You don't want to drink that

Photo by Leonardo Rossatti.

Our family had breakfast together this morning. For the first time in about two weeks. No one was in the basement. No one was sitting on the other side of the screen door, balancing a plate on their lap. All together. All inside. All at the kitchen table.

We had pink donuts with sprinkles. A COVID-free house is a thing to celebrate.

Somewhere in the blur from last week to this one, a neighbour asked, "Do you feel superhuman? Like you can do anything?"

At the time, between fatigue and loss of taste, the answer was a resounding, "Um, no, but if that's coming, it sounds great. Will definitely be on the lookout."

Superhuman isn't quite right. But the return to semi-normalcy at home has us in a more optimistic headspace. Which makes it ultra-weird to catch up on the news. Faced with rising interest rates and looming layoffs, the North American business press has gone full Chicken Little. And faced with a media diet of anxiety and doom, the North American CEOs have gone full jerk-face.

If you need a quick test to know if your company is in the jerk-face bucket or not, here's a thing you can try. Just say the policy or management approach out loud and put a little check mark in the jerk-face box when it applies.

American Airlines (maybe the worst of all the airlines) shipped a corporate policy that meant disciplinary action if staff took COVID leave. They forced people with COVID onto planes. Causing more staff to get sick. Causing even more flight delays. That's a check mark. ✅

And speaking of unsympathetic jerk-faces, it's not going well over at Meta. In an all hands meeting, Zuck laid out the basic talking points. Uncertain economy. Time for tightening belts. And the very first question when they opened it up for Q&A was whether flex-Fridays would continue. Some of us have worked in comms and don't believe that was an accident. Mark used it as a way to let people know that he was annoyed, and also that flex days would be cancelled. Later, he elaborated, “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.” ✅

Mark's not alone in rolling back perks from the past year. Many leaders are using this moment to reassert their power. Over where you work. How many days per week. How many hours. What you get paid. Places where several months ago, they were falling over themselves to shower staff with love. Not so much right now.

We're not naive. We went into the basement as small business founders and we came out that way, too. We are but a tiny tiny vessel in a vast economic sea. We're subject to the same scary realities facing the big orgs. But from out here on rough water, we're seeing captains start to turn on their crew.

Sympathy for the jerk-face

The pattern underlying this change of heart is a very human one, and unfortunately we're going to see more of it.

It starts when an executive sees the writing on the wall. Things are headed to a crappy place for their organization. Money will be tight, resources will be scarce. And, while they might try to hide from it or push it off for as long as possible, that's eventually going to mean some hardship for their people. Heavier workloads. Less room to maneuver. Layoffs. Which will make the workload heavier, still.

They can see these decisions coming and also that they will cause hurt. That knowledge is very uncomfortable. It's hard to think of yourself as a good person if you knowingly hurt people. And every PSY100 student knows what happens next.

Cognitive dissonance is the name for that feeling. That feeling of being out of integrity with how you want to see yourself. Struggling to reconcile your actions with your values. And often, when people are sitting with that discomfort and looking for a way to reduce it, anger is the emotion that bubbles up.

Good people don't hurt people, and I think I'm a good person, but I hurt people. That's a place of discomfort.

Actually... these are bad people. They are lazy/dishonest/taking advantage of me. And it's not bad to hurt bad people. That's how it gets reduced.

Imagine how a leader would act if they felt like their team members were bad people. Threats. Dismissiveness. Burnout. Micromanagement. Yelling. Every bad boss behaviour is going to come out of the woodwork in the next few months. They might not self-identify as jerk-faces, but they'll definitely call themselves "war-time CEOs," and talk about their "ruthless focus on results."

If only they actually tracked those results.

The saltwater isn't helping

Saltwater can't rehydrate you. It doesn't matter how desperate you are. You can say that you're the thirstiest you've ever been, saltwater won't help. You can say that the macroeconomic climate has changed drastically, saltwater still won't help. You can say that you're existentially thirsty, that you're war-time thirsty. It doesn't matter. The problem is not your thirst, the problem is that drinking saltwater is a bad solution.

Likewise, what we know about high-performing teams is that none of this management-by-abuse shit actually works. We can have empathy for the bosses who are sitting in the discomfort, reaching for anything to make themselves feel better. We can understand that impulse. We have felt that impulse. But the reality is that, when you act on it, you take an already-stressed operating environment and add fear, politics, and churn. Like gulping down seawater, that totally understandable impulse will make things much worse.

What does work? What would an actual ruthless focus on results look like? Psychologically safe teams outperform. Even in a down economy. Treating your people with decency, clarity, and dignity is not just for the good times. In fact, the harder things get, the more you're gonna to want an engaged, high-trust team to count on.

The harder things get

We're not saying that your organization won't have to make some hard calls in the next bit. You might have to shelve or kill promising projects. You might have to disappoint teams, or customers, or investors. You might have to lay people off. We're saying that, in all of it, you have choices about how you relate to the human beings around you.

Cognitive dissonance is a name for an observed pattern, not a law of the universe. And knowing how to spot it lets you interrupt that pattern. You can develop an ear for it. You can learn to hear it when leaders talk about their employees as bloat, as freeloaders, as children. You'll find it easiest to spot when it comes from some far-away leader. But if you listen, you might hear it coming from inside the house, too.

And when you do, our ask is that you remember. You hired these people. You work with these people. You have 1:1s and career conversations and talk about vacations and dogs and Love Island with these people. They helped build this amazing thing that you're all now trying to preserve and protect as the walls close in a bit. The duty you have, in any kind of management role, is to remember the humanity of those people. And to remind others if they forget.

If you need to change priorities or kill projects, you can do that with honesty and empathy. If you need to lay people off, you can put in the effort up front to make sure every person receives that news with sensitivity, in a way that leaves them intact. Instead of staring at a deactivated slack account. That's a choice you can make, and push others to make.

And please do not let the other bosses push you off it. The bosses who yell, who belittle, who are callous with the lives of their colleagues — they aren't stronger than you. They aren't showing grit. They are incompetent. They might be great at other things but what they're doing is not what competent management looks like. Don't let their impulsiveness or their impatience intimidate you. And definitely, definitely, don't take their word for it when they say the saltwater is helping.

- Melissa and Johnathan