The magic of respect
I have long been aware of four facts:
The reports that state that over 70% of people are unhappy at their jobs.
Many people report being treated as if they were stupid, lazy and needed to be told what to do every moment of the work day.
Children and adults are often punished for thinking for themselves
Kids who act out their boredom in school are often labeled, medicated, and/or sent to the office and then sent home.
Full disclosure is in order. Since I was a young child and even now as a 75-year-old adult, I am often told to “behave.” I recall last year starting a new, part-time job. The second day on the job one of the other professional employees sat down with the clients to tell them how to behave when the owner of the company came the next day. A couple of the clients quickly offered, “You do not need to worry about us, worry about Jim misbehaving.” This was my second day at this facility. How had clients who were in the early stages of recovery from serious addiction issues, and, thus, very self-centered, discern that I was likely to misbehave? They also quickly figured out that I was the go to person if they had a concern which other staff may not have wanted to address or may not have addressed in a passionate, assertive manner.
Every place I have worked it has quickly become obvious that Jim is not good about obeying rules which do not make sense or do not serve what he understands to be the primary goal or mission of the organization which hired him. When I was a Presbyterian minister, often on Monday morning, I would receive a call from an administrator in the regional arm of the church hierarchy saying that they had reports from some of the elders of the church that “Reverend Pickett did such and such” and asking if the report was accurate. The accusation was almost always accurate. In this small community of many churches and few residents I sent the kids from the Presbyterian church to a Sunday school at one of the other churches. I also agreed to officiate at the wedding of the daughter of a couple who had been kicked out of the church for living in sin. When a woman was about to get divorced, her husband had a serious of strokes which left him unable to take care of himself. She did not divorce him but kept him in the home and took care of him. Later she and another man established a very loving relationship. He moved in and both of them took care of each other and the disabled husband. The church elders threw them out of the church. I thought their solution to be very loving.
I worked with the owners of the local bars to develop youth programs.
Many of the newer companies such as google and the dot-com companies figured out early on that if they wanted employees to be creative they needed to give them a lot of freedom, let them share in the profits, and enjoy other perks.
Yet, today, in much of corporate United States the thinking is that the more rules the better. We also seem to spend a great deal of money attempting to insure that individuals do not misuse resources and do not cheat in terms of time spent at work. Additionally we spend a lot of time, energy and money attempting to insure that no one takes advantage of or misuses social service resources.
The same approach is common in schools. There are many rules for how to behave in school. Yet it seems as if the more rules one has the more likely children and adults are to misbehave. When children in school misbehave we send them to the principal’s office and all too often make liberal use of suspension and other “punishment.” We also make liberal use of medication. Seldom does it occur to school officials or even parents that the rules or the approach to learning may be the problem.
It seems as if many of we humans are genetically programmed to “rebel” when someone attempts to control us. Yet, this fact seems to have little influence on how we manage people in educational system, in homes, and in the corporate world.
Once again, to find a report on an experiment in using fewer rules, treating adults and kids with more respect (assuming that they will more often than not do the next right thing), I turn to Ted Talks. I find a talk by Ricardo Semler entitled “How to run a company with (almost) no rules.”
Mr. Semier says of the company leadership team,
“We said things like, why can't people set their own salaries? What do they need to know? There's only three things you need to know: how much people make inside the company, how much people make somewhere else in a similar business and how much we make in general to see whether we can afford it. So let's give people these three pieces of information. So we started having, in the cafeteria, a computer where you could go in and you could ask what someone spent, how much someone makes, what they make in benefits, what the company makes, what the margins are, and so forth. And this is 25 years ago.
05:46
As this information started coming to people, we said things like, we don't want to see your expense report, we don't want to know how many holidays you're taking, we don't want to know where you work. We had, at one point, 14 different offices around town, and we'd say, go to the one that's closest to your house, to the customer that you're going to visit today. Don't tell us where you are. And more, even when we had thousands of people, 5,000 people, we had two people in the H.R. department, and thankfully one of them has retired. (Laughter)
So we'd say things like, let's agree that you're going to sell 57 widgets per week. If you sell them by Wednesday, please go to the beach. Don't create a problem for us, for manufacturing, for application, then we have to buy new companies, we have to buy our competitors, we have to do all kinds of things because you sold too many widgets. So go to the beach and start again on Monday.”
As it happens he and some others have also developed schools called Lumiar which are set up using mentors, experts (retired grandparents) and a child governing group which have been enormously successful in terms of the kids doing well emotionally and academically.
He described the school concept:
“And so we created this school, which is called Lumiar, and Lumiar, one of them is a public school, and Lumiar says the following: Let's divide this role of the teacher into two. One guy, we'll call a tutor. A tutor, in the old sense of the Greek "paideia": Look after the kid. What's happening at home, what's their moment in life, etc.. But please don't teach, because the little you know compared to Google, we don't want to know. Keep that to yourself. (Laughter) Now, we'll bring in people who have two things: passion and expertise, and it could be their profession or not. And we use the senior citizens, who are 25 percent of the population with wisdom that nobody wants anymore. So we bring them to school and we say, teach these kids whatever you really believe in. So we have violinists teaching math. We have all kinds of things where we say, don't worry about the course material anymore. We have approximately 10 great threads that go from 2 to 17. Things like, how do we measure ourselves as humans? So there's a place for math and physics and all that there. How do we express ourselves? So there's a place for music and literature, etc., but also for grammar.
…
We'd say, why do we have to scold the kids and say, sit down and come here and do that, and so forth. We said, let's get the kids to do something we call a circle, which meets once a week. And we'd say, you put the rules together and then you decide what you want to do with it. So can you all hit yourself on the head? Sure, for a week, try. They came up with the very same rules that we had, except they're theirs. And then, they have the power, which means, they can and do suspend and expel kids so that we're not playing school, they really decide this stuff that we have in the schools, in general. And they have a zero to 100 percent grading, which they do themselves with an app every couple of hours.”
I strongly encourage every reader to listen to this talk or to download the transcript of the talk and read it. The reader will notice that the Mr. Semler applies the same principles to every aspect of his life. He examine rules in every area and for every stage of his life journey. If the rules does not make sense in terms of what I am going to call his spiritual goals he takes a different approach.
Often if I want another opinion I ask a young person. Frequently young people, including very young children, are very honest and see issues from a fresh perspective. Certainly a young child might not appreciate some issues such as the need to pay the electric bill, but very often when they tell me something is “stupid” they are right.
One the favorite questions of very young children is “why?” If I cannot explain why in a way which makes sense to that young child there is probably not a good reason to keep doing it.
Obviously, one could replace the phrase “breaking rules” with “being creative.” We are living in a historical time when we can “train/make” robots, 3-D printers, and other tools to do much of the repetitive work. That leaves us free to develop new approaches to how we live and take care of each other. In many instances we are not doing a good job by anyone’s standards. Putting old people out to pasture and then in substandard nursing homes, making money just to make money or to prove who is important, creating more weapons, building more prisons and suicide bombings, and fracking to get more oil and gas so that we do not upset the business balance by developing and using more solar energy and many other life dances are not working well.
More rules and more punishment for breaking rules is not creating a more just, happy, or moral community. Perhaps, just perhaps, we need to accept the invitation of people such as Mr. Semler to explore a new dance.
Written March 29, 2016
I have long been aware of four facts:
The reports that state that over 70% of people are unhappy at their jobs.
Many people report being treated as if they were stupid, lazy and needed to be told what to do every moment of the work day.
Children and adults are often punished for thinking for themselves
Kids who act out their boredom in school are often labeled, medicated, and/or sent to the office and then sent home.
Full disclosure is in order. Since I was a young child and even now as a 75-year-old adult, I am often told to “behave.” I recall last year starting a new, part-time job. The second day on the job one of the other professional employees sat down with the clients to tell them how to behave when the owner of the company came the next day. A couple of the clients quickly offered, “You do not need to worry about us, worry about Jim misbehaving.” This was my second day at this facility. How had clients who were in the early stages of recovery from serious addiction issues, and, thus, very self-centered, discern that I was likely to misbehave? They also quickly figured out that I was the go to person if they had a concern which other staff may not have wanted to address or may not have addressed in a passionate, assertive manner.
Every place I have worked it has quickly become obvious that Jim is not good about obeying rules which do not make sense or do not serve what he understands to be the primary goal or mission of the organization which hired him. When I was a Presbyterian minister, often on Monday morning, I would receive a call from an administrator in the regional arm of the church hierarchy saying that they had reports from some of the elders of the church that “Reverend Pickett did such and such” and asking if the report was accurate. The accusation was almost always accurate. In this small community of many churches and few residents I sent the kids from the Presbyterian church to a Sunday school at one of the other churches. I also agreed to officiate at the wedding of the daughter of a couple who had been kicked out of the church for living in sin. When a woman was about to get divorced, her husband had a serious of strokes which left him unable to take care of himself. She did not divorce him but kept him in the home and took care of him. Later she and another man established a very loving relationship. He moved in and both of them took care of each other and the disabled husband. The church elders threw them out of the church. I thought their solution to be very loving.
I worked with the owners of the local bars to develop youth programs.
Many of the newer companies such as google and the dot-com companies figured out early on that if they wanted employees to be creative they needed to give them a lot of freedom, let them share in the profits, and enjoy other perks.
Yet, today, in much of corporate United States the thinking is that the more rules the better. We also seem to spend a great deal of money attempting to insure that individuals do not misuse resources and do not cheat in terms of time spent at work. Additionally we spend a lot of time, energy and money attempting to insure that no one takes advantage of or misuses social service resources.
The same approach is common in schools. There are many rules for how to behave in school. Yet it seems as if the more rules one has the more likely children and adults are to misbehave. When children in school misbehave we send them to the principal’s office and all too often make liberal use of suspension and other “punishment.” We also make liberal use of medication. Seldom does it occur to school officials or even parents that the rules or the approach to learning may be the problem.
It seems as if many of we humans are genetically programmed to “rebel” when someone attempts to control us. Yet, this fact seems to have little influence on how we manage people in educational system, in homes, and in the corporate world.
Once again, to find a report on an experiment in using fewer rules, treating adults and kids with more respect (assuming that they will more often than not do the next right thing), I turn to Ted Talks. I find a talk by Ricardo Semler entitled “How to run a company with (almost) no rules.”
Mr. Semier says of the company leadership team,
“We said things like, why can't people set their own salaries? What do they need to know? There's only three things you need to know: how much people make inside the company, how much people make somewhere else in a similar business and how much we make in general to see whether we can afford it. So let's give people these three pieces of information. So we started having, in the cafeteria, a computer where you could go in and you could ask what someone spent, how much someone makes, what they make in benefits, what the company makes, what the margins are, and so forth. And this is 25 years ago.
05:46
As this information started coming to people, we said things like, we don't want to see your expense report, we don't want to know how many holidays you're taking, we don't want to know where you work. We had, at one point, 14 different offices around town, and we'd say, go to the one that's closest to your house, to the customer that you're going to visit today. Don't tell us where you are. And more, even when we had thousands of people, 5,000 people, we had two people in the H.R. department, and thankfully one of them has retired. (Laughter)
So we'd say things like, let's agree that you're going to sell 57 widgets per week. If you sell them by Wednesday, please go to the beach. Don't create a problem for us, for manufacturing, for application, then we have to buy new companies, we have to buy our competitors, we have to do all kinds of things because you sold too many widgets. So go to the beach and start again on Monday.”
As it happens he and some others have also developed schools called Lumiar which are set up using mentors, experts (retired grandparents) and a child governing group which have been enormously successful in terms of the kids doing well emotionally and academically.
He described the school concept:
“And so we created this school, which is called Lumiar, and Lumiar, one of them is a public school, and Lumiar says the following: Let's divide this role of the teacher into two. One guy, we'll call a tutor. A tutor, in the old sense of the Greek "paideia": Look after the kid. What's happening at home, what's their moment in life, etc.. But please don't teach, because the little you know compared to Google, we don't want to know. Keep that to yourself. (Laughter) Now, we'll bring in people who have two things: passion and expertise, and it could be their profession or not. And we use the senior citizens, who are 25 percent of the population with wisdom that nobody wants anymore. So we bring them to school and we say, teach these kids whatever you really believe in. So we have violinists teaching math. We have all kinds of things where we say, don't worry about the course material anymore. We have approximately 10 great threads that go from 2 to 17. Things like, how do we measure ourselves as humans? So there's a place for math and physics and all that there. How do we express ourselves? So there's a place for music and literature, etc., but also for grammar.
…
We'd say, why do we have to scold the kids and say, sit down and come here and do that, and so forth. We said, let's get the kids to do something we call a circle, which meets once a week. And we'd say, you put the rules together and then you decide what you want to do with it. So can you all hit yourself on the head? Sure, for a week, try. They came up with the very same rules that we had, except they're theirs. And then, they have the power, which means, they can and do suspend and expel kids so that we're not playing school, they really decide this stuff that we have in the schools, in general. And they have a zero to 100 percent grading, which they do themselves with an app every couple of hours.”
I strongly encourage every reader to listen to this talk or to download the transcript of the talk and read it. The reader will notice that the Mr. Semler applies the same principles to every aspect of his life. He examine rules in every area and for every stage of his life journey. If the rules does not make sense in terms of what I am going to call his spiritual goals he takes a different approach.
Often if I want another opinion I ask a young person. Frequently young people, including very young children, are very honest and see issues from a fresh perspective. Certainly a young child might not appreciate some issues such as the need to pay the electric bill, but very often when they tell me something is “stupid” they are right.
One the favorite questions of very young children is “why?” If I cannot explain why in a way which makes sense to that young child there is probably not a good reason to keep doing it.
Obviously, one could replace the phrase “breaking rules” with “being creative.” We are living in a historical time when we can “train/make” robots, 3-D printers, and other tools to do much of the repetitive work. That leaves us free to develop new approaches to how we live and take care of each other. In many instances we are not doing a good job by anyone’s standards. Putting old people out to pasture and then in substandard nursing homes, making money just to make money or to prove who is important, creating more weapons, building more prisons and suicide bombings, and fracking to get more oil and gas so that we do not upset the business balance by developing and using more solar energy and many other life dances are not working well.
More rules and more punishment for breaking rules is not creating a more just, happy, or moral community. Perhaps, just perhaps, we need to accept the invitation of people such as Mr. Semler to explore a new dance.
Written March 29, 2016
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