A Healthier Yardstick
James O’Toole, Warren Bennis | RTO Is A Form Of Worship, Not A Productivity Boost | Other Inputs
We need to stop evaluating corporate leaders simply on the basis of how much wealth they create for investors. A healthier yardstick would be this: the extent to which leaders create firms that are economically, ethically, and socially sustainable.
| James O’Toole, Warren Bennis, A Culture of Candor1 (2009) [emphasis theirs]
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O’Toole and Bennis mostly discuss organizational transparency — and its absence — in A Culture of Candor, but I am focused on their proposed yardstick for evaluating leaders more broadly. And, alas, there are so many examples of corporate leaders falling short of this yardstick, it’s honestly hard to find many that measure up.
A case in point: many of the corporate overlords provide a stream of psychobabble about their hardened post-pandemic Return To Office (RTO) strategies, and very few offer actual data or research to support that move, which few observers deem economically, ethically, and socially sustainable.
But as Adam Grant, Marissa Shandell, and Courtney Elliott spell out in the section below, those promoting RTO are liars. And maybe they can’t help it, because they are narcissists before anything else, and they see remote work as ‘a threat to their authority and admiration. They want to be worshiped at the office altar.’
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RTO Is A Form Of Worship, Not A Productivity Boost
The bottom line on RTO, from the authors:
When the pandemic came to an end, many people who had been working from home assumed they would be allowed to maintain that habit at least a few days a week. But today in the U.S., a third of companies have forced everyone back to the office full time and have banned remote and hybrid work.
Some leaders say they insist on full-time in-person work because it boosts productivity, despite clear evidence that it does not. Others claim it’s about collaboration, creativity or culture. Our new research reveals that the objection to any work from home is more likely to be driven by something else entirely: ego.
The authors undertook a major research study that shows a strong correlation between narcissism of leaders and enacting RTO policies:
Over the past six years, we’ve studied why some leaders continue to support remote work, while others resist it. We surveyed thousands of executives, middle managers and frontline supervisors on a host of personality traits. When we later asked them about their stances on hybrid and remote work, their answers didn’t correlate with how much they trusted their employees or how much they loved being around people. The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates.
They go on to detail the many defects in these policy decisions, and how they manifest:
‘Psychologists have long suggested that narcissism is like a drug — it leaves people craving a regular supply of attention and validation. Remote work deprives leaders of access to that supply.’
‘When people aren’t in the office, it’s harder to command and control.’
‘Self-centered leaders often respond to these threats by tightening their grip. They declare that people are shirking from home instead of working from home. They threaten to fire people who aren’t on site five days a week.’
‘Rigorous evidence shows that forcing people to come in every day backfires. Take it from studies of over 450 companies and over three million employees: Return-to-office mandates fail to increase financial returns. They succeed only in motivating star employees to quit, reducing the satisfaction of those who stay and discouraging new talent from joining. Experiments at tech companies and nonprofits show that letting people work from home part of the week boosts happiness and decreases turnover by a third — without any cost to performance. In many cases, those employees even get more done, because they don’t have to spend time commuting and don’t get distracted by office interruptions.’
Remember the O’Toole/Bennis yardstick? Do these sound like the results of economically, ethically, and socially sustainable policy decisions? Grant et al. don’t explicitly mention the financial benefits of not commuting or the ecological impacts, but they matter. And they should matter more than the sensitive egos of puffed corporate honchos.
There are some downsides to remote work, true, but these can be countered:
‘Research suggests that working from home for more than half the week can be isolating — it’s harder to build connections and cultures. It’s also more difficult to encourage creative collisions, informal learning and mentoring. But it doesn’t take five days a week to accomplish these goals. In fact, it turns out that people are most collaborative and creative when they work remotely part of the week.’
‘Coordination counts. Teams need anchor days when everyone shows up — especially to welcome newcomers and mentor junior people.’
‘Intensity beats frequency.’ Companies like Atlassian have shown that quarterly team gatherings can do more for team building and connection than daily commuting.’
Being flexible — based on circumstances, type of work, and individual lfe situation (like care-giving) — is better than a blanket remote work policy, especially for women.
The authors close with what is likely to be a call for reason that narcissistic leaders will be unable to hear:
The responsibility of leaders is not to mold the world to their needs. It’s to adapt themselves to the world’s needs, even if it means learning to live without the thrill of a live audience.
In my experience, people can’t change their personalities past adolescence, short of cataclysmic psychological events. So the authors’ words may really only influence those who aren’t narcissists to not adopt the draconian dictates of the C-suite egomaniacs running so many large and prominent corporations.
There are those who feel that O’Toole and Bennis’ yardstick should be adopted as a golden rule and take precedence over other considerations in policymaking. Those people are unlikely to be narcissists.
Other Inputs
Management doesn’t do science
In a stark expose of the anti-scientism in today’s management, Eryn Brown investigates the sad state of affairs in ‘evidence-based management’, where findings from scientific research could be applied to critical management initiatives and decisions, but generally are not.
| On Evidence-Based Management | Stowe Boyd (2018)
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Red-Collar Crime
A Shocking Number of Killers Murder Their Co-workers | James Graham (2018):
In a 2010 study, researchers administered a test frequently used to gauge psychopathy to 203 managers and executives at seven companies. On a 40-point scale, the average person scores 3 or below. Shockingly, eight subjects pulled a score of 30 or higher, which is serial-killer territory. “Their excellent communication and convincing lying skills, which together would have made them attractive hiring candidates in the first place, apparently continued to serve them well,” the researchers concluded.
How many office psychopaths turn violent is less clear: The FBI doesn’t track red-collar crime, nor does OSHA. Richard G. Brody, another CFE and an accounting professor at the University of New Mexico, sometimes trawls the web for murder trials involving white-collar defendants, and has become convinced that red-collar crime is more prevalent than most people suspect. Detectives don’t always spot such homicides, he told me, so crime scenes may be contaminated and murders may pass for suicide. “Whenever I read about high-profile executives who are found dead, I immediately think red-collar crime,” he said. “Lots of people are getting away with murder.”
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Your boss may actually be a psychopath.
Yes, Your Boss Is A Psychopath | Stowe Boyd:
If you find yourself working for a manipulative, cold, irresponsible boss, you are not alone. But you might not think he’s a realio-trulio psychopath. But he truly could be. (And it’s almost always ‘he’, not ‘she’.)
And when you ask yourself how could this psychopath been promoted into a role theoretically based on sound judgment and acting responsibly, you have to realize that senior executives in the company may have quite different perceptions of your manager than you and your co-workers do. In particular, the traits your boss is demonstrating to his superiors may be considered the hallmarks of management potential, because a surprisingly high number of managers — especially senior executives — are looking for people with psychopathic traits to promote.
Clive Boddy, in A Climate Of Fear: Stone Cold Psychopaths At Work, summarized research on the numbers:
Estimations are that while about 1% of junior employees are corporate psychopaths (assuming an even distribution of psychopaths across society) they exist at a higher incidence of about 4% at senior organizational levels. Notably, these percentages may be even higher in certain types of organizations, as corporate psychopaths are thought to gravitate towards organizations where they can acquire money, power and control, as well as honours and prestige, rather than to the less rewarded and less well-remunerated caring professions. Caring for other people is simply not on their agenda.
Estimates for the proportion of senior executives go even higher.
