What I Was Taught, and What I Learned
This week, America turns 250. We will celebrate with fireworks and flags, and most of us will think about voting, elections, and the founding documents. But as we mark this milestone, I find myself thinking about a different, quieter expression of democracy, one my grandfather noticed almost a century ago.
When I was growing up, we were taught in school that democracy was essentially about voting. Majority-rules voting was what made us a democracy. But now I know that is not true, and my grandfather, Kurt Lewin, knew it was not true when he visited the United States in the years before World War II. He first came in 1929 to speak at Yale, then returned in 1932 as a visiting professor at Stanford, when my mother was two years old. Many years later, my mother was also a visiting professor at Stanford!
A Moment in an American Classroom
Lewin was, at heart, an educator, and during his tours around the US he visited schools. He described a visit to a high school and an interaction between a student and a teacher. At one point, the teacher asked the student what they thought.
That simple act was democracy at its essence.
In the Germany he came from, a professor would never ask a student anything. Lewin himself was a professor at the University of Berlin, until 1933, when Nazi laws barring Jews from academic posts forced him out. He resigned and emigrated to the United States that August.
That moment in the classroom reflected the bedrock difference between authoritarianism and democracy: the belief that everyone has value and should have input. Voting is one form of input, but we see today that many countries we would not call democracies still have voting of some kind. As I heard a Russian quoted recently: “The difference is, when we have an election in our country, we all know the outcome beforehand. In your country, you are still not sure.”
From a young age, that student was being taught that they should have a voice in the things that affect them, and that they need to do some thinking for themselves, beyond deciding whether to obey a leader. That is what 250 years of democratic culture looks like up close: not just a ballot box, but a habit of asking.
Democracy at Work
The pillars of our democratic culture are also in place in our organizations, to varying degrees. While it is true that there are some voting methods of decision making in private companies, especially among shareholders and partners, along with employee-owned models, most decisions are not made by vote, and most are not made by consensus. I have often felt the need to say “hey, this place is not a democracy” when decision making in organizations feels rough.
But I think the best organizations, especially those with long-term resilience, are often seeking to be democratic in a deeper sense. We just use different words at work, such as involvement, engagement, accountability, teamwork, and collaboration. This resilience in each company adds up to a more resilient economy: leading with values in our workplaces is critical to our success as capitalists as well.
Even the basic process of brainstorming has democratic values built into it. Brainstorming was developed by Alex Osborn at BBDO, the Madison Avenue advertising agency, also in the years around World War II, based on the then-radical notion that anyone in the meeting might have a great idea, that ideas should at least be heard without immediate criticism, and that not just the senior leaders should have a voice in the creative process. Essentially, “asking the student.”
When I was a systems engineer in the 1980s, the idea of “asking the users” what they wanted was still a bit radical. Today we use Agile and other methods to be as close to the user as we can.
Lewin’s study of leadership styles, one of the first of its kind, was conducted in 1938 and 1939 with Ronald Lippitt and Ralph White at the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station. It compared three approaches they called Autocratic, Democratic, and Laissez-Faire. Many of the attributes of leadership we value today, from “Start with Why” to facilitative leadership or “Leading From the Balcony,” were present in that work under other names.
I think our leadership values at work are driven, in part, by our democratic culture. The same values the founders wrote into a nation 250 years ago show up every time a leader genuinely asks the team what they think, does a skip-level, or listens to feedback.
The Autocratic leader has no interest in anyone’s feedback. The Laissez-Faire leader couldn’t care less.
The Belief Underneath It All
A cornerstone of Lewin’s leadership philosophy is that the people who will implement a change should help design and control that change. This was not just another practical theory or a wise change strategy. It was based on that consistent essential belief: that all humans have value, deserve dignity, and should be heard, even if we cannot all get our way all the time.
More than that, he wondered whether the right kind of “democratic” leadership might have helped prevent the horrible Holocaust that took the lives of his relatives, including his mother, Recha, who was murdered at the Sobibor extermination camp in 1943 despite his efforts to bring her to safety. I think Lewin saw the best leadership as an expression of our humanity toward each other. When you ask me what I think, you respect me. It is harder to hurt people you respect, and who respect you.
So, as we light the candles on America’s 250th birthday, it is worth remembering that democracy does not live only in capitols and voting booths. It lives in classrooms where teachers ask students what they think, in meeting rooms where every voice is welcome, and in organizations where the people who will implement a change help design it.
Kurt Lewin also said, “Autocracy is imposed on the individual. Democracy he has to learn.”
Our beliefs are worth teaching, worth practicing, and worth protecting, in our classrooms, in our organizations, and in our country.
Happy 250th, America.
I wish you another 250 years of democracy.
