MR. KOJO NNAMDIWelcome back. Researchers have been trying to understand for decades how and why we work best. One thing has become clear in recent years, traditional top-down offices with employees simply carrying out the boss's orders don't inspire us to perform our jobs well. And it's not about money either. We're most motivated when we are able to work independently and creatively while learning new things.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIThis thinking has transformed business schools. Most of us have seen the results in our own jobs. We work in teams sitting in cubicles with open plan offices meant to encourage collaboration and sharing of ideas. If we work in a store, we may wear a name tag that describes us as a valued team member. But is that enough? Have companies really changed in how they treat their employees? Here to discuss that and to discuss it more in terms of nation states also is Howard Ross, principal of the of the consulting firm Cook Ross. Howard, always a pleasure.

MR. HOWARD ROSSHi, Kojo.

NNAMDIYou've been thinking about how change happens in organizations and, frankly, how change has been happening around the world. And you wrote a blog post over the weekend about the revolution within, linking the dynamics that you have been seeing in so many different stories to the workplace. And I was fascinated by the fact that you talked about WikiLeaks and the fact that people in Tunisia understood that what their president and his family were doing, they found out through WikiLeaks. Talk about how that all came together in your mind.

ROSSWell, I think that, you know, I've been -- and you and I talked about this many times. I'm a believer in systems thinking and the notion that -- and I'm not a big believer, as I said, in the blog of coincidences.

NNAMDIIn coincidences.

ROSSYou know, I really believe that most of the time a coincidence is simply something that we don't know the connection, you know, where we don't know the connection of what's contributing. And I've been watching over the last six months to a year and we see this pattern of things that are happening. You see the Tea Party, which of course seemed to spring out of nowhere. Then we go to what's been going on in the Middle East and these so-called instant revolutions and we look at what's going on in Wisconsin and we look at Facebook now being, you know, encompassing about one-thirteenth of the planet and WikiLeaks.

NNAMDIFive hundred million, yeah.

ROSSAnd there's a pattern here and that is that structures of government, structures of business, structures of society are no longer being driven in the same way, from the top down. What we're beginning to see is the notion of the organic community expand in tremendous ways. And this isn't a new idea that I've come up with. There are, of course, a lot of people talking about it. And I want to be clear also that I'm not suggesting that what's going on in Wisconsin is the same as what's going on in Libya or anything like that. But what is similar, all these patterns is, first of all, an energized group of people. A lot of it affected by generation, by young people who don't see themselves as constrained.

ROSSAnother piece of it is that what they call the G scale or the measurement of absolute intelligence that human beings have now is going up, but the structures of education are failing. And so we've got people who are learning, but they are learning from very different places than school. They're going on to the Internet. They are going on to Facebook. We get this, you know, the old song that a line repeated is the truth and when you see that same lie come true a million times -- I mean, how many times you have had somebody send you a story on Facebook and before the end of that day five other people sent you -- not Facebook, I mean, your e-mail. And by the end of that day, five more people send it.

ROSSAnd so what it really is pointing to, to me, is a shift in the way the human mind and the human community is formulating it's self. And when we begin to see it happening in places like Tunisia and places like communities in Africa and places all over the world, where you normally would have thought of the people as being outside of the loop. Now we're seeing those people are very much in the loop through a lot of the measures we have been trying to get access to information to folks.

NNAMDIAnd the way you relate that to what happens in our daily life in the workplace is that we have a lot of workplaces that have been practicing top down leadership. We have a lot of workplaces that have been working to change that in recent times. But it's still practiced in a great many places. And what you're seeing is how easily that can be undermined by our ability to share information quickly among one another. And top down leadership in a way depends on pockets of knowledge that are privately held. Is it not?

ROSSOh, absolutely. And, you know, I heard it said recently that top-driven things are slow and dull. And bottom-driven things are fast and exciting. Now, the problem is, what does exciting look like of course because exciting can go two different ways. But I think that what we're seeing in organizations is a very similar kind of shift. I mean, our organizational structures, the whole field of management theory came out of military structures. I mean, that's why we call it them line-level employees and things like that. This notion of command and control is something that we have sort of or really implicitly in the way we manage people.

ROSSAnd so, particularly at times like this where we've got tight economy people are having to watch expenses, the natural tendency of most leaders is to fall back to that kind of command and control. We've got to tighten things up, you know, if you think about that language and that sort of thing. And yet what we know is happening around the country and around the world is that there are some very exciting alternatives. There's whole institute of conscious capitalism that a friend of mine (unintelligible) is running up at Bentley College in Massachusetts, for example. They're springing together companies that are looking at alternatives to this. The notion how do we create a sense of what I call organizational community. Get people really engaged in with each other to look for solutions.

NNAMDIYou say what we're seeing instead is a kind of collaborative leadership. Can you explain how that works?

ROSSWell it's I want to be really clear. Leaders need to lead and saying that we have collaborative leadership or as I said organizational community doesn't mean that leaders advocate their responsibility to lead. But it does mean that we don't necessarily assume that as leaders we have the answers. And that's the sort of predominant teaching that we've had for years. The leader was supposed to be the smartest person on board, the person who had the answers, the person who had the solutions. And this is -- it's just not true anymore, particularly when we look at technology.

ROSSI mean, I've got 23 and 24-year-old young people working for me who know so much more about technology than I know. That when we decided that we were going to develop a social media strategy, we put it in the hands of Bobby Joe Smith who's just turned 24 years old. I said, Bobby Joe, come up with a suggestion. I think that we need to do more of that. And I have to say for myself I can do more of it as well. It requires a new way of thinking.

NNAMDIHow would you characterize your workplace? Is it top down leadership or is it more collaborative? Are you happy with how it's run? How do you think it could be run better? Call us at 800-433-8850. Do you think that a more structured hierarchal leadership has its merits in keeping an organization running smoothly? 800-433-8850. Here is Robin in Arlington Virginia. Robin, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

ROBINI'm really glad to hear this discussion today. I'm an organizational development practitioner with 35 years in the field. And I've been saying for many years that command and control is a walking corpse that hasn't realized it's dead yet.

NNAMDIDead man walking. Go ahead, please.

ROBINAnd I'm glad to hear you pointing out the whole information piece. I'm one of the few people in the world -- I don’t know if you're familiar with (unintelligible) and his chaotic theory.

ROSSYeah, as a matter of fact, I use that term in my blog, Robin.

ROBINWell, I'm one of the few people in the world who've been formally trained on the process. And, in fact, I think, as brilliant as these explanation in his books are, the one thing he missed was that one of the foundation premises of command and control is the ability to control the flow of information and technologies made that impossible. So I really love hearing this discussion and, you know, if I can do anything to help advance what you're pushing and what you're thinking, I would love to.

NNAMDIHoward, you said that people are less likely now to defer to authority. What does that mean for supervisors and leaders and organizations?

ROSSWell, I think that -- first of all, just quickly before we leave Robin's comment. You said when Robin started talking, you said dead man walking. And I want to focus on that because the emphasis on man there is an important thing to understand that the numbers of women who are moving into leadership is one of the things that's changing this equation. And that is that historically we've used the very male model of leadership. It's predominantly a particularly left brain model of leadership. "Just the facts, ma'am," to quote Joe Friday.

ROSSAnd that has been part of what's built into the culture. As we have more -- and for many women to be successful in that model and business, they've needed to fit into that as we've got more mixed gender and more mixed race teams coming in. So we've got people who represent a lot of different identities. That brings in more both brain thinking, if you will.

NNAMDIMm-hmm.

ROSSAnd when we include both sides of the brain, we begin to see that we need different models.

NNAMDIDo you see technology, e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, as being part of the change we're seeing? It seems to me that there is a relationship between culture and technology that bounces back and forth that causes one to affect the other. And it's harder to tell which is first, the chicken or the egg.

ROSSRight. I think it was Arthur C. Clark who once said that any technology will take longer to affect than you think it will, but will have far more dramatic effect ultimately than you ever thought it would. And I think that's true. And having, as you know, my youngest son is 17.

NNAMDISure.

ROSSAnd to see him grow up with this technology and to…

NNAMDIHe's a digital native.

ROSSExactly. He really is. And, you know, you really see it in younger people, how quickly they turn to information. And it speaks back to the question you asked me a moment about how much we defer to authority.

NNAMDIMm-hmm.

ROSSWell, it's easy to defer to authority when authority has the answers and you don't have any. In the older days, when you would come into an organization, the people above you had the answers. You were being trained to think like they think, to believe what they believe, and to do what they do. Nowadays, that same 22-year-old who comes in and listens to you pontificate about the way we do things around here, can easily go on and find 300 people, 500 people, 1,000 people on the Internet who have a cogent, responsible way of doing things that's different than what you're suggesting as a leader.

ROSSAnd what that means is, the credibility that I give that leader as having the answer is no longer the same as it was before. Now, it also means that my community is not linked to who are the people I'm working with because at the same time as I'm linked to community, I'm also tied into hundreds of Facebook friends or thousands of Facebook friends. I'm e-mailing to people all the time. And even as we see now, whether we like it or not, people talking on cell phones in the middle of the day, including congresswomen as we saw in the article this morning.

NNAMDIYes. I'll tell you about that in a second.

ROSSYeah. And so the notion that we're in this company looking up to this person for guidance is replaced by a notion that we're in this company in the middle of multiple webs of influence that are occurring all the time. And so the nature of leadership is no longer so much given by titular control as it is by how much I feel valued and included and how much that leader becomes a part of that network rather than my having to leave my network aside to fit inside of it.

NNAMDIHoward was referring to an article that I came across on the root.com website about a congresswoman who is no better known than any other congresswomen of the 435 members of the House of Representatives in Washington, but who has apparently developed a reputation for being verbally abusive towards her staff members. And now, here it is, once it's on that website, it goes viral. Everybody knows about it. And at some point, that congresswoman is probably going to have to -- well, not at some point. Years ago, it would have taken a much longer time.

NNAMDIShe's gonna have to make some very rapid changes to her style of authoritarianism in her own office and that, for me, even though a lot of this article is frankly based on gossip, even though in that situation it might be based on gossip, it's an indication of how rapidly we can come to find out about things and how quickly change must occur. One guy burns himself to death in Tunisia and it seems within hours it's all over the world and all over that part of the world where it is most meaningful.

ROSSExactly. And it's not just that we hear about it, we actually see it because somebody took a camera and they took a video of this woman doing it or the guy in Tunisia doing it, and we're actually seeing it happen right before our eyes. So it's different than somebody saying something happened and we say, well, I wonder what the -- we're actually watching it in front of our eyes, which in a lot of cases, depending upon how the video clips are edited, could be just as misleading as reading it, but nonetheless, a lot more believable.

NNAMDIHere is Tina in Ashburn, Va. Tina, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

TINAThank you, Kojo. I have a question. What should be the role of organization leadership to address job situations for senior citizens as well as women with children, women who are educated who had very good jobs that's given up their jobs because they have children now? And, you know, what kind of solutions can they think of? And the reason I bring up senior citizens is people in their 60s having to work -- and I recall from previous works that we had a couple of people who were senior citizens and they fell asleep at their desk and other people were making fun of them. And so they want to work, but maybe they cannot work full time, you know. That's my question.

NNAMDIWell, I don't know whether it has to do with working full time as much as it has to do with how the workplace is organized. Because one of the things you talk about, Howard, is how we tend to work better when we have a clear sense of what we are doing, and if we are allowed to do it in the way that works best for us.

ROSSMm-hmm, absolutely. And, you know, one of the things that's challenging for us is to distinguish, of course, when any group is distinct, to distinguish their behavior versus the group's behavior, and there's no question. Now, I know Kojo, you and I both in our 60s sit here and say, you know, we don't usually fall asleep at work.

NNAMDIThat's true.

ROSSThere -- not to mention the fact that 60 is very different than it was a few years ago. It's one of the conversations, of course, we have in this whole social security conversation, is that when we determined 65 was the retirement age, the average lifespan in this country was 68. And now, of course, the average life span is in the high 70s. Well, I don't know what it is today. It was 77 to 79, something like that.

ROSSSo we're gonna have more and more people working. And before we hit the economic crisis a couple years ago, we were seeing real trends in terms of that. But I think the ultimate is, how do you structure a workplace environment in which you maximize the talent? And whether that shows up in terms of parents of children, I think it's important we say parents and not just mothers, but parents of children, or folks who still have a lot of talent and are in great shape and could continue to work past what we would normally consider retirement age. All those are factors.

NNAMDIOne of the more surprising things to come out of the research on the workplace is that rewards like money are not what really motivates people.

ROSSYeah. It's very fascinating. I mean, there are a couple of guys in particular, Dan Pink...

NNAMDIDan Pink, who we had on the show last year.

ROSS...who you had, I think, had on the show and Dan Ariely who's at MIT, a brilliant -- the behavioral economist whose work I really respect a lot. Both who say the same thing, which is that when we look at tasks or when we look at monitoring people who are doing more task orientation, that is, if I say to you, I'm gonna pay you $5 for every bag of trash you pick up from the street, then that tends to motivate people.

ROSSIf we watch people in that way, they tend to motivate. So, yeah, I'll do six bags or seven bags or eight bags, if I can get $5 for each one. But an interesting thing happens when we look at more right brain activities, when we're asking people to be more creative and more innovative, which, of course, in an informational economy is happening more and more. And that is, that that same kind of monitoring and measuring people, looking over their shoulders, has the exact opposite impact.

ROSSIt actually squashes innovation and it squashes productivity in those kinds of environments. Now, it's fascinating when we think about who's leading and what mindset do those of us who lead come from. Because most of us were raised in environments where we saw the more military model that you do your job well, and we may have had benevolent leaders who did it that way, but nonetheless, we looked at it. What are you supposed to produce, what do you produce, as opposed to creating environments where people have a lot more autonomy and a lot more of a sense of producing the result in ways that bring in different talents.

NNAMDIGotta take a short break. When we come back, we continue our conversation with Howard Ross about top down leadership and how it is being challenged by today's rapid communications environment. 800-433-8850. Do you think employees are less likely to accept an authoritarian environment at work? 800-433-8850. If you have already called, stay on the line. We'll be right back.

NNAMDIWe're talking with Howard Ross about top down leadership. Let's go to Bill in Columbia, Md. Bill, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

BILLThanks, Kojo. Another great show today. My situation is I work for a large company that is part of a larger organization. It's a Fortune 500 company, but we look like a stand-alone business. And over the past seven or eight years, we've had a series of presidents rotate in from corporate, stay for three years, and then move on because they've punched their ticket and they're moving up the corporate ladder. So there is no head of the company that takes ownership of the long-term growth of our position or business.

BILLAnd the -- sort of a parallel to that is I feel like they don't feel like they have any ownership or have to care for the people working for the company, and consequently, my division has not grown significantly over the last decade.

NNAMDIHoward?

ROSSYeah. And that's a very awkward situation, obviously, Bill, because the people who come in not only come in with a mind for the fact that they're not going to be there for a long time, they also come in with a mind to produce short-term results rather than long-term results because of course, if they're only gonna be there for two or three years, they're not going to be evaluated on the long-term growth of the company.

ROSSAnd in addition to that, the culture of the organization probably shifts dramatically depending upon who's in leadership. And unless you've got a culture that's very, very strong, then the leader will come in and start to shake things up and leave everybody wondering which way is up. And so for all of those reasons, the kind of circumstance that you're describing is a very challenging one.

ROSSUsually in those kinds of circumstances, what we recommend is that people in the larger corporation are very -- try to be very conscious of the kind of disruption it can cause, focus a lot on the articulation of the culture, both to the leader who's coming in and also to everybody with that leader as the new management team comes in, so the people can have a picture drawn of what we're going to be doing together over this period of time and work towards that picture. But unfortunately, not many people take the time to do that.

NNAMDIBill, thank you very much for your call. Tim in Clarksburg, Md., raises an issue that I think does pertain to this discussion in -- well, let's let Tim explain it. Tim, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

TIMHi. Mr. Ross, my question is -- I am in total agreement with your concept. I think it is certainly the way to go to tap into the creativity of the employees, but how does it relate to the compensation? I think, you know, top executives and top management have a stranglehold on compensation and they don't really trickle that down to the employees that you're tapping into. I'll take my response off the air. Thank you.

NNAMDIThank you so much for raising that issue, Tim. I heard Michael Moore addressing the crowds in Wisconsin saying that the 200 -- 400 top Americans make more money than 155 million Americans put together. Four hundred individuals...

ROSSYeah.

NNAMDI...and the disparity between the highest paid and the average employee has gotten a lot bigger over the past year. So it would be fascinating to know the relationship between that and the challenges facing top down leadership.

ROSSWell, it's clearly there and there are a number of factors in the point that Tim brings up. One is that there are structures in which people recognize that nobody wins unless everybody wins. And there's a certain sense that everybody has to perform at a base level in order to stay -- keep their job. But beyond that -- you know, for example, I've got a client in -- it's a law firm in Jackson, Mississippi, that recently shifted their way of being and now all of the partners make the same amount of money.

ROSSAnd I think that they have certain things depending upon how many years you've been there, but in other words, rather than having what's a typical law firm environment where everybody's out kind of getting their own clients, they're all working for the benefit of the organization. Now, that's a very unusual structure for law firms. There are other companies. Whole Foods is a great example that has a limit in terms of the amount that the senior execs can make over the lowest people in the organization.

ROSSI think it's something like 27 times, which sounds like an enormous amount, except when you consider that it's probably 10 times that or more in most large corporations. So there are people who are beginning to look at this issue and it doesn't mean going to socialism. That's the thing that people don't understand. What it means is that when you begin to create a shared sense of accomplishment that people perform together for a larger goal, that the organization performs better and everybody wins.

ROSSAnd even back into '50s, (word?) was talking about this with his quality work, he used to rail against giving individual performance feedback for the very same reason. He said if you hold people accountable to their individual performance, what you'll get is a lot of individual performers. If you hold people accountable to the role they play in the team, then you'll get team performers.

NNAMDIThis is why we see that the way we describe jobs has been changing, too. You walk into a store you're likely to see a nametag that says sales associate or valued team member.

ROSSYes.

NNAMDIWhat does the language we use say about how people are supposed to view their work?

ROSSWell, I think language is very powerful. It can distinguish concepts for people and it can give them a sense of what we're trying to do. On the other hand, if all you replace is the language without replacing the culture, than it's an enormous source of cynicism. It's like in the old days around here we remember going into Roy Rogers restaurants where you'd walk in and the person would have the little hat -- a funny hat, and they'd say, howdy partner, and you almost were in pain for them because you knew how embarrassed they were to have to say this, you know, even though it was well intended.

ROSSI think it's really important for people to understand that the language shift has to reflect an actual shift in the culture for it to be meaningful.

NNAMDIOn to the telephones again. Here is Tim in Takoma Park, Md. Tim, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

TIMHi there. Thanks for taking my call. I just wanted to talk a little bit about sort of the perspective from the millennial generation. I'm probably the oldest in that generation and I've been a part of launching a couple non-profits, and also having the experience of being in sort of traditionally top down run organizations. And I notice that -- I guess I'm making two points here. The first is, it's really difficult, of course, to affect change as one of the younger people on the totem pole, which is, you know, obvious.

TIMAnd then, even outside of that, when people try and start their own organizations, a lot of the donor money or start up funds or grants or that initial feed capital is often tied up with people that are older. And so I just wanted to, you know, highlight that, and that there are so many rich, fantastic ideas that work on a much smaller budget that are far more productive that are out there in the minds of a lot of young people, that, you know, unfortunately get held back because a lot of that initial start up potential and capital is still, you know, folks don't want to change, which has become a problem. So I'll just take any response off the air.

NNAMDIHere's Howard.

ROSSLook, there's no question that what Tim's saying is accurate. And, you know, as I said, I mean, I know I work hard to try to, you know, be open to that and it's not easy running a small company. You have a tendency to fall back to your patterns. You move in fast and you do things in the way that you've always done them without even realizing it in a lot of cases. I think it's even more so when you're more separated from people in a larger company, and when you don't have a lot of alternatives to how to operate outside of that realm.

ROSSAnd we just have to keep consciously bringing in more of these younger, smarter people. I mean, I'm a huge fan of the millennial generation.

NNAMDIBut it doesn't necessarily mean that every good idea -- every idea is a good idea. Here's a post we got on our Facebook page from Rajshree. "Sometimes a benevolent dictatorship is needed. Especially in a workplace where are too many different styles of project management as well as different projects going on. What comes in my mind is Steve Jobs when he came back to Apple and streamlined the projects and focused on the iPod."

ROSSWell, yes. And it's an important distinction. I'm not suggesting that you don't have people whose job it is to pull the trigger and ultimately make the decision, and that there aren't times when somebody has to do that. I mean, if you're on a sailboat in the storm, it's not the time to get everybody together and say what do you all think we should do? And the same is true in case of business decisions. The same is true when you've got a lot of different ideas on the table. At some point, somebody has to say, this is the way we're going.

ROSSBut my experience has been, if you allow people to really have their input valued, then they understand somebody's got to make the decision and they're not going to get it their way every time.

NNAMDIThis e-mail we got from someone who wishes to remain anonymous. "So what can you do when you find yourself in this authoritarian type of company? Usually there is no review process for employees to review management. It seems the only option is to seek other employment."

ROSSWell, sometimes that’s true. And there are sometimes when there are people who aren't going to change, they're not gonna change their structure, they're not going to change their way of operating. But what I encourage people to do is to at least give people an opportunity to offer suggestions, to offer them in a very clear way, and to speak to the mindset of the people you're talking to. If you know the people, for example, are business people who operate from business plans, then when you come in with an idea, have some sense of what a business plan for installing that idea would be.

NNAMDIHoward Ross is the principal of the consulting firm, Cook Ross. Howard, always a pleasure.

ROSSYou, too, Kojo. Good to see you.

NNAMDIThank you all for listening. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.