Are Your Employees Mature Enough To Deal With Freedom?
We hear this kind of question all the time at Flux:
I want my employees to be free. I think that’s a good thing to work towards. But how can I trust them to do what’s right? What if they end up destroying my business?
You will gain their trust by showing that you trust them. You have to let them experience true freedom in the workplace before they will know how to make the most of that freedom.
In Noam Chomsky’s On Anarchism he paraphrases the 18th Century German philosopher Immanuel Kant:
“Freedom is the condition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity is achieved."
Your employees don’t need you to control them. They need you to remove the barriers in your organisation that stop them from doing great work.
Set them free, and they’ll learn how to be free.