Meta Scrutinizing Sheryl Sandberg’s Use of Facebook Resources over Several Years

What I said is helpful, isn't sociopathy. What is helpful is not having a bleeding heart. Being able to make the right call, even if it hurts someone, or many someones. The higher up you go, the more necessary it is.

I started out in industry at a low level, and worked myself up to senior leadership at a Fortune 50 company. I've founded several companies. I've had to fire friends who were really, really trying hard. I've had to hire folks I didn't like. I've had to lay off teams, and shut down one of my own companies (and lay off everyone I'd hired, which I did face to face) not because what they were doing was bad, but because it didn't fit the market anymore. I do care about people, and it has cost me quite a bit of emotional trauma that I see others not have. It has given me a positive reputation and general like well after the fact, but that doesn't scale or work in other situations.

1) The larger the organization, the more likely you'll run across someone who is bad and is skillful at using emotion to manipulate others (playing the victim, pushing buttons, you name it) and those people need to be removed. If you can't handle making the call and seeing it through despite the tugging at the heart strings, it poisons the organization. The problem being, most people will do it to some extent when their jobs or livelihoods are on the line. There is no 'clean' way to do this generally, though money can help (severance). It can also be very expensive.

2) The larger the organization, the bigger the impact of a layoff, change in strategy, etc. and the larger the emotional toll of doing what needs to be done. The more you are friends with everyone, the more the toll generally. But it doesn't change the necessity of it. In fact, it magnifies the cost in real terms if it isn't done. Sometimes to 100's or more of median 'life work value' (aka total economic output for a lifetime for a median person).

Being overly empathetic or sensitive to this just makes it harder, and if it is harder, eventually that person will hit a point they can't do it. Which makes someone ineffective and prolongs and magnifies the actual damage.

While the positive/great side is awesome - making things work, getting organizations working together, making everyone productive and value creators instead of destroying value - the negative/downside that can happen sometimes is much harder than most people are willing to face.

A common way of coping for this is to draw emotional distance between oneself and ones reports, which also has downsides. Another way is 'othering' them, which has even more major downsides. Another way is disempowering oneself (oh, I had to do this because I was told to), but that has even MORE major downsides. Either way, the more someone feels it, the harder it is to do. Being inauthentic or out of touch with people however, makes it nearly impossible to avoid being toxic and damaging more than is required. It also destroys the ability to do the POSITIVE side of leadership, and is ultimately destructive to the leader.

Rarely, someone will be empathetic AND be able to do this at a large scale. Seeing what they do up close however, they often shut off the degree of emotional exposure they get, and make sure that many of the hardest decisions are done in a clinical way out of view, so they can be effective in those situations.

So think of it as a filtering mechanism. Folks who make it to a certain place, they have reasons they survived and others didn't. Sometimes it's sheer luck, but more often than not, it's certain survival traits and ways of looking at the world that happened to click in the right way.

> it's not nearly as obvious as you think that Churchill goes in a different bucket than Stalin

You might be surprised that I might know more about it than you imagine, maybe more than you. It is pretty obvious that they belong in different buckets.