Star Performer Created a ‘Toxic Culture’ at Silicon Valley Community Foundation
philanthropy.com
philanthropy.com
How are people still getting away with this for so long? Didn't they even notice the high turnover and Glassdoor reviews?
Extraordinary people need extraordinary compensation. Maybe pissing off a few people is part of compensation and company has no problem with that as she is worth 100 such people she is gonna piss off.
This article may possibly impact the business longer-term and the hidden opportunity costs they have already experienced are both harder to quantify and also really costly.
It also assumes that you couldn't find someone just as effective with good people management skills as well. I personally think it is a myth that someone is irreplaceable unless you make them irreplaceable. If you do that then you deserve the fallout for when that irreplaceable person becomes a liability.
This foundation is likely now opened up to lawsuites, a reputational hit, and potential loss of business. Can they weather it? Probably. Did they have to weather it? No.
It just occured to me just now that this has some similarities to technical debt:
- The costs to the individual employees are a lot more obvious to those individuals than the costs to the organization as a whole are to the leadership.
- The costs to the organization are both real but hard to quantify: Higher turnover, missed opportunities because staff don't have breathing space to think about seizing them, decreased ability to execute on goals. The costs to the organization of solving it are much more tangible: an immediate and sharp hit to the ability to execute on some things right now. Its easy for someone to argue that it is too costly to solve and hard to push back on that.
- Requires leadership to be able to recognize the symptoms of the problem, to keep open communication channels that would let diagnostic information bubble up, to acknowledge that there is a tangible cost to taking action but agree that its worth it to avoid the larger hidden costs, and to actually take that action.
I suspect there is probably a good essay to be written (or which has been written) which defines this category of organizational rot and fleshes out the specific leadership habits that are needed to notice and fix it.
Why was she a manager? Without a power advantage she wouldn't have abused anybody: obviously she wasn't screaming at her superiors, given that she wasn't fired. Most absuers only unfold their unique traits when they're surrounded by subordinates that have no chance of retaliating.
People don't just want more money. They want to be important and powerful as well. If there's someone in your organisation that you want to keep, paying them more to stop them leaving won't work. They leave anyway, but with a higher salary to use as a bargaining chip for their next role. You have to give them more responsibility, and that usually means bringing people in under them.
This almost seems analogous to the armed forces, where recruits are subjected to all forms of screaming, yelling and demeaning comments. I would never want to be in such an environment, but clearly, they are doing it because they believe that it works. Do we think that the Marines should be pressured into not yelling at recruits? If not, shouldn't other organizations be given the same latitude if they genuinely think it works best?
2) "They're doing it because they believe that it works" implies a certain deliberateness and design. Having spoken with a few USMC recruiters back when I was a teenager, I'm very inclined to believe that they've put a lot of thought into this and that there is a fair amount written about how they use these harsh methods to solve the problems like "How do we give people from a wide range of social backgrounds the mental toughness to be able to do trigonometry in their heads while mortars are going off near them?"
This is quite different from refusing to deal with one employee who has a habit of randomly screaming at people about accounts receivable issues.
2) Your point here is that it's ok to engage in yelling if the decision was made "deliberately" and "by design"? I don't think we as a society should be micromanaging the internal working of a private organisation to that extent. We should be regulating organizations by their behaviors and outcomes, not their thought processes.
Lest anyone misunderstands me, I certainly do not advocate for yelling and belittling behavior. I don't think it makes for a productive workplace, and I would never want to work in one. But I do think there's an inconsistency wrt the wide latitude we give the armed forces. To the extent that such inconsistency is acceptable, I'm curious as to why.
Edit: Another example that just came to my mind, was many athletic coaches in sports like soccer. Specifically, the "greatest football manager ever", Alex Ferguson.
https://www.givemesport.com/1251440-sir-alex-ferguson-used-t...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2016/01/29/how-cristian...
In this case yelling was used to belittle everyone and secure more power. If you break someone down but never build them back up you have crushed people.
If we still want to turn people into killing machines than yelling is a tool to help that process.
“a few months” would be more accurate
The armed forces are specifically looking to replace any creative or independent thinking with responsiveness to the chain of command and willingness to commit acts of violence. Those are exceptional requirements which are generally in direct conflict with the productive functioning of any other organization.
I do think it’s worth inquiring into why we’ve created a society which necessitates such broad-scale weaponization of human beings, however.
There is even a term for it: Followership. Something I had never even heard of until I looked into joining ROTC, and realized they weren't looking for future leaders, but robots they could program.
What if you don't it then a new startup comes, starts doing it and soon they run your business and become an enormous success. Soon, you end up selling your business and your employees are left jobless.
One problem with employees is that they think that the business is going to keep afloat no matter what.
I think "it works" is often indistinguishable from "we've always done it that way," especially for organizations like the US military that have the budget and entrenched status that it's hard to imagine the organization suddenly not working. Maybe the thing you're doing is irrelevant and you might as well stop. Maybe you'd do better if you stopped. But you have no way of knowing.
Also the screaming happens mainly in basic training, as far as I understand.
It's a bit like measuring chattel slavery by its economic output. The vastly more important issue — whether people would be able to own other people — is entirely orthogonal.
With regard to the armed forces analogy, consider too the difference in situations one is likely to encounter as a member of the military as opposed to a SV non-profit.
I think what's good in market differs from what is good in general. Those two are a different thing, you might want the market to accept your "good behavior" as default but that won't make it more profitable by default.
Granted, the proprietors of said business may not see it that way… but no one commenting on this article is representing the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. As consumers (or, in this case, donors) we should hold businesses to a standard of absolute good. The market incentive to be ethical only exists if we create it.
Not only that, the more they clue in that they are operating in a consequence-free environment, the more pronounced their flaws become. Not only are the disincentives for bad behavior removed, but it also may feed their ego: every time they get away with something others wouldn't, it is like the organization is confirming how exceptional they are in other ways.