As we continue to understand the idea of “I and ME” vs “Us and We” it is important to identify why this happens to so many people we call “leader.”
As leaders grow, they increasingly become more insulated. It is their responsibility to stay connected to their people and teams in the most appropriate way possible. There is no formal training in corporate that is pressed on people to help them figure out how to do this.
Great leaders turn inward, do the hard work it takes to self discover and find the time to invest in learning and growing. The result is more compassion, empathy and understanding. They lean in toward the idea of US and WE. The challenge with this for them is the psychopath mentality that allows others to achieve great heights.
Some research indicates that senior leaders either show more traits and tendencies toward psychopathy or they are in fact psychopaths. On average, the general population is 1% psychopath while corporate and organizational leaders show 3-4% in their relative population.
WTF over?
- Lack of Empathy: Difficulty in understanding or sharing the feelings of others.
- Superficial Charm: Ability to attract and manipulate others through charisma.
- Manipulativeness: Using deceit to achieve personal goals.
- Impulsivity: Acting on whims without considering consequences.
As they get higher in the org chart, they become less connected and more demanding. A lack of empathy and compassion in general for people they may have direct contact with is one thing, caring about anyone at all in any capacity below even the folks they know is another.
This type of person gives zero f’s about you or anyone else. The only reason they wouldn’t destroy the people directly around them is because they have utility. The people they don’t know about or understand have little to no value.
Have you seen or worked with anyone like this?
It is likely that you have.
Here is the question: “How do I deal with a psychopath boss?”
You bust your ass everyday, showing up, putting in the time and effort to be treated like shit or not heard. The best leaders are sensitive and empathetic, they assess themselves and they work hard to listen. Sure, there are plenty of times they have information that others don’t but when they are trusted, people lean in to do what they are asked to do in those specific cases.
Most of the time, if leaders provide the vision to the team, provide the time, the goal, the trust, people will not only do magic, they will produce outcomes that the person with the initial vision could not have foreseen.
Even the best leaders will make mistakes, but these are often easily forgiven when we the people know their intentions and they have been consistent.
So, here is the scenario, one of many but this one will do. You start with a company, you are an expert in your field, the people hiring you really have no idea who you are and what you are capable of but the kind of work you do is corporate work meaning, you aren’t turning a screw, welding or pipefitting where they can see your talent with immediacy.
You do all the things that you know how to do. Get to know people, go to meetings, show up and learn. A few weeks in, it is your time to say something and the moment you do, your leadership team SHUTS YOU DOWN.
What do you do?
Well team, I am here to give it to you straight. If you’ve been with the company for 21 minutes, hours, days or years, it doesn’t matter. The company will always have inhuman resources protect the monsters.
There are only a few conditions that companies will protect you. If there is a legal risk to them due to a law that is clear. For example, if someone was walking down the hallway and they were touched inappropriately and this was seen by more than one person.
If there are issues that are visible due to a protected status, disabled veteran, persons background, gender, etc. There is nothing to protect you from a corporate bully and nothing to protect you from a person or people being assholes.
In fact, it is more likely that your more senior C-level will be an asshole. This doesn’t mean there aren’t exceptions, it just means that they FOUGHT to get where they are. They did the political hooka booka. They did I and ME ME ME ME ME.
Again, there are great leaders in many places. There are great leaders in corporate. I know I have worked with some. The fact is, you are less likely to be dealing with a great one and more likely to be dealing with a douche canoe.
Here are SOME not all of your options:
- Stay and suffer and submit — Wait it out, take your check, do your daily, find passion and purpose in other places in your life. Do your best to do what they want you to do and accept your situation.
- Document and complain — Start a campaign of documenting your pain and the pain around you. Write it all down and have your case for the grand jury ready to go. Bust your ass, get all the people around you to see what you are saying. You will be motivated by the people around you and your circles. The assholes will still be assholes but you’ll get them someday. Maybe they will get tired of being assholes and leave? Maybe the company will realize they are assholes and they are making poor business and leadership decisions? Maybe? You just grind it out every day though and give your life energy because without this, you might not see your own value. Right?
- Figure your shit out and leave — Now.. it isn’t easy to do this and for some people feeling stuck or hearing about the nightmare market, they don’t want to do this. Understood but is the devil you know better?
You can “right fight” and you can “fight for what is right” but at the end of the day, the corporate and organizational machine won’t care or miss you either way.
The truth and reality of these types of situations seem complicated, but most places are the same. Someone told me once, it is called a “rat race” for a reason. The movie “Office Space” holds up even to this day. Everyone has known a boss like Bill Lumbergh. If you haven’t seen him directly, you’ve seen him somewhere along the way.
I’ve seen people move around teams inside companies and do well. It takes time, you can do it and it may be better. It also may be hard if your immediate boss thinks you suck. They may in fact think you suck because if they thought you didn’t suck, they’d like you to do what they need which they may not think you do now, this in part is why you are getting JAMMED UP.
You also may be dealing with an immediate boss or lead who is awesome, but their boss is an asshole, and shit does roll downhill as they say.
Here’s the part nobody puts on the org chart: the company doesn’t run on Us and We. It runs on whoever fought hardest to get to I and Me. Your job was never to fix that. It’s to make sure that, whichever of the three options you pick, you don’t turn into the thing you’re trying to survive.
If you are looking to fact check the numbers, look for the book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work by Robert D. Hare and Paul Babiak (ISBN: 0060837721). It was written twenty years ago, and honestly, it could have been written by Machiavelli himself.
For now, if you are jammed up by asshole douche canoe leaders, please find time for yourself and get some peace. They will kill you and they won’t know or give a shit. In the long run, it may be worth it to really look at yourself in the mirror, decide and act on what is healthy for you. No one under any circumstance has the inherent right to treat you poorly simply because you entered into a business contract with them. Never let them harm you!
For most of the last century a company was understood to answer to several groups at once. Its workers, its customers, the town it sat in, and its owners. Around 1980 that ended. The new rule, taught in business schools and rewarded on Wall Street, was a company exists to push the stock price up, and nothing else is really its job. Once that becomes the whole point, people are no longer what the company is for. They are a cost it wants to trim. Pay the boss in stock and you have told them, in the only language they are measured by, that your wellbeing is beside the point.
In the middle of the last century about a third of workers at private companies had a union standing behind them. Now it is close to one in sixteen. Firing people got easier & cheaper.