None of this is how companies or teams work. Rules are not created through negotiations, at some point a leader makes a decision.
Which is defined as "Psychological contracts are defined by the relationship between an employer and an employee where there are unwritten mutual expectations for each side. A psychological contract is rather defined as a philosophy, not a formula or devised plan."
So I don't know what happened at Basecamp but here is how breaking a psychological contract feel to the employee from my experience: A leader representing the company does something, an action, takes a decision. You, the employee, feel that a wrong was done to you, even if the rules, law and contract says the one who took the action has the right to do it.
And in the beginning no amount of explanation about the action will alleaviate this feeling. Logically you will agree that they can do what they did, but emotionally (psychologically) at the end of every meeting or discussion you will still feel that somehow a wrong was done to you, a balance is unbalanced ...
Shortly you lost the trust in the company that what they will do has your best interests at heart.
It takes a big amount of effort and trying to put yourself in the shoes of your leader to try to understand how they got to that decision/action and if indeed was done in good faith you might overcome this. If not, then the best is to leave.
True leaders realize the importance of cultivating those underneath them, and adapting their direction to pushback or input.
Hire good people, give them goals, and the resources they need, then get the fuck out of their way. Let them make their own processes, rules, norms, even mistakes. Most organisations have a prevailing culture, so they'll operate in context anyway; create boundaries by application of Conway's law. Intervene by guidance and with pertinent and impertinent questions, not with directives and fiat. Authoritarianism is the death-knell of ingenuity.
Brian Epstein made lots of decisions without the bands opinion and many more when they disagreed.
I'll make N-way decisions between conflicting ideals when I'm invited to adjudicate, but refrain otherwise. My guidance would be to workshop apparently dissimilar preferences extensively, because 99% of the time there is a synthesis to be found, and creating a focus for conflict tends to encourage loud voices to get louder, drowning out alternatives. I'll treat any administrative decision-making as being on behalf of the team, i.e. as having been delegated the authority to do so from the members. I learned years ago that governing by consent of the governed is the only form of respectful leadership, and this extends to organisations and corporations, and it's never more apparent than when a manager switches jobs and people follow to the new gig because they liked working with you.
The most important function, in this management style, is hiring, and in some organisations, talent acquisition has been half my workload. Regarding which I was once told, "hire people smarter than you"; the only issue with this maxim being the corollary, viz. that the CEO is, by induction, the company dunce.
Why is it that you avoid possessiveness?
I am not asking from judgement but genuine curiosity.
I think there are some valuable ideas in your post. And I generally agree with your perspective. I also think nothing about governing with consent of the governed alters the existence of an actual power structure unless you would resign in the face of a team member not consenting to your decision.
Yes. The primary meaning of "my" is the individual possessive. The secondary meaning of association, or membership, is something one cannot reliably communicate, even to oneself.
> Why is it that you avoid possessiveness?
I don't own people. They have individual agency.
> resign in the face of a team member not consenting to your decision
That's bonkers. It's still thinking in terms of a command authority. It's not me that has to consent, it's the rest of the team. Or more precisely, don't make decisions on behalf of a team if it hasn't agreed to recognising their validity in advance. The most important consent to obtain in this regard is hiring (nuance: compensation/levelling is best left to a separate corporate organ), followed by seating (yes, really) and allocation of day-to-day work.
Frankly, a manager whose team doesn't recognise the validity of their decisions, or who can't handle being challenged to qualify and explain their thinking, should go. Continuing the earlier analogy; if the band is unhappy with their manager, they can get a new one.
Command authority is for temporary dictators in situations required real-time skilled decision making, like a surgeon in the OR, or the emergency controller for a downtime incident. It is not for deciding which continuous delivery tool we'll use, whether we're including SSO in the next release, or buying standing desks, or who gets to sit next to the window, or has to refactor a problematic query.
The hardest thing to do in this context is fire someone, but then, it always is.
The easiest thing to do is actually extinguish the team, because the quid pro quo is that it spends company resources.
Sure, ending a relationship is disruptive. But moving on is perfectly feasible.
And the thought here is not novel -- it was taught to me as part of an Organizational Psychology class in b-school
One's ability to lead is only as good as their ability to get followers to follow their lead. Hence why so many people use fear to keep others in line -- it's the easiest and simple way to ensure compliance
Considering that most b-school students go on to become MBAs, I would hope they teach some leadership skills
Leaders make decisions but good leaders take account of the views of their teams.
If we say that employees should be smart enough to autonomously do their jobs well, wouldn't their collective intelligence be better at running the business in its entirety? Why isn't it smarter and more financially sound to run a business like a democracy?
You left off "if you want your boss to give you gobs of money every two weeks".
Particularly in the context of a workplace, where the workers are the ones actually doing all the work.
This is a value judgment not shared by everyone. One/few person rule can be quite efficient in certain tasks such as rapid development and deployment of resources, because you can cut through red tape. At the same time, it can be inefficient in other tasks.
I know I'm wasting my time here but here is the first three definitions of totalitarianism I was able to find :
(emphasis mine)
> Britannica: Totalitarianism: *form of government* that theoretically permits no individual freedom and that seeks to subordinate all aspects of individual life to the authority of the state.
> Google : relating to a *system of government* that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state.
> Dictionary.com : of or relating to a *centralized government* that does not tolerate parties of differing opinion and that exercises dictatorial control over many aspects of life.
A business is not a government and you are using the term in a meaningless context so you are going to have to forgive everyone else for pointing out that what you are saying makes absolutely zero sense.
Yes it is, hence the existence of concepts like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_governance and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy
Employers have a great deal of authority of their employee's lives - to that extent they govern their employees. This is all straightforward, conventional usage of these words and terms.
Government also makes the rules about how businesses operate (property law, contract law, and so forth), and give businesses the right to enforce them - in this way, businesses are an extension of government in the control they have over our lives.
All you're doing is question-begging the exact premise I'm critiquing in the first place: That the workplace is in a magic separate dimension where principles usually agreed to be good (democracy, equality) are no longer desirable or even applicable.
I'm not sure why this has made you angry - perhaps you've become irrationally attached to certain ideological beliefs, and my pointing them out has triggered you.
>Yes it is
Some things reach a point of idiocy where no one is going to be convinced and you just need to call things what they are. And that is fucking moronic. So let's just stick with that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government
Emphasis mine:
> A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, *generally* a state.
> While *all types of organizations have governance*, the term government is *often* used more specifically, to refer to the approximately 200 independent national governments and subsidiary organizations.
So you are simply ignorant of the broader meaning of the term. I look forward to your apology. But do please try to interact with more humility and politeness in future, and be familiar with the very basics of a topic before debating it.