When a culture is designed around its leader
There has been a post circulating about a certain CEO of a certain social media platform who seems to be rapidly running it into the ground, whether deliberately because of a hidden agenda or through sheer incompetence or both.
The post is by someone who was an intern at one of this CEO’s other companies, and they talk about how managing this person was a huge part of the company culture.
“Even I, as a lowly intern, would hear people talking about it openly in meetings. People knew how to present ideas in a way that would resonate with him, they knew how to creatively reinterpret (or ignore) his many insane demands, and they even knew how to “stage manage” parts of the physical office space so that it would appeal to him… There were layers of management between individual employees and him, and those managers were experienced managers of him. Again, I cannot stress enough how much of the company culture was oriented around managing this one guy.”
I wish I could say this felt shocking or unusual, but unfortunately this type of culture, designed around the ego and idiosyncrasies of its leader, while perhaps not usually taken to such an extreme, is the norm. I’m sure many of you recognize it too, whether from your own lives or from movies like “The Devil Wears Prada”.
You could call it an extreme example of “managing up.” Knowing how to “manage up” is often seen as a necessary and desirable skill, but the reality is that a huge amount of energy can be wasted in a process that is nothing to do with achieving an organization’s mission, yet the organization’s mission also cannot be achieved without doing it. Either way, the leader of the organization that everyone is managing is the roadblock.
More often than not, though, there is some kind of payoff, right? There has to be some sort of benefit - they bring in money, or PR, or they have the vision, or the connections.
Is equity, inclusion and belonging really possible under such a setup though?
Even in the absence of a leader that requires such a high level of management, the socialization to keep the people in power happy, to center on their needs, to align with their vision and to do what they’re told without questioning or even fully understand why runs deep. People build successful careers off their ability to do this and it can be a hard culture to break.
The thing is that equitable and inclusive leaders WANT their people to be honest with them, to take a stance, and have an opinion because they know it will result in better decision making.
Some questions to think about:
As a leader, are there ways in which your team is telling you want they think you want to hear rather than what you need to hear? Can you name the pattern in order to get feedback on how to shift it?
As someone reporting to leadership, do you find yourself saying what you think they want to hear instead of what they need to hear? What would you need in order to able to say what you think needs to be said instead? What might be a small and manageable next step towards getting those needs met?
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