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

Thoughts on Yahoo's Workplace Culture

Gregory Anderson, suing Yahoo for manipulating the rating systems that cost him his job.

Earlier this year, a NYT article by Vindu Goel called "Brain Drain Shows Level of Faith Lost Inside Yahoo,” outlined how CEO Marissa Mayers, in attempting to quell the growing tension at Yahoo, promised employees that "the bloodletting was finally over and shortly thereafter, she changed her mind and demanded more cuts" to save her own skin.

In a follow up article in the NYT on Feb 2 called “A Yahoo Employee-Ranking System Favored by Marissa Mayer is Challenged in Court,” Goel outlines how a performance rating system introduced by Mayer is used to get rid of employees. I am very familiar with this system and I view it as discriminatory and easily manipulated. Yahoo is rationalizing their layoffs as culling out poor performers, when it is a systematic way to get rid of employees without having to give statutory notice. 

This system, developed by management consulting company McKinsey and Company, has proven to have had a "corrosive effect on productivity and employee morale." Interestingly enough, Amazon, a rat’s nest of workplace culture toxicity, also uses this model.

Mayer is a dismal failure who has proven she cannot be trusted, and will continue to ruin the lives of employees to prove to her investors that she is able to increase the enterprise value. At this point, the only way for the enterprise value to go up is for her to go down!

Photo Credit: Gregory Anderson by Laura McDermott for NYT