For most executives, a recession provokes more interest in survival than caring leadership. But Autry, president of the highly successful magazine group at Meredith Corp. (Ladies’ Home Journal, Better Homes and Gardens and 14 other titles), is an iconoclast who wants managers to shed “the macho scab of business” and realize that “even firing can be an act of caring.” Showing just how sensitive he is, he repeatedly breaks into poems with titles like “The Memo” (“It looked like any other memo, / corporate proper and neat,”) and “The Leader” (“a balancing act is more tiring / than you think”).
Although his message is offbeat, Autry isn’t serving up sanitized silliness like “The One-Minute Manager.” Autry is the son of a rural Mississippi preacher. He lost a brother to cancer. One of his sons is autistic. He likes to write about the kind of workers you rarely read about in business books: employees who are dying, young hotshots who mishandle older subordinates, working parents struggling to balance competing demands.
Associates at Des Moines-based Meredith say Autry, 58, practices what he preaches. “He may be an ambitious altruist,” says one, “but he’s an altruist.” Autry says he learned the leadership style he touts by making 29 years of mistakes at Meredith, a company still so genteel that employees receive Christmas baskets. While other publishers moan about falling revenues, advertising is up at nine of Meredith’s 10 U.S. magazines that accept ads. “That might not be the case,” Autry says, “if we went around blaming our own people for the recession.”
Which begs the real question: does it pay to treat people well? Margaret Neale, a professor of organization behavior at Northwestern University, isn’t so sure. Researchers have repeatedly tried to prove that a happy worker is also a productive worker, she says. “It’s certainly appealing intuitively,” Neale says, “but the relationship is just not there. A happy worker can also be a complacent worker.” It’s true, says Neale, that companies benefit when executives value employee input. But the boss can value you while still presiding over painful cutbacks.
Autry doesn’t view himself as an indulgent Leo Buscaglia for the business set. His beef is less with firings or blunt performance appraisals than with the punitive way some managers conduct them. “The last chapter on management by fear is about to be written,” he says. Autry may well do the typing: he’s leaving Meredith late this year for other, still undefined pursuits. No doubt he’ll find new avenues for such populist Autryisms as “You got where you are today not despite your roots as a worker in the ranks but because of them.” To make sure the office autocrat sees that one, fold down the corner of page 37 before you sneak “Love and Profit” into the IN box.
