Has Someone Installed a Control Button?

There’s a dynamic I want you to watch for in your firm. It’s one you’ve likely encountered before but one that you may not have put language to or scanned for consistently.

It happens when someone taints a process with a deforming demand and thus ends up controlling outcome. The way we say it in our work with people is that someone has “installed a control button.” Let me give some examples.

A silly illustration first. My friend loves to make pumpkin pies. He has a recipe for the innards that dates back to George Washington, so he tells me. Yet his wife insists on making the crusts. Her grandma was known all over West Texas for her pie crusts and so no pie is going to be made in my friend’s house without grandma’s crust accompanying it.

Now, my friend lovingly complains that due to his wife’s demands about crusts, he never gets to make pumpkin pies when he wants to—or as many as he needs for meals and gifts to friends. His wife’s benevolent demand controls outcome, whether she intended it to or not. This wife had installed a control button.

I worked with a firm on a matter not long ago, and was told that all paperwork had to go through Margaret (not her real name) but that Margaret smokes and is unhealthy and that it might be weeks before my paperwork was approved. I asked why only Margaret could check the paperwork. “I don’t know,” came the reply. “Margaret has been here since dirt, the boss loves her, and this is Margaret’s condition for staying on the job. She is the final check on all paperwork.” I can tell you that as sweet as Margaret may be on other matters, she is choking her firm to death. In fact, I cancelled a large order and walked out, being unwilling to wait weeks for something I could get elsewhere that afternoon. Margaret had installed a control button.

I could give dozens of other examples. Yet it all follows the same pattern. Someone, usually motivated by insecurity or territorialism, installs a control button on a process and from that point on they control the outcome. They’ve created a choke-hold on a process much larger than they are but now determined by them. And it all continues because a leader either doesn’t see it or have the courage to confront it.

Now, take some time to consider the processes in your firm. Has anyone, anywhere, installed a control button so that outcomes are limited by their approval or pace? If so, make the needed change. You can’t run a company when you’re being blackmailed. Fix it. Free it. And make this language—“install a control button”—common usage in your firm. If people can name a destructive occurrence then they can detect it and help you banish it.