Bosses and other strangers

Is it cruel to be kind?

The head of the first company I worked at was once included in a Fortune magazine story “America’s Toughest Bosses.” (Narrator: Fortune misspelled jerk.) And he certainly was that, and more. He fired the head of communications, an Orthodox Jew, for not returning to the office on a Friday evening for some calculated, nonsense thing. (Honey, get me the legal dept.) The Fortune profile quoted someone calling him “a legend in his own mind.” He also once sued Forbes magazine for an unflattering profile. That didn’t end well

That high-ambition, low EQ types rise to the top of organizations and societies is not a new thing, of course. Perhaps this is because we - especially in America - still tend to celebrate the “do you feel lucky, punk” macho types (it’s still mostly a guy’s playpen), the narcissist-cum-entrepreneurial types who typically leave wreckage as their main accomplishment and then move on to the next thing to muck up.

Among the outcomes of ubiquitous inter-connectivity and non-stop media is that these jerks-in-chief are now more likely to be outed and shamed than ever before. And yet, they’ve proven resilient, like cockroaches. They scatter, and then come back pissed off and in numbers.

The current employment cataclysm called the “Great Resignation” is partly a symptom of the long overdue correction to the John Galt school of hyper-individualism and asshattery in the managerial/ownership ranks.

The rise of ESG criteria in evaluating corporate governance and investment potential is a similar example of growing angst against late stage capitalist machismo. But this conversation, “greed is good” vs. “share the wealth” is itself old news and largely is a non-solution to a more fundamental problem: a lack of humanity in the owner/executive class.

Max De Pree, former chair of furniture maker Herman Miller, Inc., (a company noted for its empowered workplace culture) and an expert on organizational development and leadership, once said:

“…we come to life with a tremendous diversity of gifts. I think from there, a leader needs to see himself in a position of indebtedness. Leaders are given the gift of leadership by those who choose or agree to follow. We’re basically a volunteer nation. I think this means that people choose a leader to a great extent on the basis of what they believe that leader can contribute to that person’s ability to achieve his or her goals in life. This puts the leader in the position of being indebted - in the sense of what he or she owes to the organization.”

While that sentiment may seem positively quaint in today’s working environments, the concept of Servant Leadership is trending, more that 50 years after it was introduced by Robert Greenleaf.

And rightly so. The times, they are a changing (See: Great Resignation, above.)

Peter Drucker, the father of most modern management concepts and principles, felt strongly about this. Peter wrote Managing the Non-Profit Organization, among many other business books. He believed that if a leader treats employees as if they were volunteers - free to leave at any time - the leader will give more attention to the non-monetary needs of workers, and move from transactional motivation to transformational motivation.

De Pree and many others have shown that this can work in larger organizations. For the smaller organizations which make up the vast majority of the employment opportunity in this country, it may be a path to salvation. What’s in place now surely isn’t working for more and more people on either side of the management-labor equation. It has to change, and it is changing.

Bosses: show some humility and appreciation. It goes long way.

We don’t have to take it anymore…