You Can’t Demand Commitment

The meeting was about five minutes in when someone walked through the door late.

This was early in my career, just after I’d left AT&T for a small startup. The owner held weekly all-company meetings every Monday morning. Sales, customer support, engineering, marketing, everyone in one room. He’d give us his motivational rundown of what he wanted to see happen that week.

On this particular Monday, an employee arrived about five minutes late.

The owner stopped mid-sentence. “Why are you late?”

The employee answered honestly: he’d been stuck in traffic.

You could feel the room tense up. The owner latched onto it. Told him it didn’t matter why he was late. Late was late. He should have planned for it.

In my head, I kept thinking, this is such a trivial thing to harp on. But I knew. He wanted to prove he was in charge.

The employee apologized. Said it wouldn’t happen again.

“You’re going to be here on time,” the owner repeated.

“Yes.”

“You say yes sir to me.”

The room froze.

The employee acquiesced. “Yes, sir.”

That was the moment. I’ve talked to people who were in that room 15+ years later, and every one of them says the same thing: that was the moment he lost them. When he forced the “yes sir,” it became obvious this wasn’t about punctuality. It was about dominance.

From that point on, anytime he talked about having an open-door policy or said employees were empowered to make decisions, nobody believed it. They had seen what empowerment meant to him.

You Can’t Demand Commitment

We talked about this incident right after it happened in our executive team meeting. I told him I thought it was ineffective.

He said, “Well, I demand compliance.”

I was young enough to not realize the danger of challenging this and said, “If you demand compliance, that’s all you’ll get.”

We worked in an environment where we needed more than compliance. We needed people to intrinsically want to do things. If you place a supreme focus on being here at 8 o’clock, they’ll show up at 8 and leave at 5. If you have zero flexibility on the front end, they’re going to give you zero flexibility on the back end.

Since then I have seen this same type of thing play out dozens of times and the result is always the same. When you make compliance a zero-sum game, that’s all you get. You won’t get anything extra. Because that’s what you’re signaling is important. Not commitment.

Empowerment Is an Environment, Not a Gift

Here’s what I’ve come to accept: you can’t really empower people. You can only create the environment where they feel safe to use the authority and autonomy you’ve given them. It might sound like semantics, but there’s often a gap between telling someone they have authority or autonomy and actually creating the culture that makes them feel safe using it.

There isn’t a button you can push that’s going to make a person act a certain way every day. There isn’t a lever you can pull to make them want to come to work. Those are functions of the environment you’ve built. And that starts with being aware of your own behavior, because if you can’t manage your own shortcomings, it’s hard to lead other people through theirs.

The owner in that meeting thought motivation was something he could manufacture through dominance. Show up on time. Say yes sir. Follow the rules. What he actually manufactured was a room full of people who did exactly what was required and absolutely nothing more.

The Difference

Empowerment has little to do with giving employees anything other than freedom. It’s about individuals enabling themselves to take action, control their work, and make decisions autonomously. But that only happens when the environment signals that it’s safe to do so.

Coach and get out of the way. Accept their failures and turn your own into lessons. Share your commitment first so they know it’s safe to share theirs. Build their confidence instead of their compliance.

Every person who works for your company is part of a whole. When you don’t give your team the right environment, it has a demotivating effect that can cause people to leave or, worse, stay and become disengaged.

That’s the difference between compliance and commitment. Between showing up and showing up engaged. Between employees who do what they’re told and employees who make things happen.

That’s not motivating employees. That’s liberating them.