“Like a rubber band. He keeps going back to the same position where he was when he started.” That’s how I describe one owner I work with. He will tell you himself that he is the bottleneck, and he can point to the last 12 to 24 months of bad decisions. Then he blames the people around him for not understanding him, and he snaps back to the old behavior.
Because they’re the leader and they’re in charge, owners are almost always the bottleneck at some level. What I tell people about this one is that short term, you accept that he’s not going to change, and long term, you keep chipping away. One way I chip away is an anonymous employee survey designed around the owner’s leadership, because it lets his people answer without putting their names on it. His company has a culture. It is his personality, because culture defaults to the personality of whoever is running the business, whether anyone designed it that way or not. A culture that is one person’s personality has very little room in it for anyone else’s.
That is the problem our new guest author, Dr. Josh Maddox, takes on in “The Art of Belonging Without Losing Ourselves.” Josh is a clinical psychologist and the CEO of Wellspring Psychology in Los Gatos, California, and his article takes business owners deeper into the psychology of the people in their workplace than I can. I’m not a psychologist. I build workplace cultures, and I’ve watched what happens inside them for years. Josh explains what is going on inside a person when a culture works and when it doesn’t.
People should belong enough to disagree.
— Dr. Josh Maddox, Clinical Psychologist
The overlap starts with belonging, because belonging is what I’m building. A vision, a mission, and company commitments get written down so every employee has something to belong to. Then the owner holds a monthly all-company meeting and asks whether the company is living them out, where it’s falling short, and what’s missing. Josh’s article is about what that same belonging can turn into when nobody is watching it. He puts it in one line: “People should belong enough to disagree.”
He describes how it goes wrong. Shared identity can slide into comparison, until “accountability begins to resemble interpersonal policing rather than constructive responsibility.” Expectations and accountability are words I use constantly, so that sentence stopped me. Accountability in our work is to the written commitments, and the owner answers to them too, which keeps it from turning into employees keeping score on one another.
Josh also names what the owner is responsible for: “The leader must strengthen the collective without allowing the collective to consume the individual.” Put that next to my claim about culture defaulting to the owner’s personality and you have the rubber-band owner, a company where the one personality that counts is his. Josh’s description of what a culture should be is better than any I’ve given: “At its best, organizational culture gives people something to belong to without asking them to become someone other than themselves.”
Josh gives three questions for telling whether a culture has crossed that line. Can someone question a decision without jeopardizing their standing? Can they offer an unpopular perspective without being treated as disloyal? Can they disagree with leadership while remaining a valued member of the community? Those are the questions I would ask about your business. Put them on an anonymous survey, word for word, and send it before your next all-company meeting.
Read the answers yourself before you share them with anyone. A no to any of the three tells you your people don’t yet feel safe saying so, and that points at the owner first. If your commitments aren’t written yet, writing company commitments employees will remember is where I would begin. Read Josh’s article too. The three questions come in the section on when belonging becomes conformity.
