Last week, Maddie and I visited Menlo Innovations, a software company in Ann Arbor, Michigan. You may remember my book review a couple of months ago of Joy, Inc., written by Rich Sheridan, the founder and CEO of Menlo. Menlo has been covered fairly extensively in the business press for their unorthodox (and highly successful) methods, including having everyone work together in pairs (literally two people per one computer). We spent the better part of two days there getting the official tour of the office (they give several hundred tours a year), talking to people, and observing folks working.

We were lucky enough to be able to sit in on one employee’s performance review process. At Menlo, you’re not given a performance review on a schedule. You have to ask for it. You schedule a lunch and invite your peers to give you feedback. If you’re smart (as Rich points out in the book), you invite your harshest critics to your performance lunch, rather than only your staunchest supporters. That means you’re likely to have some tough conversations in these meetings. Conversations where you’ll have to own up to mistakes, challenge each other on what works best and why, and really seek to understand each other when there is not one, obvious path forward.

And those kinds of conversations happened in this particular lunch–but they were handled with ease. The people in the meeting demonstrated impressive communication skills, the kind you send executives to expensive training for, and then hope that they use occasionally. Not to mention that they demonstrated these skills in front of two complete strangers! But at Menlo, it’s just how you do things. And there are a bunch of reasons for that (e.g., they explicitly look for good “kindergarten skills” when hiring), but one of the biggest reasons was pointed out by someone else during my visit: there is no fear at Menlo.

I guess that’s an exaggeration. They are a bunch of human beings, so fear has to be somewhere in the mix, but compared to most of the organizations I’ve observed, Menlo is noticeably fear-free. Rich talks in the book about the difference between an environment where people choose to “be safe” (don’t risk, don’t take chances, etc.), versus what he has at Menlo, where people “feel safe.” When you reduce the fear, you unlock potential in people. You end up with the kind of meetings that we observed at Menlo.

It’s another reminder for me that there is so much more that we are capable of in our organizations. What the status quo says is impossible is being lived at Menlo and at other organizations that are willing to try new ways of leading and managing. The sky’s the limit.