Let’s Let the Inmates Run the Asylum (Sort Of)
In my earliest days of corporate life, I had a CEO who reportedly said: “Don’t let all these people working on this…don’t let them think.”
“DON’T. LET. THEM. THINK,” he barked. (He was a barker.)
Worse, he was referring to the challenge I was hired to help solve—the biggest strategic issue facing the company at the time. I was one of “these people.” He didn’t want me to think??
There was also the leader who said, “We can’t let the inmates run the asylum.”
“Oh yeah,” I wanted to ask, “We hired INMATES?? We run AN ASYLUM????”
Either of these leaders could have said, “Let’s not let too many chefs spoil the soup.” That would have been fair, and it wouldn’t have shown a not-so-under-the-surface leadership attitude of “We leaders have all the answers, and our people can’t possibly have any.”
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During change, our people are not only critical to the change’s success, they almost certainly will DECIDE its success. It’s not that they’ll have a meeting and vote whether to go through with the change. They may not even realize they’re killing a change. It’s much more subtle.
Reality is, if the change is not—at least in part—our people’s idea, if they haven’t had some say, some sense of control, they are less likely to be engaged, on our side, in the boat rowing with us, aligned. They can in fact actively destroy the change. More likely it will be passive: Their lack of enthusiasm will kill it slowly. We won’t be able to point our finger to one minute, one thing that lost the change for us, but it will be lost—like two-thirds of all change efforts.
So, yes. We not only need to involve our people when thinking about the change, but we also need them when running it. We need them to think. We need them to help us run things.
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Whatever happened to the “Don’t let them think” and the “Inmates” leaders? I can’t recall the inmates issue we were working on or what happened. With Dr. “Don’t”…well, the issue we were working on was labor, and we ended up with a disastrous strike that cost a lot of money and—more important—stopped the company’s momentum. It tore apart the company’s culture.
“Our people are our greatest asset.” It’s a truism, not a talking point.