands at that point.

Blair: I've sitting here on the edge of my seat waiting to hear what the response was. I'm a little bit surprised that people are two things at once, both appreciative of the feedback and unsurprised by what they're hearing. Do you ever get the more sociopathic or psychopathic response of, well, they can like it or lump it.

David: Yes, for sure I do. All they just think that I have completely misread the situation and that if I really knew what was going on I'd realize that that person that I think is providing valuable feedback is just a jerk and selfish. It's almost always not true. When you read especially if you have any linguistic background, any sense about you, people aren't getting together and saying, all right, let's all say this in the survey. No, it's generally true, and when I hear that from a principal, I'm pretty much done with them.

I'll finish the engagement but I'm not going to work for them again. What surprises you is what surprises me is that wasn't the surprise and maybe that it didn't bother them as much as they did. I don't do leadership and manage been coaching. All I can do is point out what might need to change and then introduce them to somebody else. I think we just don't properly weight the role of managing people effectively in doing what it takes to be a leader in terms of measuring the success of our firms. You and I know so many principal and so many of those people are really thoughtful empathetic strong leaders and it's so great to see when you see it.

Blair: Yes. It's the vast, vast majority of my experience is strong leaders and empathetic as well. Let's wrap up here. Is there one thing you would like people to take away from this post of yours in this discussion?

David: I think it's to just be more aware of some of the fears that surface as you contemplate the big leadership decisions you need to make. There are cheaper ways to make friends than view all your employees as friends. They need to respect you and like being around you so on, but the biggest most impactful decisions are not always going to be viewed appropriately right now. I think that's the thing I would leave people with. Is that your job is to think about the future. Their job is to make sure that you're not forgetting the present. That's the combination of things that makes it all work.

Blair: Oh, that's a great way to look at it. You saved it. Talk about bearing the lead. Your team members are responsible for optimizing the present and you the leader, you're responsible for the future. That's fantastic. Let's end on that. I'm going to chew on that for a bit. Thanks, David. This was enlightening and fun.

David: Thanks, Blair.