Escape from the Red Zone

"With fear," someone says from the back of the room.

Crittenden -- tanned, dark hair streaked with gray -- nods her head from where she's sitting. William Daigneau, the head of facilities management at the center, has flown Naylor and Crittenden to Houston after using their system with his top staff for more than a year. Now he wants to spread their system to all of the managers in his division.

"As a male macho executive, what am I not supposed to feel?" Naylor asks.

"Fear!"

Yet fear is what keeps everyone moving. That's the central paradox of modern management.

When it's Crittenden's turn in front of the group she asks them to think of words that might activate an employee's Red Box. They call them out, and she lists them on a tablet. There's laughter of recognition at some of them: Loser. Moron. Idiot. Failure. Need to. Have to. Must. Now. Or else. You have no choice. We need to talk. You didn't. Deadline. And by the way. Lazy. No. It's your future. Procrastination. How often do I have to tell you? Hello? Babe. Honey. Your negligence in this matter. Bitch. Has to be. My expectation. You did what? You said what? Huh? Oh no.

"These words will flip the switch all right," she says.

"You don't want to flip his switch," somebody says, pointing to a younger man at one of the round tables.

"I flip his every day," another manager says, laughing. There are a few other nervous laughs around the room.

The younger man doesn't react, doesn't smile. The older manager isn't laughing now, either. His face turns red. Houston, we have a problem.

The problem, Crittenden tells them, isn't emotion. Emotion is just the indicator. The problem is that in business everyone pretends that emotion isn't the root of everything that gets done. "Emotions can turn from green to red without being destructive," she explains, "as long as you don't suppress them or refuse to manage them. Phonied-up positive thinking is the last thing you need. Trying to solve the problem by forcing changes in your emotions is like putting your thumb on a thermometer to warm up a room. Red emotions aren't the problem. What causes the red emotions is what destroys people."

Contemporary management, in practice, is almost totally dependent on the Red Box: Without it, along with the animal impulses of fear and greed that it inspires, external motivational techniques wouldn't work. Yet the Red Box is ultimately self-defeating: it pushes and pulls the worker in two opposite directions. You work out of fear and, simultaneously, resist the urge to work, also out of fear, knowing the process always ends with shortfall and criticism. Every success will still feel like a failure.

Naylor is 62 now. More than 30 years ago he was an engineer at Ingersoll-Rand working in a variety of roles, at one point as an air-compressor salesman. He worked his way up into staff responsibilities, bought a 17-room house and had a beautiful wife, three intelligent daughters, and a country club membership. The problems were all below the surface: he kept his own liter of gin in the freezer.

In the early '70s, he met someone at a trade show who told him about a program called The Dynamics of Personal Leadership -- a multiweek seminar involving a set of tapes and a handbook designed to teach principles of self-motivation, time management, and goalsetting. He signed up. After implementing the system on his own, he quit his job and became a distributor of the program.

Several years later, he teamed up with Crittenden, who'd run her own small businesses -- health food, graphics and printing, and wholesale exercise equipment. Together, they've expanded the fundamental program -- moving around upstate New York and finally settling in Rochester -- to the point where their seminars are almost totally distinct from the original handbook and tapes.

The mechanics of the program are deceptively simple: work between managers and subordinates boils down to "design" and "validation." Together the manager and the managed design the future of the organization, writing down goals and the mutual benefits they seek to achieve. Once goals are identified, management leaves it entirely up to the subordinates to choose the actions that will achieve them -- with no meddling. Managers only validate achievements with written, physical recognition of actual outcomes -- on paper -- while ignoring shortcomings, no matter how dramatic. Then the design process starts again. Not planning and evaluating. Design, validation, design, validation, in an endless cycle.