True to the spirit of humanocracy, Nucor’s model isn’t about pushing employees to do more, but giving them the opportunity to be more—more than blue-collar workers, more than order takers, more than mere operators, more than employees. Nucor’s frontline team members are experts, innovators, risk takers, and owners.

What’s true for you is equally true for institutions. The pace at which any organization evolves is determined in large part by the number of experiments it runs. Despite this, most employers provide little encouragement to workers who are eager to “learn by doing.

If the job is defined as getting better outcomes from a group of people working together, then a great manager’s team will consistently achieve great outcomes.

My goal was to make employees feel like owners and, in turn, to increase the amount of responsibility they took for the company’s success. However, opening company secrets to employees had another outcome: it made our workforce smarter. When you give low-level employees access to information that is generally reserved for high-level executives, they get more done on their own. They work faster without stopping to ask for information and approval. They make better decisions without needing input from the top.

In most businesses, without even realizing it, senior managers stunt the abilities and intelligence of their own workforce by keeping financial and strategic information hidden. Although just about all companies talk about empowering staff, in the vast majority of organizations, real empowerment is a pipe dream because employees aren’t given enough information to take ownership of anything.

There is another, equally critical, factor for success in companies: teams that act as communities, integrating interests and putting aside differences to be individually and collectively obsessed with what’s good for the company.