The Most Dangerous Employee at Johnsonville Was the CEO

Johnsonville CEO Ralph Stayer realized he had a problem employee. This employee was a senior leader who was indispensable in all the wrong ways. He micromanaged. He made all of the decisions. He did the important things himself because he didn’t trust anyone else to do them.

The result, Stayer recognized, was a loss of initiative and responsibility among his employees. Instead of growing, this leader’s employees seemed less capable than when they were first hired. The quality of Johnsonville’s sausages declined.

Something had to change.

Stayer knew this leader could learn and grow because the leader was Stayer himself.

This story resonates with me because I love Johnsonville sausages, and I’ve found myself in a similar position. I am a recovering bottleneck (the picture below is me admitting that during my Break the Bottleneck keynote).

Nearly every leader I’ve met who is a bottleneck got that way because they care deeply. You don’t want anything to go wrong; you want your employees to succeed; you want your clients delighted; you want the buck to stop with you; and you want to model accountability.

You hire capable people, but they gradually become less capable because they have so little at stake. When you make the important decisions, solve the difficult problems, and rescue them from every struggle, you deprive them of the experiences that build judgment and confidence.

Capability doesn’t remain stationary. What isn’t exercised deteriorates.

It’s like strength training. If you lift the weight for someone, you may prevent them from struggling, but you also prevent them from getting stronger. Of course, you don’t ask someone who can lift 25 pounds to lift 250. Empowerment without preparation isn’t leadership; it’s abandonment.

Stayer learned that he couldn’t simply announce that people were now empowered and walk away. He had spent years teaching them to depend on him. Reversing that dependency required a journey of progressively greater challenges, clearer responsibility, coaching, and room to struggle.

His role changed from solving people’s problems to creating the conditions in which they could solve increasingly difficult problems themselves.

I created the 3-Discipline Leadership System® to give you a safe, effective, and teachable way to create Team-Powered Momentum so you can move from being the bottleneck to becoming the architect of momentum. You’ll spend less time fighting today’s fires and more time building tomorrow’s prosperity.

I invite you to complete this sentence, “With greater team-powered momentum, I could _____.” Identify a dozen results, benefits, and outcomes you could achieve.

What did you come up with?

P.S. Stayer wrote that transferring quality ownership to frontline teams eventually helped reduce rejects from 5% to under 0.5%.

About Author

Chris Kolenda

I work with leaders who want to build unshakeable business endurance.

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