The Power of Listening

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"Paul went ahead and said, 'Okay, that's what you people want, we'll get that' -- and Paul didn't want that!" remembers Foster, shaking his head in incredulity. "But he took it to a vote, and that's what the people wanted, and that's what the people got."

Of course, the Centenaris and Atlas may have marched boldly into a minefield here: Democracy, as countless political leaders have discovered to their chagrin, is a costly and unpredictable process, notoriously hard to control. In a business, it has some obvious downsides.

One problem is simply the unfamiliarity of the terrain. "People are more used to the command-and-control model, where decisions are made for them," says Peter. The Centenaris -- usually Paul, both acknowledge -- have had to push voting, and at first had to convince the employees that they were serious about it. Nobody was too sure, either, exactly what could and could not be put to a plebiscite. Can you vote on reinstating an employee who violates a drug policy, for instance, as Atlas once did? Oops! To make an informed decision, you'd want to know whether he had used drugs since, whether he was in a rehab program, and so on. Ask those questions in public, the Centenaris have learned, and you violate confidentiality laws.

A second problem: Nobody wants decisions made by people who don't understand what they're voting on. "We weren't about to empower dummies," Paul told a reporter a few years ago. His choice of words may not have endeared him to Atlas's work force, but his point was valid: Somebody needs to spend time researching alternatives and communicating them intelligibly to the voters. In the case of the corrugator, the competing vendors made elaborate presentations to the workers who would make the decision. More often, the preparation is done by someone on staff. The process takes time, so it costs money.

Given such obstacles, what's striking about democracy at Atlas isn't how far it has progressed -- we're talking baby steps here -- but how much the concept has already become part of the cultural woodwork. Paul has pushed votes on big things, like the corrugator, and on little things, like the colors used when the office was redecorated. Most recently, he held an election for the new team leader of the customer service department. Amazingly, that didn't faze anybody.

"Anything we're going to do, we put up for a vote," says customer service rep Snider, as if it were the most logical thing in the world. "We don't just have someone say, 'Well, this is the way we're going to do it, and you guys follow us.' That's the way we work it. The whole plant works that way."

A skeptic might want to ask a couple of questions -- maybe starting with, Why bother? -- about all these breaches of managerial convention. Niceness and open doors may come cheap, but education benefits are expensive, and open-book management and internal democracy both require serious commitments of time and training. And then there's the issue of how far you're willing to trust your employees. Suppose someone betrays your confidence? Suppose the group makes stupid decisions?

Leaving aside the counterargument that CEOs and managers aren't immune to either of those vices, a fan of Atlas's we're-all-in-this-together culture -- and there are many in the Severn plant -- might respond by pointing to the hard realities of the cardboard box business. It's an industry in which the opportunities for screwing up are legion. (Atlas may ship as many as 200 separate orders a day, each one a different kind of box, from the same plant.) It's a price-competitive industry in which the difference between profit and loss is tiny. (Let paper waste creep up a few percentage points, and suddenly, your business is in the red.) Everybody has to pay attention to details in such an environment, and the company that saves a nickel earns a nickel. Quick, now: Who is more likely to be paying attention and worrying about those nickels, employees who trust management and feel like owners or employees who are only putting in time? "It isn't just about being nice," says Paul. The open books and democracy are ways to shape a company that can do things that its competitors can't. "When people feel they're part of an organization, they feel the passion. And if they feel the passion, you're going to be dangerous in the marketplace."

Though passion isn't something that can be measured, it has clear-cut benefits. Whatever the up-front costs, for example, the Atlas culture is dramatically cheaper in the long run, simply because it obviates the need for an army of frontline managers. "I'm the only supervisor on the East Coast running a box plant that has 35 people under him without assistance," says Charles Kilgore, one of Atlas's printing managers, who has spent 39 years in the industry. "At another plant, I might have a general foreman, training supervisor, die-cut supervisor, and two lead men. But we don't need supervisors in this place. We have people here that run the plant themselves." Another cost saver: the fact that employee retention averages around 85%, compared with an estimated 50% elsewhere in the industry. Atlas isn't spending a lot of money to replace and train people who don't stay because most do stay.

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