The Power of Freedom

I received my COVID vaccine yesterday and felt incredibly liberated.  Like most people, I have felt penned in the past year.  When I got home, I did two things.  I booked a trip to France to see my daughter and turned my horses out of the small pen they have been in all winter.  While it has been nice to closely monitor them in their pen, it was inspiring to see them run and frolic across a 100-acre pasture; this is how horses are meant to live. The famous horse sculpturer Veryl Goodnight said, “To me, horses and freedom are synonymous.”

As COVID ends, leaders will have a natural urge to establish more control and curtail some freedom employees have enjoyed, including working from home. We have already read of some high-profile companies doing just that. While some rebalancing may be appropriate, we should be careful to avoid a snapback effect to over-controlling. There is a strong link between freedom and creativity, an essential attribute in our knowledge economy. A scientist wrote in Psychology Today, “we presented research evidence that creativity really does bloom in the soil of freedom and die in the hands of over direction.”