Monday, December 04, 2020

Avoiding Contagion



Bad leadership and aggressive management practices are highly contagious. So are bad attitudes. If you spend your time around mean-spirited, aggressive, dishonest, and narrow-minded people, you will find that some of it will rub off on you. The same goes for listening to cruel gossip, constant backbiting, and formation whining. Like germs and bacteria, behaviors of this type gradually undermine our resistance and destroy our mental and spiritual health.


Organizations and executives that tolerate—let alone encourage—negative, mean-spirited, and aggressive behavior in the cause of driving up profits and shutting out the competition defile themselves. Why do they do it? Because they focus only on the outcome. It's that myopic emphasis on the bottom line. Yet the true bottom line, the only one that really counts, is the result of all additions and subtractions—not just the financial ones. And a toxic culture—bosses who treat their staff like dirt; staff who whine and complain, and indulge in backbiting and dish the dirt on one another—and executives who happily pocket the cash and hold their noses, are huge subtractions that can turn just about any level of purely financial profit into a thumping great social, emotional, and community loss.

I have seen reasonable, ordinary, basically decent people treat their colleagues in cruel and malicious ways—quite thoughtlessly—under the influence of a boss who made that kind of behavior both acceptable and necessary to keep his favor.
It’s very easy to get used to what you experience every day. In time, it becomes almost normal. It doesn’t feel too bad—or too hard to put up with. I have seen reasonable, ordinary, basically decent people treat their colleagues in cruel and malicious ways—quite thoughtlessly—under the influence of a boss who made that kind of behavior both acceptable and necessary to keep his favor. I’m sure those people no longer felt that what they were doing was particularly unpleasant, let alone wrong. It was “business as usual” and “the way we do things around here.” The unpleasant boss’s attitudes had rubbed off onto everyone else. Days and weeks spent in a poisonous atmosphere of jealousy and political intrigue had hardened people without them even noticing.

We all want to survive. We all find it easier (and much more comfortable and safer too) to fit in, rather than stand out against someone who seems to have the power to harm us or our careers. If that is what we do, over time the pain and the dissonance between our true feelings and how we have convinced ourselves to think and act lessens. It is no longer so hard. The famous experiment is well known where students were persuaded to administer strong electric shocks to their colleagues as part of an experiment (in reality, to actors who mimicked being given agonizing “punishment”). The students did it because that was what they were told to do. That was what they believed was expected and required of them. By moving them slowly from administering small, apparently totally harmless shocks towards inflicting what seemed, on the outside, to be severe pain, they were induced to treat the whole process as “acceptable.” Their minds denied what they were seeing. Most claimed afterwards that they assumed that it had to be safe, however much the supposed subjects yelled in pain.

. . . they have gradually been induced to believe that this is “normal.” This is how business has to be in the 21st century. This is what it takes to succeed.
That is what happens when you spend too much time in a toxic environment. You become hardened. You no longer notice what is going on. And that is what is happening in too many organizations today: people working horrendous hours, driving themselves and others ever harder, treating subordinates like servants, and allowing themselves to become part of unethical, even sometimes dishonest business practices—all because they have gradually been induced to believe that this is “normal.” This is how business has to be in the 21st century. This is what it takes to succeed.

The ends cannot ever justify the means. That is the one all-encompassing, underlying truth of ethics—in business and everywhere else. Howyou do something is as important as what you do. Achieving even great results by dishonest, disagreeable, or downright noxious means removes any benefit or luster from the outcome. It becomes tainted and worthless.

The ends cannot ever justify the means. That is the one all-encompassing, underlying truth of ethics—in business and everywhere else.
Contagion requires frequent contact. It needs you to breathe the same air, share the same office space, inhabit the same environment, laugh at the same jokes, as the source of infection. Jerks, bullies, unethical weasels, and domineering, egotistical fools spread the infection of their attitudes and opinions wherever they go. Keep away from them. Keep away from the contagion of bad, Hamburger Management. Treat it as you would a bucketful of germ-ridden, noxious sewage. For that is what it is, and it is slowly poisoning our organizations—and our business values.

We do not have to allow this to happen. We can fight back and we can win. Mankind has conquered many of the infections that used to make human life nasty, brutish and short. We can do it again. If enough people quietly refuse to allow themselves to be tainted, the contagion will stop spreading. If enough organizations refuse to turn blind eyes to those who deliver profits by unacceptable means—and root out the bullies, the petty dictators, the cheats, and the assholes—such behavior will ultimately be ended. It is simply a matter of choice.


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8 Comments:

Sarah said...

I'm new to slowleader and I am extremely inspired by the articles I have read. This one in particular chimed totally with how I feel about modern management, HOWEVER be warned, if you are to adopt any of the recommendations contained within the article and stick your head above the parapet you risk the wrath of all the small minded, vile managers out there trying to protect their empire. I speak from bitter experience I was fired from my job today for advocating honesty, commonsense, hard work and openness.

9:48 AM  
Carmine Coyote said...

I'm so sorry to hear about your situation, Sarah, but maybe you're better off not working somewhere where that could happen.

Yes, I realize some people will not like what I say. That doesn't mean I should not say it though. If I don't, who will?

Keep reading, my friend.

3:45 PM  
Dan said...

"This is how business has to be in the 21st century. This is what it takes to succeed."

This statement reflects what I believe is the essential "con." And a good one, too, since so many of us have bought right into the notion there are no alternatives.
But there is more than one....

Sarah, you will need to heal for awhile from this experience. It's a spiral of learning, isn't it? One right move leads to another and another. Most people follow a thread in their lives. Go deeper; tie in to a rope that will hold you when things are difficult.

Take care
Dan

12:40 AM  
Robert Pearson said...

I read with interest Pete Aldin's comment to---
"Corporate Ethics . . . How Far Has Business Got with Reform?"

It is worldwide, this problem.

I read with great empathy Sarah's comment to this post. One of my solutions has been to apply the Malle Rule of "Did you have a Job, Position or Career? Which did you want?" The Malle comment is at this Blog "Measuring Contribution" Thursday, November 23, 2020.

Figure out whether you want a Job, Position or Career and which one you just lost. It will be a big help in targeting your future employment. You can take control.

Never stop looking for your next employment. When you get new employment, update your resume and start trying to find out what you are worth. Always know what you are worth to employers.

I digress. The reason for my comment is to point you to an interesting post at StorageMojo titled "Help Wanted: Storage Leadership Position Open".
http://storagemojo.com/?p=321

An interesting read for a technical Blog.

Keep writing your "stuff that dreams are made of", my friend.

5:17 AM  
Carmine Coyote said...

Good advice, Dan. And you are right about the "con" that is in place.

Keep reading, my friend.

7:38 AM  
Carmine Coyote said...

Thanks for your comment, links, and sage advice, Robert, as always.

What you point to is an important effect of Hamburger Management: people need to keep their resumés polished and stay ready to move into the job market at any time—and they do just that.

Then organizations start to find (and complain) that they cannot keep talented people. And whose fault is that? You cannot simultaneously keep people loyal and treat them badly.

7:45 AM  
Carl said...

I took on a job at a candy factory as the production supervisor. Despite my years of business experience and college education in business management, everything fell on deaf ears to upper management. Everything was about image, and every problem started at the bottom with the employees rather than my opinion of managing from the top down. The community strongly supports this business, even giving “Business of the Year Awards” despite its turnover rate of staff and general poor working conditions. During my time there I brought productivity up my increasing morale and we kept employees much longer.

Carl Strohmeyer

6:03 PM  
Carmine Coyote said...

Thanks for your comment, Carl.

I hope life is better for you in 2007.

6:16 PM  

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