18 Leadership in the Box

“My youngest boy, Cory, who’s now almost 40, was a handful. Drugs, drinking—you name it, he did it. Everything came to a head when he was arrested for selling drugs during his senior year in high school.

“At first I wanted to deny it. No Herbert ever did drugs. And to sell them—that was unthinkable. I stomped around demanding that this injustice be exposed. It couldn’t be true. Not about my boy. So I demanded a full trial. Our lawyer recommended against it, and the district attorney offered a plea bargain that included only 30 days in jail. But I wouldn’t have it. ‘I’ll be damned if my son is ever going to go to jail,’ I said. And so we fought.

“But we lost, and Cory ended up spending a full year in the youth detention facility up in Bridgeport. As far as I was concerned, it was a blight on the family name. I visited him twice the whole year.

“When he got home, we hardly spoke. I rarely asked him anything, and when I did, he responded with barely audible one-word answers. He fell back into the wrong crowd, and within three months he was arrested again, for shoplifting.

“I wanted to deal with this one quietly. I had no illusions that he was innocent, so I pushed for a plea bargain that involved a 60-day wilderness treatment and survival program in the high country of Arizona. Five days later, I boarded a plane, Cory in tow, from JFK to Phoenix. I was taking him to be ‘fixed.’

“My wife, Carol, and I dropped him off at the organization’s headquarters. We watched as he was loaded into a van with other kids who were entering the program, and away they drove toward the mountains of eastern central Arizona. We were then escorted into a room for two all-day sessions— sessions where I expected to learn how the people there were going to fix my son.

“But that’s not what I learned. I learned that whatever my son’s problems might be, I needed fixing, too. What I learned changed my life. Not at first, for I fought everything they were suggesting tooth and nail: ‘What, me?’ I protested. ‘I don’t do drugs. I’m not the one who spent most of my senior year in high school behind bars. I’m not the thief. I’m a responsible person—respected, the president of a company, even.’ But gradually I came to see the lie in my defensiveness. I came to discover, in a way I can describe only as simultaneously painful and hopeful, that I had been, for years, in the box toward my wife and my kids.”

“In the box?” I said quietly, almost under my breath.

“Yes. In the box,” Lou responded. “I learned that first day in Arizona what you learned yesterday. And in that moment— about the time when my son was probably climbing out of the van and looking around at the isolated wilderness that would be his home for the next two months—I felt for the first time in years an overwhelming desire to take him in my arms and hold him. What desperate loneliness and shame he must have been feeling. And how I had added to it! His last hours—or, for that matter, months and maybe even years— with his dad had been spent under a silent cloud of blame. It was all I could do to hold back the tears.

“But it was worse than that. That day, I realized that my box had driven away not only my son but also the most important people in my company. Two weeks earlier, in what people around the company were calling the ‘March Meltdown,’ five of the six executive team members had left for ‘better opportunities.’ ”

“Kate?” I asked.

“Yes. Kate was one of them.”

Lou stared intently into nowhere, apparently in deep thought. “It’s amazing when I think back on it now,” he said finally. “I felt betrayed by them the same way I felt betrayed by Cory. To hell with them, I told myself. To hell with them all.

“I was determined,” he continued, “to build Zagrum into a success without them. They weren’t that great anyway, I told myself. They’d been around, most of them, for the full six or so years since I’d purchased the company from John Zagrum, and the company was basically limping along. If they were any good, we’d be doing better by now, I thought. To hell with them.

“But it was a lie. Now it might have been true that we should’ve been doing better. But it was still a lie—because I was completely blind to my own role in our mediocrity. And as a result, I was blind to how I was blaming them not for their mistakes, but for mine. I was blind, as we always are, to my own box.

“But I recovered my sight in Arizona. I saw in myself a leader who was so sure of the brilliance of his own ideas that he couldn’t allow brilliance in anyone else’s; a leader who felt he was so ‘enlightened’ that he needed to see workers negatively in order to prove his enlightenment; a leader so driven to be the best that he made sure no one else could be as good as he was.”

Lou paused. “You’ve learned about collusion, haven’t you, Tom?”

“Where two or more people are mutually in their boxes toward each other? Yes.”

“Well, with self-justifying images that told me I was brilliant, enlightened, and the best, you can imagine the collusions I was provoking around here. In the box, I was a walking excuse factory—both for myself and for others. Any workers who needed the slightest justification for their own self-betrayals had a smorgasbord of options in me.

“I couldn’t see, for example, that the more I took responsibility for my team’s performance, the more mistrusted they felt. They then resisted in all kinds of ways: Some just gave up and left all creativity to me, others defied me and did things their own way, and still others left the company altogether. All of these responses convinced me all the more of the incompetence of the people in the company, so I responded by issuing even more careful instructions, developing even more policies and procedures, and so on. Everyone took all that to be further evidence of my disrespect for them and resisted me all the more. And so on, round and round—each of us inviting the other to be in the box, and in so doing, providing each other with mutual justification for staying there. Collusion was everywhere. We were a mess.”

“Just like Semmelweis,” I said in amazement, under my breath.

“Oh, so Bud told you about Semmelweis?” Lou asked, looking at Bud and then back at me.

“Yes,” I said, nodding along with Bud.

“Well, that’s right,” Lou continued. “The Semmelweis story is an interesting parallel. I was, in effect, killing the people in my company. Our turnover rate rivaled the mortality rate at Vienna General. I was carrying the disease I blamed everyone else for. I infected them and then blamed them for the infection. Our organizational chart was a chart of colluding boxes. As I said, we were a mess.

“But what I learned in Arizona was that I was a mess. Because I was in the box, I was provoking the very problems I was complaining about. I had chased away the very best people I knew—feeling justified all the time, because in my box, I was convinced they weren’t that good.”

He paused. “Even Kate,” he added, shaking his head. “No one on this planet is any more talented than Kate, but I couldn’t see that because of my box.

“So as I sat there in Arizona, I had a huge problem. I was sitting next to a wife whom I’d been taking for granted for 25 years. I was by then 100 miles of impassable terrain away from a son whose only recent memories of his father were probably bitter ones. And my company had come unglued— the best and brightest scattering around the globe, embarking on new careers. I was a lonely man. My box was destroying everything I cared about.

“One question seemed more important to me in that moment than anything else in the world: How can I possibly get out of the box?”

Lou paused, and I waited for him to continue.

“So how do you?” I finally interjected. “How do you get out of the box?”

“You already know.”