Why I care to write about this
I recently had a multi-year stretch working full-time at one company and working on a contract basis for another company. There was a powerful dichotomy when it came to the leadership at the two companies. At the company I was full-time with, Cascade.io, there were effectively two leaders. For the sake of this post, I’ll refer to my part-time company as ‘Capital Ventures’ and my direct supervisor there as ‘Gordon’.
The dichotomy became apparent to me over the course of a two year period. Its essence was simple:
- The leaders from Cascade were incredibly kind, thoughtful, inspiring, supportive, and caring, amongst a million other wonderful qualities.
- Gordon from Capital Ventures was disrespectful when times got tough, quick to assume, controlling such that creativity evaporated, and led with fear.
In my roughly 11 year career, I’ve never come across someone like Gordon before; this fact in combination with being an optimist led me to give him the benefit of the doubt for quite some time.
As the days passed and I was exposed to both company cultures, I became less and less able to ignore the tendencies of Gordon. I was frequently finding myself comparing and contrasting the leadership qualities of him compared to the leaders at Cascade. Slowly, the dichotomy was born.
I could surely go into a diatribe about all the asinine things Gordon said or all the times he wronged our team, but that’s not what is important. I’m writing this post because I have given this topic a lot of thought and I’ve reached what, to me, are important conclusions to carry with me:
- I’ve thought about how Gordon’s style is simply unacceptable. It always was and always will be but I do think that we, as a society, have at least fairly recently passed a point where this type of behavior is accepted.
- I’ve thought about the leadership qualities of those at Cascade and how powerful they were. I’ve thought about how insanely counter-productive the opposite is.
- I then questioned who I am on my worst days and who I am on my best. Am I a jerk, too? Are we all sometimes?
It is not 1989 on Wall Street anymore
If you’ve read Michael Lewis, you may have come across Liar’s Poker or The Money Culture. In these books, he gives a rather humorous peek into the world of high finance. Questionable ethics, greed, and profanity dominated the day. For a visual representation, see The Wolf of Wall Street. Would anybody in their right mind watch that movie and think that even the tamest of the bad was acceptable? Of course not. There's a scene in the movie where Jonah Hill's character berates an employee in front of the entire office. The scene ends with a dejected and now unemployed man watching his pet fish get swallowed. This, I hope, was a dramatization to bring to life a real theme from the time: emotionally annihilating an employee was totally fine so long as it was justified in the perpetrator's mind. Let's say it's 1989 and you watched a colleague get verbally assaulted by a superior. My bet is that you'd feel sorry for the fellow and move along. Fast forward to 2023 and this is all a big no-no. That's because at some point in the last 30 years we have taken the productive step of realizing that this type of behavior is crap. It's not cute anymore. Making someone feel like crap because they did something wrong, said something you disagree with, or whatever else is not okay. It doesn’t matter if you think what you said was simply “firm”, “blunt”, or “to the point”. That’s probably not true and it’s really just an excuse for the perpetrator to make themself feel better. We teach our kids to "treat others how you want to be treated". That's not a sign of a society gone soft. It's a sign of a society that values mutual respect. My recommendation to those who read this last paragraph and became even slightly ticked off? Take a hard look in the mirror. I’m willing to bet you’re the problem.
My Uncle Dave once told me a quote that I'll never forget: "Greet the janitor with the same respect you greet the CEO". Anything less than that is unacceptable. It's simple.
Being a jerk is absolutely, positively counter-productive
Now let’s walk through the effect this has, in both directions, on the workplace (or any other place where you have relationships with humans beings).
The Positives of Kindness
I was one of 10 employees at Cascade. We were a small start up building a product that we were all proud of. I was, without a doubt, the least competent software engineer on the team. I was working with, amongst other brilliant individuals, an ex-Googler and two founders who had both built and sold their own companies in the past. You might think that this could be an intimidating place to work for anyone, let alone a junior engineer who was trying to find their footing. Nonetheless, the culture here was one that made me fearless. It filled me with confidence. It made me certain that mistakes were ay-okay. If anything, they were the norm. If you were not making mistakes, you were probably not being very productive. This, by the way, was completely unspoken. The genuine openness of the leadership team, and my other colleagues, to field questions made you understand, at your core, that questions were a good thing. Uncertainty was a good thing. Each time you’re uncertain and ask a question, guess what? You learn something new. Was it perhaps frustrating each time I asked the ex-Googler how to do something that they could do in their sleep? Maybe. I’m not sure because they never expressed anything but a willingness to help me. This approach was spread throughout the team such that, eventually, you are left with a culture. A culture of respecting each others’ ideas. A culture of questions. A culture of thoughtful responses. A culture of understanding that your approach might be wrong and that’s just fine.
What does a strong culture like the one above lead to?
It leads to an efficient, curious, and incredibly productive team. It leads to a team that is not afraid to make mistakes. It leads to a team that is always using one another to grow, learn, and take the next step forward. It leads to a bunch of people being fearless because fear has no place on a team. The only fear that might exist is the fear of letting your colleagues down. If that’s the ounce of fear that is present on your team, you’re winning.
The cherry on top? Kindness permeates. We all get only so many trips around the Sun. Each day I spent with my colleagues at Cascade was one that I look back on fondly. That’s worth more than a paycheck.
The Negatives of being a jerk
At Capital Ventures, Gordon led with fear. I was only on about, say, 10% of all team calls given I was part-time. Even with that being true I heard him say, multiple times, “You will be gone tomorrow if _____” or “I will fire anyone who _____”. I witnessed him verbally abuse the team as a whole or individuals in front of the team upon something going wrong. I watched as he insulted the work and/or intelligence of team members. This matters so much more than what’s on the surface. Maybe you can walk away each day and compartmentalize your boss or colleague being a jerk. I get that and I hope you have the ability to do so. What the team as a whole cannot walk away from, however, is as follows.
The team cannot walk away from the fact that, in that environment, team members are surely less confident to ask questions.
I just watched my colleague get told that their work was filled with incompetence. Is this question I have going to expose me as incompetent? Better yet, am I incompetent? Now I’m doubting myself. I’m doubting my question. I’m doubting my work. Now I have a pit in my stomach every time I have to interact with this individual. Now I just might resent him.
I now have a hypothesis to share that I’m really confident about. I know I appreciate when a hypothesis is brought to the table with a pinch of evidence. I, therefore, apologize that I’m making a hypothesis without a shred.
My hypothesis: People are more productive when they’re happy to be going to work than when they do so filled with angst.
Do you want your team coming to work every morning filled with angst?
What about the culture at large? Now we have a culture where questions are frowned upon because the act of asking is feared. Due to this we immediately arrive at less productivity. If we’re asking less questions, we’re learning less; if we’re learning less, we’re growing less; if we’re growing less … you get it. Make your own list of side-effects from there.
Moving on … We now have a culture where sharing ideas is less likely, on an absolute basis, than it was before. Why? Those ideas might be ridiculed. Your most junior member might have a brilliant idea brewing. Don’t you want to hear it? Probably. But last week you reamed out your most senior engineer due to an issue with her latest project. You think that junior member is brave enough to share their idea now? Maybe. But I’d bet not.
Remember above when I said:
“It leads to a team that is not afraid to make mistakes. It leads to a team that is always using one another to grow, learn, and take the next step forward.”
The reverse is pretty easy to see, so I digress.
So, anyway, while you, the toxic leader, think that you’re infallible and brilliant, all you’ve really done is produce a team that is not performing even close to their full potential. At the end of the day, that is the (business) cost.
Maybe we’re all jerks?
While my reflection above is something I truly believe, I always try to question myself. Surely there are some days that I acted like a jerk. In fact, I didn’t even want to let myself off that easily. I made myself list a few times that I was a jerk. The challenge was shockingly easy because the moments where I was a jerk were seemingly burnt into my memory. It’s funny because I clearly tried to suppress those memories. But they’re there, alright. Clear as day. And when I think of them, it hurts. I feel badly as if I had just experienced the memory. Give it a shot.
So here’s to giving people the benefit of the doubt, to a degree. Think about a few times you were ruder than need be. Hold yourself to account for it. Don’t BS yourself. Over the course of our lives we will all have what amounts to a kindness spectrum. Some days we’ll be way to the right, our “best self”. Some days we’ll be a total jerk, unfortunately. Maybe that’s okay so long as we’re keeping ourselves honest and trying to do better next time. Maybe that’s okay if we own up to certain things and apologize when needed.
I said we’ll give people the benefit of the doubt, to a degree. I said that because north of some “jerk frequency” threshold, someone might just be a jerk. They no longer deserve the benefit of the doubt.
So please, as Tim Ferris says when he signs off on a podcast, be a little kinder than is necessary.
