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I play on an old men's basketball team, and we keep score. Now why would people who are slow and old, why do we keep score? Because it's part of the fun. It's part of the way we were made. God made us in a way that we want to hold ourselves accountable. We want to keep score.

What was stopping your subordinates from experiencing joy?
I was. I was the manager, instead of being a leader. I had to sacrifice some of my fun. All bosses have fun. I understood why—because I had the ball all the time. I had control. I went to Harvard Business School, which teaches you that you are God and you can make all the decisions and control the world. But God gave up his power—he still has the power, but he gave us the chance to make the decisions.

What did it mean for you?
I decided I'd limit myself to making one decision a year, and tried to get every one of my leaders to do the same. I don't know whether we were successful at that completely, but that allowed lots of very important decisions to be made by people who ordinarily would not have the chance to make them—all the decisions, including the ones about finances, hiring, firing.

How did you make sure the employees knew enough to make good decisions?
Good bosses, when they have a problem, get their team together and say, "Give me your advice." It's called participative management. It was a first good step away from just telling employees what to do, when to do it, and how to do it.

I turned that around. Instead of me making the final decision, an employee close to the project was appointed to do it. All he or she had to do before making that decision was get the team together, including the boss, and ask for advice.

Our board meetings were really fun. We never voted. Each board member would give their advice on the phone to an employee who was, say, going to buy a billion-dollar plant in England, and most board members had never met the person. It takes a lot of trust. They were a little skittish about this. After everybody would get their advice in, we'd hang up the phone. We'd say, I wonder what Jim's going to do. And three days later we'd find out.

What makes Joy at Work different from similar workplace management books, such as Good to Great by Jim Collins?

These kinds of books contain good ideas, but some have turned respecting an employee's dignity into a technique. That's a troublesome thing to me. The irony is, if you aim for a goal like making money or productivity and you use the idea of the dignity of all persons as a technique to create joy, you don't get joy and you lower your chances for increased productivity. The motives are then wrong on the part of the leader. I don't think that's been understood even by Christians very well.

Is the Joy at Work philosophy a management style—one that happened to fit your personality—or is it more than that?

A lot of Christians say to me, "This is just a management style." I think giving up power, sharing power, and allowing people to make decisions is just part of how God made us. Obviously, out in the secular world, it's an option. But I don't think we as Christians have an option. We do not have an option to control everybody's life. We do not have an option to take over all the important decisions. At least that's how I read the Parable of the Talents. And in Genesis I read that bosses were not supposed to be the ones making all the decisions. In fact, I don't think management is a really good thing. You manage systems and you manage money, but people ought to be led.

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July (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49