The board wasn't actually firing Giezeman, of course, but despite the nervous laughter in the room that day, this was no joke: Giezeman would have to change. The board was telling him it was time for him to stop trying to do it all; time to hire a general manager to run the plant; time to turn his attention to the big picture (strategic planning, expansion, acquisitions -- initiatives vital to Searcy Industrial Laundry's survival); time, in other words, for Giezeman to make the jump his father never made, the transition he was afraid would defeat him, giving up his traditional role as owner-operator and becoming, at last, a professional manager.
"I always knew what I wanted," Giezeman says of his new role. "But as you get ready to let go, you need a vision." Covey supplied that vision, or more accurately, Covey helped Giezeman define, and then realize, his own vision.
* * *
The most powerful message Giezeman took away from Covey is also, as it happens, a simple one: You can do it. So simple, perhaps, that it's meaningless -- until you compare it with the frightening message at the heart of so many other business books: Change or die. Before he found Covey, Giezeman had heard the latter message so often that he was beginning to lose hope. The more changes he tried on for size at his company, the more of them failed, and the more the company remained the same. He was coming to a conviction, which was "I'm in deep shit; or if I'm not now, then I'm gonna be. The natural forces are against me." But Covey convinced Giezeman that he could make it, and beyond that, that the power to succeed was already his, a matter of developing himself, not lining up with yet another new program. The upshot is that Giezeman doesn't worry as much as he used to. "Just let them be who they are," he says now of his competitors. "We'll do our own thing." Developing confidence in himself has helped Giezeman find the motivation to "eliminate our own hurdles and our own stupid mistakes," to "take care of our customers," to "do all the things right we can control." And that, he says, has "brought an amount of peace to me."
If the owner hungers for it, you can bet his employees do, too. It's on them that the waves have been crashing, one after another after another. Max Elliott, before he became Searcy Industrial Laundry's production manager, endured years of cascading management initiatives in the air force -- efficiency experts, quality mavens, learning coaches, creativity gurus, systems reorganizers. "I have this long list of buzzwords," he says wearily. "The buzzwords come and go. You look back on them and they all seem to be the same thing, just repackaged." So many books, tapes, videos, seminars, initiatives, and schemes, all of them designed to increase profits, improve productivity, and make American business more competitive in the global economy. "You spend three hours in a lecture," says Searcy Industrial Laundry's route supervisor, Kevin Money, describing his typical experience, "and your head is spinning and you're tired and you're hungry and your butt hurts and you just want to get outside."
Not long ago Money spent three eye-opening days in a Seven Habits seminar, taking to it, he says, "like a bird dog to birds." If he was fidgeting, it was because he couldn't wait to get home and tell his wife all about it. Afterward, they sat down together and wrote a family mission statement, which led Money to conclude he was spending too much time shooting birds and not enough time with his family. "I understood through this that I need to listen more, that I need to understand what they're saying," he says. "Do I really care about what they're saying? Do I let them know that I care about what they're saying?" Covey has made him more aware, Money says, in a way that "just sort of blows me away."
It's not hard to see what's happening here. When the Searcy Industrial Laundry study group meets at work to talk about personal goals; when Max Elliott says, "Covey's method of approaching the spiritual side really brought the balance that the others did not have"; when Thomas Hodges says, "This book touched a lot on how to handle family situations"; when Richard Stocks says, "It's not totally management, it's more than that"; all of them are saying much the same thing -- that Covey reaches them as people first and as employees second.
So naturally, Joe Giezeman would respond to Covey as Annette Bowman did -- by first going to work on himself and trusting the rest to follow. Traditionally, the bargain has been proposed in reverse: Work harder, sacrifice, be more efficient, become more productive, get with the program -- whatever it is -- and once we get this company turned around, you'll be better off, more secure, happier too. Trust us. Talk about creating false expectations!
Covey turns the bargain on its head. Ultimately, his impact on American business may be sustained no longer than that of the legions of self-helpsters who preceded him or those who inevitably will follow. Still, his current popularity tells us something: about a collective fatigue born of promises unkept and a collective hunger for sweet solace.
"I come in thinking, 'If I do these things, I'll be a better person," says Lester Allen. That's both the way he approaches Covey's Seven Habits and the reason he's so excited about them. "My wife will like me more, my children will be happier with me, and I'll be able to do important things in the community -- as well as produce more for the company," he says.
Trust him. He trusts himself.
