Iron Throne
“Inside Uber’s Aggressive, Unrestrained Workplace Culture” was the title of a recent New York Times article (by Mike Isaac, February 22, 2017). It reports on a set of over 30 interviews with current and former Uber employees regarding “an often unrestrained workplace culture.” Some of the most egregious incidents that were reported included:
- a manager groping a female employee’s breasts
- a director shouting a homophobic slur at a subordinate
- a manager threatening to beat an underperforming employee with a baseball bat
An earlier blog post — by Susan Fowler, a female engineer who had left Uber in December — outlined how upper management had responded when she reported an incident of sexual harassment from her new manager (on her first day on his team). She said that they had told her “that he "was a high performer" (i.e., had stellar performance reviews from his superiors) and they wouldn't feel comfortable punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake on his part.“ In her post, she goes on to say that “In the background, there was a Game-of-Thrones political war raging within the ranks of upper management in the infrastructure engineering organization.”
“In the background, there was a game-of-thrones political war raging within the ranks of [Uber] upper management in the infrastructure engineering organization.”
Uber’s co-founder and CEO, Travis Kalanick, has opened an internal investigation conducted by Board of Directors member Arianna Huffington along with a former U.S. attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., to investigate. As reported in the NYT, at an all-hands meeting this past Tuesday, Ms. Huffington said that Uber would no longer be hiring “brilliant jerks.”
While the information about Uber (as reported in the NYT and from Ms. Fowler’s blog) is extraordinary, it is unfortunately largely consistent with the prevailing corporate culture in many of our organizations. The NYT’s headline gives that away - the goings-on at Uber are an example of an “unrestrained workplace culture.” So, not that the culture itself was rotten, but simply that it was over-expressed.
I would suggest that most of our companies are willing to hire and promote “jerks” of every kind (but particularly misogynistic ones) as long as they can drive immediate business results. For example, a recent study has found that the number of senior corporate executives in the U.S. that had clinically-significant levels of psychopathic traits is twenty times that which you would seen in the general population (21% versus the expected 1%). Part of the reason for this is that, in most of our organizations, the constant jockeying for power between the different silos, leaders and teams is standard behavior - an environment in which psychopaths would naturally do well.
The prevalence of jerks in positions of power within our organizations should be a surprise to anyone. It certainly won’t be to women, visible minorities, persons with disabilities, or anyone else who is not a white, able-bodied male. So how is it that we tolerate these people and their zero-sum-game internal politics? The reason is that the combination of three things:
- Our patriarchal society
- Organizations modeled as “monocratic bureaucracies” (to use Max Weber’s term)
- Focus on short-term results (more! less! this week, this month, this quarter).
A workplace culture that encourages competition rather than competition, one that permits the denigration of groups of people, and one that focuses on short-term goals, does not make for an organization that can be sustained over the long term. To be successful over many years an organization needs to be “smart”: to have an open sharing of ideas and information, (shame researcher Brené Brown says “vulnerability of the birthplace of innovation”), where diverse set of perspectives can be brought to bear on the organization’s challenges; and where employee engagement is high (and, with it, higher productivity and improved business outcomes).
So you can have brilliant jerks who are occupying (or fighting over) their Iron Thrones - but they are ultimately leading zombie organizations, not smart ones.