A lot of companies seek to control employees. They have handbooks and policies. They monitor emails. They make rules about what’s allowed and what’s forbidden.
But “control” is a tricky thing. The tighter the reins, the more you create an environment of distrust. An us vs. them mentality takes hold. And that’s when people start trying to game the system.
That’s why workplace managers who seek “control” might want to consider the advice Shunryu Suzuki gives in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind:
The best way to control people is to encourage them to be mischievous. Then they will be in control in its wider sense. To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him. So it is with people: first let them do what they want, and watch them. This is the best policy. To ignore them is not good; that is the worst policy. The second worst is trying to control them. The best one is to watch them, just to watch them, without trying to control them.
Imagine an employee handbook that just said: “We trust you. Be mischievous.”
Morley
on 16 Dec 09At the same time, look at what happened to Lost. Because of the show’s success, ABC gave the creators free rein to do whatever they liked. The result was two plodding seasons where not enough happened. When they stepped in and forced the showrunners to get their act together, the show improved measurably.
So I think the solution is to give employees freedom, but to periodically steer them in the right direction when they stray.
(I’m taking a tight interpretation of his use of the word “watch”; maybe Suzuki means with the word what I suggest.)
Vladimir
on 16 Dec 09“We trust you. Be mischievous. We are watching you.” is it a recipe for some weird workplace reality show? :)
Dan
on 16 Dec 09Meh…..handbooks are more about liability than control. At least in my experience.
Jorge Bernal
on 16 Dec 09Morley, I think that’s just the difference between “leading” and “controlling”
Big Company Dude
on 16 Dec 09My company would probably be sued out of existence in the first 6 months of encouraging anyone (especially me) to “Be Mischievous” – LOL! Too bad we live in a world where the legal pressure to CYA ultimately diminishes a large company’s ability to do great things…
Steinblock
on 16 Dec 09That’s some pretty stupid advice. I think we as society have through history and lots of trial and error worked out that certain rules must be established (laws) so everyone is safer and we function better as a group.
Suggesting that “We trust you. Be mischievous.” is good is ignorance. If that worked we’d have lawless land and everybody would be bound by code of honor, but alas, that does not exists and it does not work.
Every single company, including 37 Signals, has policies and procedures. And you have them to enforce consistency of service or product delivery to your customers. Whether you have written it down or not, they exists. Nothing is just hippy happy “we trust you”...
Yeah I trust you not to abuse company credit card (I watch the bill), but I want you to answer customer inquires same day… I don’t trust you with that.
And point about “watching them”, how would you feel if your every move at work was recorded and watched and that evaluated?
Mike
on 16 Dec 09Reminds me of Bentham’s Panopticon. Sometimes you hear about “lightweight governance models” in the context of wikis; this might also be called a “shame-based governance model”.
The interesting paradox is that a lack of explicit rules can be an even more effective way of controlling people. They don’t know what implicit rules they might be breaking, so they are even more paranoid. This is how it works in China – there are no explicit laws against revealing state secrets. But you can still be arrested for revealing state secrets of course, but they will never tell you what you said that got you arrested.
itdnext
on 16 Dec 09I believe the word mischievous use metaphorically, as to mean unusual freedom. As for JJ Abrams crew and LOST, I think they painted themselves into a creative corner and they did that before they got all the so “freedom”. It’s a tricky business. I think a a leader one explains the business objectives, one also make it clear that means has to be legal and ethical (these are boundaries we live by in usual life as individual) the spacious meadow metaphor is excellent. Work is just one tiny little bit of life, shouldn’t be a spacious meadow, should it promote freedom within the objective and should it be allowed within the meadow to correct course but still preserve the meadow.
Let me know.
itdnext
on 16 Dec 09I forgot to preview before I posted… sorry. Tons of grammar errors. It sounded great in my head :)
Sam Aparicio
on 16 Dec 09What if the handbook was reworded: We trust you. Be mischievous. Don’t do anything to damage the company’s reputation.
Dmitry
on 16 Dec 09Steinblock: I think the point is that you should use a carrot instead of the stick. Rules will push people in your desired direction, which works but also creates distrust and dislike as people normally don’t like being told what to do. Instead, use incentives and company culture to pull people. Make them do what you want by making them want to do it, rather than by forcing them to do it.
carlivar
on 16 Dec 09Imagine the lawsuits the company would lose when it is revealed in court that its employees were officially sanctioned to do anything.
George
on 16 Dec 09That’s a good point. Most companies try to control their employees and turn them into mindless robots. But what really makes a company outstanding is when the employees actually care about the company and its customers. They care enough to express themselves and find ways to make the company succeed.
I think that when a company tries to control its employees the employees stop caring about the company.
Adam
on 16 Dec 09This would work well if you had good employees. If companies invested as much time into recruiting and encouraging employees as they do writing policy and procedure employee manuals would be obsolete.
Kimball Fink-Jensen
on 17 Dec 09As with most Japanese advice, you need to look beyond the words. This is really about a license to let people be creative in how they go about doing their work. Consider also that “Zen” in English translates as “for the better”.
Everyone in a company is a brain as well as a set of hands, but too often controlling managers think of them only as a pair of hands.
Yet the people doing the work often have the best knowledge about how to make that work better – better today than it was yesterday and then in the future better than it is now done today. In the West however we too rarely give them the chance to express it.
That doesn’t mean there should be no boundaries. Indeed we should take the improvements that people suggest and that are implemented, and standardise them into the processes for all.
BY the way, this is the art of KAIZEN or as the West likes to call it, lean thinking – making change for the better, involving everybody, everywhere and everyday.
So let people be “mischievous” by giving them a platform to express their creativity about how they do their job. You might be surprised at the results.
Steve R.
on 17 Dec 09In my experience, the truly bad examples of corporate control arise from a few (or one) idiot with too much power.
For example, I worked for a firm with a policy regarding meals when on the road. They set a dollar limit and just paid the employee a per diem. Worked great. One internal control manager who never got to travel decided it was a bad idea, and some employees might eat cheap and pocket the difference, so she implemented a bunch of controls to force people to submit receipts for all food purchased. Long story short, they still paid out the same amounts, and the employer incurred the additional cost of a small army of clerks who spent their days auditing expense reports and calling you to ask why you ate two muffins at Starbucks, and wasn’t one adequate, and why did you eat at this restaurant, and wasn’t there a Dennys nearby you could have eaten at and saved the company money?
My takeaway – better to have your employees ‘get over’ a little and be happy, than to antagonize them and pay higher compliance costs.
Eric
on 17 Dec 09@Morley Actually, it wasn’t ABC that set the end date. The writers and producers of “Lost” asked for it.
So one could argue that giving their employees (the show’s creators) the freedom to plan out how the show would end improved the value of the end product. That took a lot of trust—it’s extremely rare for creators to get that kind of creative control.
Here’s the backstory:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/24/arts/television/24lost.html
http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/b55075_Beginning_of_End_for_Lost.html
Tim Jahn
on 17 Dec 09Too much control is definitely a bad thing. Too little control is probably a disaster.
I think somewhere in between works the best.
Bob
on 17 Dec 09I’m often asked to be a mindless bot.
Richard M.
on 17 Dec 09This is a lovely, may I say, desirable or even necessary counterpoint to usual manifestations of even kaizen management. A perhaps necessary independent, simultaneous melody. Toyota / Suzuki glee club.
Romain
on 17 Dec 09@Mike
There are laws against revealing state secrets in China. The trick is that there is no definition of what constitutes a state secret. Then indeed, it makes people paranoid and they just don’t reveal anything to be on the safe side.
So that’s the space and flexibility that makes control effective vs. a set of rigid rules, which are more easily bypassed and may come in the way of actual positive actions.
ramsha
on 17 Dec 09buy
Ricardo
on 17 Dec 09Yes, for some time I thought I was a little off because I think this way. It is nice to see that some other people share similar ideas. I keep telling myself that when I have my business up and running this is exactly what the handbook will read.
I’ve always worked for companies that try to control every move, from the hours you work, lunch time, training, coffee, books, vacation, etc… However, I have always insisted to my “managers” that I needed more freedom to do my work and most of the times I have gotten that freedom and have always done my job on time and with quality.
What’s interesting, is that even do my managers saw that everything worked perfectly, they always asked me to not talk about this “freedom” to my fellow co-workers, they feared that if I did, then all employees will come and ask to get that same freedom and they thought that will be a disaster. My answer to that concern is this, let them loose, if you notice someone is not doing their job or is abusing this freedom, then those are employees you don’t want to keep anyways ;-)
Doug
on 17 Dec 09This works great for some employees in some environments. Can you image if you were the manager of a McDonalds and told your minimum wage burger flippers to be mischievious and work ‘when you want’, etc? Time to take off the rose colored glasses…
If the employees act like owners, it works great. If it’s just a J.O.B., good luck—you’ll get taken advantage of.
I DO agree that some procedures and managers push some people into not caring. But some employees just don’t care. Your corporate culture won’t change their human nature. Do you fire them if they’re super talented but need to be managed?
Kyle Maxwell
on 17 Dec 09I don’t think you want folks in all environments following that advice.
I work at a company that handles credit card data. I’ve worked at companies that handled litigation support, financial audits, and even phone calls.
Do you want people who work with your private data having that as a policy? Doubtful.
Funu
on 17 Dec 09I think Shunryu Suzuki was talking out of his ass. You know, having some fun with gullible Westerners. Don’t take his mischievous words for a gospel.
Few things are worse than some budding wannabe reading one book on Zen and then finding it applicable to every excruciating minutia in their workaday life. People devote their entire lives to fathoming Zen, and then they die trying. Anyone can buy a cheap paperback book on Zen, read a few chapters from it, and then misinterpret everything that’s written in there, and then harass others by parroting the nuggets of ‘wisdom’ found in there.
Mark
on 18 Dec 09Imagine if the federal government implemented this and got out of our collective asses with their regulations, control and “change”.
Amy
on 18 Dec 09I am working on our employee handbook and I agree its more about liability then control. However, I’m taking this to heart and on the first page its going to say “We trust you, be mischevious.” But I’m going to add “but yield results.” Or something along those lines.
shiro
on 18 Dec 09Ironic that this was written by a Japanese person, when Japanese companies are some of the strictest / policy dictating entities on the planet. Amazing the disconnect between the philosophy and daily practise…
Martial
on 18 Dec 09Greetings from sunny, dusty, chilly Kabul. Everybody who isn’t from here has a security policy, as you can imagine. Most of them are pretty strict, along the lines of: To travel between points A and B, you must be driven in an officially sanctioned vehicle – and points A and B must be within this carefully designated zone.
What are the consequences of that policy? UN staff, to put an organizational face on it, cannot shop in local stores. They cannot meet local people. They cannot get exercise by walking or jogging or riding a bike (all things Kabulis do). They live their lives driven between their hotels and guesthouses, their offices, and restaurants. Actually, currently UN staff can’t even go out to eat. Home to office and back.
That policy ensures that we have thousands of internationals whose job is to work with the people of a country who cannot interact with those people. There is something desperately wrong with that policy. And the quality of the work visibly suffers.
My company works in war zones. We have a security policy too. “Don’t be stupid.”
I’ll leave the implications of that policy to the reader.
This discussion is closed.