Ignorance is No Excuse for Bad Leadership

When it comes to CEOs, ignorance of the culture in your workplace is unacceptable. Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer recently came to the defense of Uber’s Travis Kalanick saying that she didn’t think Kalanick knew about the toxic culture at his company: “I just don’t think he knew. When your company scales that quickly, it’s hard,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle.

This is like Donald Trump defending Vladimir Putin. To say that Kalanick didn’t know about toxic culture puts him in the same league as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and his infamous comment in the New York Times expose on his workplace’s culture: “That’s not the Amazon I know.” Mayer’s defense of Kalanick as a “great leader” reflects the general attitude of organizational leaders today—their only concern is shareholders and they just don’t care about their workplace culture and, by extension, their employees.

Andrew Faas is the author of From Bully to Bull’s-Eye: Move Your Organization Out of the Line of Fire. 

Photo credit: Observer

Before You Start Praising Jeff Bezos, Consider This

In the rush to laud the business acumen of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos following his recently released annual letter to shareholders, many business publications are missing a key fact—this is a company that was cited in 2015 by the New York Times for its toxic work culture. The only result seems to be the shameful efforts by Bezos and spokesman Jay Carney to try to find the employees who spoke off the record to the Times, little else seems to have been done to address the culture described in the article. Bezos assertion that “Even if it’s rare or isolated, our tolerance for any such lack of empathy needs to be zero,” does little to reassure business skeptics such as myself.

We are seeing in real time on prime time the outcome of companies that ignore the importance of psychologically healthy, safe and fair workplaces. Surely the recent fiascos with United Airlines and Uber should give leaders reason to peel back the curtain and ascertain what is really going on in the culture. All of the jargon about being a “Day 1 company” or to “disagree and commit” when team members are unsure about moving forward does little to address the most important underlying principle of business—feelings drive organizational behavior.  Companies ignore this at their own risk.

I have written about Amazon’s workplace culture before, but there’s nothing cuts to the quick quite like satire, and I highly recommend this piece by New Yorker humor columnist Andy Borowitz, “Amazon Chief Says Employees Lacking Empathy Will Be Instantly Purged.”

Photo credit: Amazon

Is Your Company’s Performance Management Plan Designed to Get Rid of You?

Performance management is all too often a wolf dressed up in sheep’s clothing. Touted as a path to self-improvement for employees, such programs are actually structured to get rid of people. And forget about employee review plans. They might as well come with a pink slip. This hard fact became apparent at the end of November when an Amazon employee survived a leap off a 12-story building at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. The employee had previously sent a public email to CEO Jeff Bezos as well as hundreds of his colleagues. According to sources, he had applied for a transfer but instead was put on an “employee improvement plan.” In corporate speak this means: “you’re toast.”

I have written before about the toxic culture at Amazon, which was exposed in this New York Times article. Amazon isn’t the only company to take on this practice. Kimberly-Clark and Proctor & Gamble were also notorious for this. This sort of toxic environment doesn’t bode well for productivity in the long term—and it certainly has done no favors to national reputation for any company. 

Photo: REBusiness Online