Cashing in on Checks and Balances

Why they’re so important to any democratically oriented organization

One afternoon, about 15 years or so ago, I was chatting with Amy Emberling, longtime co-managing partner of the Bakehouse. We were reflecting on the high level of collaboration we’ve built into the culture and systems of the ZCoB (Zingerman’s Community of Businesses) and how lots of conversations and connections happen here before any kind of big decision is made. We talk about things, gather diverse perspectives, review, revise, converse, and collaborate quite a bit before we take action. We do take action, of course. It’s just not done on a whim, or in a burst of emotionally fueled fury from an angry boss. Amy laughed, smiled, and said something like, “I really can’t even remember the last time I made a decision on my own!” 

She didn’t, of course, mean it in a completely literal sense. Clearly, we all make a myriad of small decisions all day. We decide what we’ll eat for dinner or if we’ll have another cup of coffee, how long we’ll read our book or what time we’ll head to bed. That said, I agree with Amy about how we do what we do here in the ZCoB: There are really no significant decisions that are made by just one person working completely on their own. Even in the most casual settings, there are always at least a couple of collaborative conversations about how to handle the situation at hand. And in anything bigger than that—product source changes, new guidelines for almost anything, big equipment purchases, menu changes, etc.—there will always be multiple chances to check in with others well before the decision is a done deal. 

In fact, I think it’s reasonable to say that most people, especially those in leadership, spend a good deal of their day checking with others to gather insight and ideas on the subject that’s on the table. All of the input is used to further enhance and better balance the impact of the decisions we’ll be making. It takes more time, for sure, but it leads to far more holistic and helpful decisions, decisions that have essentially been created by collaborative conversation, both formal and informal. It’s kind of like the “huddle in my head” that I wrote about last week, only in this case, the conversations are audible to all. I’m only sorry that Joey Ramone, who I also wrote about last week, isn’t here to help us find our way to the best possible decision. 

Historically, we really haven’t talked much about the philosophical import of “checks and balances” here in the ZCoB, but we have, I see now, been using a lot of these tools all along. And when we do our work well—whether that’s deciding to switch to the Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter at the Roadhouse and then the Bakehouse, open up Little Kim last fall, or approve Joanie Hales as co-managing partner of ZingTrain—it is in great part because we have used some of the hundreds of checks and balances we have in place. And that when we do make a decision, we’re ready for a little bit of the Ramones’ classic line “Hey, ho, let’s go!” 

In hindsight, I think it’s reasonable to say that effective application of checks and balances has quietly been one of the reasons we’ve continued to do what we do here at Zingerman’s in the way that we do it. We’re not perfect, of course, but checks and balances have helped us stay on course and true to our values. We’ve managed to do this when so many others seem to sell out or opt for short-term solutions and shiny objects that, over time, almost inevitably undercut the ethical integrity of their work. That’s why I believe that checks and balances are a key factor in helping us do what Joey Ramone said about the music of the band he helped start in 1974. To paraphrase him, we’ve always stayed true to who we are.

The impact of this work, I see a little more clearly every week, is far bigger than I ever would have believed. It’s not just which butter we use to bake our Sour Cream Coffee Cake. It has an impact on the community around us, and, over time, the entire country. I keep coming back to Wendell Berry’s wise words: “The leaders will have to be led.”

With all that said, here’s some of what I’ve been thinking about in recent weeks in this context: If we want a country that is governed graciously, with effective checks and balances in place, a good starting point is having our organizations do similar work. Big changes often start with small businesses. So hey, why wait? The more we create constructive, well-designed checks and balances in our workplaces, the healthier the ecosystems around us are likely to become. I believe we can do it. As Emily Ullman sings on the first song on her newly released album, Severe Clear, “If you expect the best, you get the best.” 

While checks and balances are in the news mainly because some people are trying so hard to get around them right now, I believe that they do not need to be an obstacle. To the contrary, when done well, they enhance creativity and collaboration while increasing inclusion. They help organizations, and the people in them, to work in more positive, empowering, collaborative, and creativity-generating ways. 

You may not have heard of Kim Scott. I can say honestly that I hadn’t until recently. We would all do well, though, to check out her work. In addition to being the author of Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity and Radical Respect; How to Work Better Together, she is the founder of the company Radical Candor. Aside from writing business books, Scott lives in Silicon Valley and teaches at Apple University. She once ran a health clinic for kids in Kosovo, followed by a diamond-cutting factory in Moscow. Needless to say, the Russian history major in me was intrigued by the latter. Perhaps even more intriguing is what she has to say about checks and balances.

In a March 2023 essay with the hard-to-pass-up title of “Here’s How to Stop Disempowering Your Employees and Start Creating a Cohesive Team,” Scott noted that many workplaces set the stage for top-down coercion by giving “managers up and down the org chart unchecked authority to make decisions that have profound consequences for their employees.” She added that it doesn’t have to be this way:

You can bake checks and balances—management systems in which leaders are held accountable for doing their jobs well rather than given unilateral decision-making authority—into your organizational design, or you can design a system that creates mini-dictators.

In my experience, people who are not actively involved in governance (which is, of course, most people) tend to think about checks and balances mostly in the context of the American Constitution. They’re obviously not incorrect. Checks and balances are clearly a critical component of trying to create a healthy country with well-functioning governance. I want to suggest, though, that well-designed and diligently used checks and balances are equally important—if far less often talked about—in the context of our companies. 

It’s not like organizations can’t operate without any checks and balances. There are many that work that way. Unless the unchecked leader is beyond exceptional, incredibly emotionally intelligent, and ethical to the core, the odds of things going well over time are low. We all miss things, and we all make mistakes. Checks and balances help to turn what could have gone way wrong into a regenerative right! I, for one, would not be doing what I do had I not benefited from some of the many checks and balances we’ve woven into the ZCoB. At an extreme, when leaders are allowed to be autocrats, they can make the kind of terrible, ego-driven decisions that Kim Scott is talking about. History is full of examples. It’s true in countries, but it’s equally true in companies large and small. When there are no checks on power, things will nearly always end up getting way out of balance. 

Autocratic leaders who lack any effective checks and balances on their decision-making power can wreak havoc or even go to war in a heartbeat—literally in the case of countries, figuratively in the context of companies. Since no one else has to sign off on their decisions, autocrats can essentially just authorize whatever it is they want to do and then do it. In fact, autocratic organizations are designed around the belief that the boss always knows best and should not be hindered by the flawed perspectives of others. To some, it sounds strong and decisive, but it is almost always dangerous in the end. Maria Alonso, writing in Forbes late last year, offered this: 

In any organization, leadership requires decisiveness, but when authority is unchecked, it can lead to environments that are unfair, toxic and even hostile. Leaders who fail to consider alternative perspectives or respond empathetically to challenges risk alienating their teams and fostering distrust. This dynamic can be particularly harmful in businesses, where the well-being and engagement of employees directly influence productivity and innovation.

Democratically oriented organizations, by contrast, are designed around the reality that nobody’s perfect. That we all—bosses, bakers, bussers, and corporate bigwigs alike—need help. That on our own, each of us will always miss important things. Conversely, when we tap into the wisdom of the group, we will do far better in the long run. As one member of the Ann Arbor-based Students for a Democratic Society said back in the ’60s: “Democracy is an endless meeting.” And sure enough, as per what I shared from Amy up top, on pretty much every issue of consequence, extensive ZCoB conversations precede action. People have a lot of autonomy to act, but hey, why wouldn’t you want a second or third or fourth opinion from someone you respect before you make any big decision? 

Even in an emergency, conversations can be convened quickly so that more people are involved within a matter of minutes. Here in the ZCoB, no one will just decide to do something drastic and then do it. In great part that’s because there are always effective checks and balances in place. As an example, we do not fire very many people here, but when we do, no one can be terminated without a member of our Department for People (aka HR) or a managing partner present. Terminations are always done by at least two people together, never one of us on our own, and always after many conversations with our HR folks. It’s a small thing that is used relatively rarely, but still, it can keep some really big problems from happening! 

There are, I see now, a lot of checks and balances in the world that I had never consciously considered but that we work with freely. As anarchist anthropologist and author David Graeber shows:

[P]rocesses of egalitarian decision-making … occur pretty much anywhere, and are not peculiar to any one given “civilization,” culture, or tradition. They tend to crop up wherever human life goes on outside systematic structures of coercion.

And, sure enough, now that I’ve been paying attention, I realize that checks and balances are already all around us, even if we don’t usually think of them as such. To wit: Quarterbacks have coaches. Classrooms have teachers. Writers have editors. We all drive on roads with speed limits. And many of us live in houses. In his song “Bobbie’s House,” Jeremy James Meyer sings:

So I’m building a roof
For my soul to dwell
Cause my home needs protection
I’ve got staying power

Meyer’s lyrics led me to wonder if the roof on a home is a check on the weather, one that allows us to lead better and more balanced lives. Poet Gary Snyder’s excellent tome The Etiquette of Freedom also reminds me that nature knows checks and balances quite well:

Social order is found throughout nature—long before the age of books and legal codes. It is inherently part of what we are, and its patterns follow the same foldings, checks and balances, as flesh or stone. What we call social organization and order in government is a set of forms that have been appropriated by the calculating mind from the operating principles in nature.

Checks and balances are also, of course, in the Bible. One of the most fascinating and intriguing examples is the Sabbatical year. Every seven years, debts were supposed to be forgiven. It was meant to rebalance economics in the community, prevent excessive accumulation of wealth, and help out those who were struggling to get by and had borrowed money to keep going. It’s an inspiring Biblical directive that, interestingly, seems to be ignored in most modern settings. 

Looking back on our nearly 44 years of history at Zingerman’s, I realize now that we’ve been both checking and balancing, in a sense, since Day One. Even when we only had two employees, Paul (Saginaw, of course) and I were working together to make any meaningful decision by consensus. We came to agreement—often after a lot of disagreement—or we didn’t act. Since then, the list of checks and balances has grown longer. While it may not be an approach for the autocratically minded, it is pretty clearly working for us.

The desire to weave checks and balances into our work, the sort of beliefs that Paul and I both had back at the beginning, is not unique to us. It’s a very different belief system than many organizations have, though, one that encourages humility and collaboration in the interest of everyone coming out ahead and succeeding together. In her recent enews, Dana Margolin, leader of the British band Porridge Radio, wrote:

Everything in the room is defined by everything around it in the room that is not it. If you spend enough time looking at all the empty spaces around everything in the room, you start to notice all the empty spaces around yourself that make you up. The empty room around me is as important to the physical space I think of as myself as the little bits that are touchable that I also think of as myself. That makes me know more about my place in the world.

Margolin’s beautifully written observation is one that comes from someone inclined to collaboration and the quality improvement that comes from well-designed and caringly used checks and balances. Someone with an autocratic mindset, by contrast, is the inverse. Their ego fills the room, they have all the answers, and checks and balances are only an obstacle put in their way by “less competent” colleagues. It’s Dana Margolin’s approach that I’m advocating here, of course. Well-designed and thoughtfully applied checks and balances come with several benefits:

• They make sure that we all come up with the best answers we can.
• They’re a systemic way to actualize and benefit from diversity.
• They help us avoid making rash, bad, or deeply destructive decisions when we’re caught up in an emotional reaction.
• They encourage us to accept limits that may feel restrictive, but I believe they’re actually regenerative contributors to our ecosystem’s health.
• They’re an important element of making any kind of inclusive, democratically oriented organization work. Without them, decisions are often made by bosses who get really excited or angry and then act in response to these feelings without really thinking through the implications of their actions. I’m all for emotion, but it is best when it’s balanced by the diverse inputs of others. 

People do need to have good intentions to use checks and balances. Those who don’t care or who are acting out of malice just work hard to figure out how to fake their way past them. It takes an ethical organization or community to keep checks and balances in active and effective use. In a 2024 interview on the Live at the National Constitution Center podcast, author, political commentator, and chair of Princeton’s Department of African American Studies Eddie Glaude Jr. offered:

We have to cultivate the cognitive virtues of being open to deliberation, of being willing to understand when we’re wrong, to engage in a kind of experimentation with regards to matters, right? So cognitive virtues that allow us to be open to growth, right? As well as kind of emphasizing notions of courage. Of being caring and tending towards others.

I’ll add something to that: Checks and balances won’t work if you don’t believe they have a benefit. They definitely don’t work well with people who see checks and balances as a pain in the ass that they need to figure out how to get around. The author of Small is Beautiful, E.F. Schumacher, writes that “Gandhi used to talk disparagingly of ‘dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.’” There are, of course, no such people. When people’s main goal with agreed-upon checks and balances is determining how to get around them, they will almost certainly find a way. 

Here at Zingerman’s, there are a whole host of things that I now see are healthy, equity- and dignity-based checks and balances. Here are a few:

1. Paul and I working by consensus: Right from the get-go in 1982, Paul and I quickly agreed that if we weren’t able to come to an agreement as partners, we wouldn’t take action.

2. Expecting consensus from other partners: In 1994, when we rolled out the Zingerman’s 2009 Vision, we extended that same agreement to all the new managing partners. Neither they nor we, no matter how big a share of the business we owned, would act on something without consensus from all of the other partners. The model, we knew then and know now, is not a good one for people who just want to do what they want to do without input. 

3. Leveraging the tension of businesses operating both together and independently: When creating the 2009 Vision, we built in tension between our overarching organization (the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses) and our semi-autonomous businesses. Each essentially checks the other. Instead of having a typical corporate headquarters tell everyone what to do, our businesses will constructively check the shared services team and vice versa.

4. Introducing our Training Compact: Put in place in 1994, this compact gives 100% of the responsibility for the effectiveness of the training work on both the trainee and the trainer. In other words, both the trainer and the trainee are turned into checkers and balancers, each guiding the other to get to a successful training session. 

5. Building consensus into Partners Group decision-making: In 1994, we moved responsibility for running the ZCoB to our newly formed Partners Group. The group began as seven or eight people—me and Paul and some managing partners. Today, there are 22 people. The consensus model Paul and I had used together since 1982, became, more formally, the model we use in the Partners Group. They approve things like new businesses, new partners, the ZCoB benefits plan for the next year, changes in organization-wide policy, and new long-term visions for the organization. Again, those decisions are made now by 20-plus people. Yes, it can be frustrating for anyone who’s ready to get going, but it helps us get to better outcomes in which we are all really on board. 

When we made this move for the bigger group to adopt consensus-based decision-making, it meant that Paul and I willingly gave up the chance to operate without any real checks on our organization-wide work. Yes, we were important, but the Partners Group (of which we were a part), not “Paul and Ari,” made the big decision. As I tell doubters all the time, Paul and I have not been in charge of the organization since 1994! We are only two voices. I’m not saying we’re irrelevant—only that we gave up the chance to just do what we want as co-founders without getting full consensus from the other partners.

6. Bottom-Line Change: For 25 years, we’ve been using this organizational change recipe, which globally recognized writer and leadership coach Verne Harnish regularly refers to as the best he’s ever seen. This recipe (aka framework) for change is all about good checks and effective balances. It’s designed to bring more people into the conversation before a decision about change is made. In the process, we tend to take into account issues autocrats will almost certainly have ignored. (Far more can be found in the pamphlet “Bottom-Line Change.”)

7. Incorporating staff partners into decision-making: By putting four folks who are not managing partners into our Partners Group and having them be part of the consensus, we add diversity and increase the odds of someone stopping something from going forward without considering the needs of the majority of the people who work here. Each of their voices counts as much in the Partner Group consensus as mine!

8. Embracing open-book management: Thirty years into using open-book management, I can see that it absolutely serves as a check and a balance. Busboys might ask about the balance sheet. People in one business wonder why another is getting the results it is. Everyone who’s interested can see the info.

9. Holding open meetings: By defaulting to having our meetings open, we’re more likely to get a diverse group of people and perspectives in the room, and the likelihood that someone will speak up and voice a different view is greater. It is often an informal but effective check and balance on our work. 

10. Creating our Stewardship Council: This is a five-person group of managing partners (I‘m one of the five) who are filling the role Paul and I filled since 1994—leaders among leaders. While all the managing partners are deeply committed to, and care about, the organization, the Stewardship Council members are committed to spending a significant percentage of their time working on the whole organization. This provides both formal and often informal checks on what managing partners might otherwise do (or not do) when left to work on their own, alone.

11. Using meeting facilitators: The facilitator in our meetings essentially serves to check those who tend to speak more and better balance the conversation to bring out the voices of those who might tend to hang back.

12. Having shared services: Our Department for People (aka HR), Finance, Creative Services, and other teams that serve all ZCoB businesses help keep our ethics, legal obligations, and internally agreed-upon expectations in place.

13. Having three bottom lines: Our three bottom lines are Great Food, Great Service (to each other and the community as well as guests), and Great Finance. The checks and balances happen pretty naturally in this setup. If one bottom line starts to get overemphasized, it’s almost inevitable in an open organization like ours that someone will speak up to advocate for the bottom line that got lost. Rebalancing begins.

14. Clearly defining quality: Everyone who’s worked here for more than a couple of weeks will likely know that our definition of quality at Zingerman’s is a) full-flavored, which we further define as “balance, complexity, and finish,” and b) traditional food. This is not about keeping products out of the ZCoB, per se. Rather, it offers a sense of calm confidence for anyone who works here that they, too, can learn to assess quality without having to wait for some hierarchical boss to pronounce something “good enough.” 

15. Establishing our perpetual purpose trust: This freely chosen check and community-minded balance prevents Zingerman’s from being sold and selling its soul in the process. Here’s much more I wrote about it. Email me at [email protected] if you’d like to know more.

Checks and balances do not need to be done in a dictatorial way. Sometimes, doing better systems-design work puts a check or balance in place in an ecosystem-aligned way that is very effective but that hardly anyone notices. In that regard, I realize now that all of our frameworks are essentially freely chosen checks and balances. They guide us toward better decisions while still requiring each of us who uses them to think things through pretty effectively. It’s hard to imagine someone going radically off course while giving their all to living the 3 Steps to Great Service, trying to practice dignity, or using the Six-Pointed Hope Star, and so on.

In his wonderful forthcoming book, Flourish, Dan Coyle shares the story of a Dutch engineer named Hans Monderman, who did some wonderfully creative work to check and (re)balance traffic. In 1982, Monderman was in his late 30s and living in Holland, while we had just opened the Deli here in Ann Arbor. He was assigned to work on a traffic problem in the small town of Oudehaske. As is true of many European towns, Oudehaske is relatively small, but still located along a fairly major roadway. Which means that high-speed motorists need to slow way down when they get to the edge of town. All kinds of warning signs had been tried, but to no avail. Drivers simply sped on through, risking lives in the process. Monderman’s approach, later dubbed Shared Space, was counterintuitive to most of his colleagues. Rather anarchistically, he opened up the traffic space entering the town, creating a wide, flat, unmarked area. Because every driver needed to figure out what was coming at them and from which direction, they all slowed down, on average by about 40%. Fewer formal boundaries, better results, more self-regulation, and accidents were reduced in the process! Wow!

Another example is the ZCoB’s ritual of ending every meeting with what we call “appreciations.” It’s a totally voluntary, “Quaker-style” sharing of gratitude by anyone present for anyone anywhere. They are, I just realized this week, a great example of a regenerative check and balance. They remind us in every meeting to return to a place of gratitude before we get into the rest of our day. After critical, even tense, conversations, they get us back on an appropriately appreciative track before we break up our gathering.

There are also checks and balances that we can impose on ourselves. To wit, Paul taught me early on to never act in anger. It’s a great guideline. By all means, be angy—just don’t act while I’m angry. Another simple one I made for myself is committing to smiling when I’m writing an email. It’s a check that pushes me to stay positive, polite, and dignity-focused rather than dash off a note in frustration.

Part of having effective checks and balances in an organization is that if we don’t hold ourselves accountable for actually using them, well, they won’t work. Which means that often my role as a leader (or that of other leaders here) is to say stuff like, “We really should slow down and use Bottom-Line Change to roll this out properly,” and “This decision really ought to be discussed in an open meeting so more people can be part of the conversation. Let’s pause and put in the agenda for next month’s ZCoB huddle.” It’s not always fun or easy to do this. When momentum is pushing people forward and they’re ready to get going, it’s not much fun to feel like I’m the one holding them back. I remind myself, though, that it’s not me—it’s the checks and balances that we had already agreed to use. That is the work that needs to be done. As Kim Scott says:

Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off. You have to accept that sometimes people on your team will be mad at you. In fact, if nobody is ever mad at you, you probably aren’t challenging your team enough.

Does all this really matter that much? I believe so. My sense is that checks and balances are a far bigger deal than most of us might imagine. Grace Lee Boggs, writing in The Next American Revolution, puts all of this in context:

All over the planet more and more people are thinking beyond making a living to making a life—a life that respects Earth and one another. Just as we need to reinvent democracy, now is the time for us to reimagine work and reimagine life. The new paradigm we must establish is about creating systems that bring out the best in each of us, instead of trying to harness the greed and selfishness of which we are capable. It is about a new balance of individual, family, community, work, and play that makes us better humans.

Which is exactly, I believe, what thoughtfully designed, caringly crafted, and purposefully used checks and balances can do when used regularly. 

There is, of course, no perfect way to do this work. Each ecosystem will need to design its own checks and balances. Take a bit of time this week to check in on what checks and balances look like in your life. Let me know what you learn. Our collective future may hang in the balance!

Build balance into your systems