Undoing toxic work culture

I’ve written previously about work culture, and boy can it be rough. I’ve put in some thought as to how to roll it back, and there are no easy or obvious solutions.

Ultimately, it can start with us. We control the stress we feel and how we deal with it. So that’s a choice worth starting with.

But then we have a second choice, do we let our stress roll down hill to the people that work for us? Because nearly every company on earth is some version of a hierarchical bureaucracy. And in bureaucracies, rolling work down is what’s supposed to happen. 

Do I let myself be stressed by others’ demands, and how do I filter the stress of those demands to the people who work for me? Those are the choices we all face. And those are the same choices our boss has, and their boss has, and their boss has, all the way up to the CEO of the company. And then the CEO (together with the company's board) face those demands from investors and customers.

Everyone in that cycle has a choice on what rolls down hill and what doesn’t. Everyone in that cycle has a choice on whether they’ll let the culture become less toxic or more toxic.

I am a manager, employee, customer, and investor. If you’re reading this, you probably are too. Which means we both have some ability to influence our respective cycles.  

It’s obvious that as a manager I can treat my team with respect and work hard to be a better, more moral manager so that I roll less toxicity down hill. It’s obvious to me that if I try hard, I also have some influence over my own thoughts and how I react to what falls in my lap from people higher in the hierarchy than me.

What was an epiphany for me is that I also have the ability to decide how I act as a customer and investor. As a customer and investor, I can make the cycle a little less toxic. But that requires a sacrifice from me - I have to let some things slide.  

When my flight is late, I need to not bash the airline on twitter or be rude to the gate agent. When my salad has onions and I asked for none, maybe I ask politely and patiently for it to be fixed or let it go, rather than hassle the restaurant manager and make them come down hard on the wait staff. Maybe as an investor I don’t demand results overnight so long term planning is just a smidge more likely to happen.

I complain a lot, publicly and privately, about American work culture, and to be sure, there’s a lot of big stuff that should absolutely change. And that big stuff requires way more power than I have. The buck does stop with the CEO and in some cases the government.

But at the same time - and I’ve come back to this idea a lot in recent years - maybe, just maybe, I can change the way I operate as an employee, manager, customer, and investor first. 

Indicators of a good man

For over two years now, I’ve been trying to explore what it means to be a good man. My supreme goal as a father is to help our kids become good people and the best way I know to do that is become a good person myself and be present in their lives. 

There are a lot of little rules of what a good person does - like saying please and thank you, sharing, and keeping promises - but those rules of thumb leave me unsatisfied. There are way too many rules to follow  

So I’ve been trying to reflect on a set of capabilities, rather than “skills”, that really identify whether or not I am a good man.  

The best I’ve come up with so far are truth, sacrifice, and unconditional love.

I figure if I am capable of being truthful to myself and others, able to put the needs of others on par with or above my own, and consistently love others without conditions, that’s a pretty good indicator that I’m living out my desire to be a good man. 

And imagine a world where we all were even a little more truthful, willing to sacrifice, and unconditionally loving. So many of the problems we try to remediate with government and institutions would cease to exist. 

The older I get, the more I believe that the route for true social impact is not through what I choose to do for a job, but through how I improve my own character and help others do the same.  

Running the bases: A framework for strategy development

I had a fun work meeting yesterday where we were outlining a strategy for a new initiative. Being the management nerd that I am, wanted to use a framework to help guide our discussion.  

I took the competing values framework (which was developed at Ross, go Blue), specifically Bob Quinn’s four questions from his book Lift, and put it into a baseball metaphor. The idea is to think through the problem you are solving by “running the bases” - starting from home plate - before jumping to a solution and writing a “pitch”.

Sharing it here for three reasons: 

• It was fun, and I wanted to share in case it’s helpful.
• If you have feedback, I’d love to improve it.
• if you’re willing to share, what exercises do you use to develop a strategy with a team? 

Link to a PDF

Treasured Moments

Robyn and I did our monthly date night box yesterday, and one of the activities was taking turns asking each other questions that helped us really share something of our hearts. It was great. One question, my favorite from last night, was, “what’s a moment you treasure?”

I treasure story time. Every night, when we’re all together as a family in our son’s room. Robyn in the rocking chair, Riley by her side, Bo in my lap on the floor. We hold the book together, Bo flips the pages and I read. He’s just tall enough for me to rest my chin, softly, on the top of his head. Sometimes, if we’re seated just right, Robyn and I get to hold hands. It is calm and quiet, a moment of pure love and peace. I treasure it.

There are so many other treasured moments, once I started thinking about it. Seeing Robyn come down the aisle, which actually gave me a physical feeling of lightness. Times where I’ve written something and it feels like not me writing, but some gracious being that has taken over my faculties. The dinner my pops and I had over the Thanksgiving before he died. Just he and I and we spoke for the first time, truly as friends, as well as a father and son. Or seeing my grandmother experience Disney or taking my mom to Buckingham Palace. Treasured moments.

Or even the last moment I had with my father alone, after he had died. In the hospital, I had time for a few last words and one last blessing with the touching of his feet. Some treasured moments are painful, too.

I’m not writing these for any particular reason. Just because it was a good question. And that maybe I’ll remember these moments better if I write them down.

As I reflect on it, treasured moments are not so rare, perhaps. The challenge for me, as for all yogis and peace seekers, is to look for and  find that treasure in the moment we are in now.

If life were meaningless

If life was actually designed to be meaningless there would be no need for meaning to be made. At work, with family, or at play. There would be no “search” or pressure to make something special of this existence.

And maybe that’s freeing. 

If life were meaningless we’d be able to accept it as a gift, that’s what I would try at least. And instead of working our whole lives to show God we’ve earned it maybe we could say thank you, from the deepest parts of our hearts, and continue on.

Instead of feeling guilty about the gift, maybe we could just honor it then. Honor it by savoring it. Loving it and clutching it until it’s soft and broken in. Sharing it and cherishing it. Honoring it with graciousness and generosity.

If life were meaningless, our only obligation would be to pass ahead someday. Return to the dust and father we came from. We paid no ticket, no entry fee to get into this world. We signed no contract. By virtue of being here, we are free to roam until it’s time to go home.

If life is meaningless we haven’t failed if we don’t make it more meaningful or less meaningful than someone else’s. There would be no competition for meaning or need to be more special than the rest. I don’t think anyone, God or otherwise, asks us to demonstrate we’ve deserved this life. If we weren’t worthy of the opportunity, we simply wouldn’t be here.

I’m a theist, a believer in God, but please indulge me as I wax on this if you’re not. I think the point can be more broadly made.

What if we acted as if life were meaningless, or perhaps more specifically that there was no meaning to seek. We would not have to selfishly toil and klobber our way into finding meaning or torturing ourselves if we fell short.

If there were no meaning to seek, maybe that would liberate us from the suffering of its search. And maybe then, it would free our hearts to honor, cherish, and share life as the gift that it is.

Paradoxically, if we believed life were meaningless, maybe that opens a door for a purer, nobler, more virtuous way to live.

Unconditional Love

“Unconditional” is a common adjective used to describe love. Is love really love unless it’s unconditional? 

Conditional love is not something I’d wish on anyone.  

Leadership is ultimately toxic and unsustainable

Most problems worth solving can’t be solved by one person, only by teams and organizations (teams of teams).

But organizations, especially as they get larger than six or seven people, have a problem. The goals of individuals on the team aren’t often the same as the goals of the organization (or other individuals). This misalignment of goals causes conflict between people and wasted resources (time, materials, opportunity) for the organization.   

The solution we have now for the misalignment problem is leadership. The organization designates a person who is charged with leading and managing the organization. They set the goals for the organization and are given the power to give orders and fire people who don’t measure up.

By creating leaders and developing leadership, the problem of alignment between and individual and organizational goals is solved.

Unfortunately, leaders and the concept of leadership make corruption, a different and perhaps more pervasive organizational problem, worse. 

Because we choose to live in human societies instead of the state of nature, corruption is inevitable.  Human societies have randomized and unevenly balanced resource endowments, which make imbalances of power, and therefore conflict, inevitable. We create rules to help mediate conflict, but rules require an enforcer of the rules that are established. 

When we designate people to enforce rules, it requires us to concentrate power. And because we are mere mortals, with great power comes great temptation to act corruptly.  

By creating leaders in any organization, we further concentrate power. Therefore, the more we create leaders and elevate the concept of leadership, the more we enable corruption to occur.

If leadership is our solution to the problem of organizational alignment, we should expect to exacerbate the problem of corruption.

Leadership is akin to chemotherapy to me. It attacks the cancer of organizational alignment, but is toxic because it breeds the conditions for corruption to occur.

We have to do better at improving leadership, just as we need to improve chemotherapy. I don’t disagree with that.

But at the end of the day, leadership is not a sustainable solution to organizational misalignment. Ultimately, leadership is toxic. We can do better.

In the coming months, I will share alternatives to leadership that I have been thinking about. 

Defying (organizational) gravity

Generally speaking, the more people that get added to a company, the harder it is to increase productivity. Put another way, as you add people there are diminishing returns to productivity. This feels like a law of physics, like it was gravity or something.

One of my favorite recent thought experiments is imagining what an organization would have to do to get increasing returns to productivity as company size increases instead.

How insanely different would that be? People would have to spend so much more of their energy improving and helping each other. And, there would have to be so much emphasis on customers and what they find valuable.

The biggest difference would have to be management. Individuals would have to have tremendously more autonomy to make decisions faster, which would probably require much up-front work to vividly articulate a vision that everyone understood well enough to be an agent of.

It would take recruitment that asks not what person fills the spec needed for a job, but rather what person does a job in a way that makes everybody better.

Literally everything would have to be different.  

To be clear, this is all within the realm of possibility, to at least try. But it requires not running companies the way we’ve always ran them, because we’ve always run them that way. It requires thinking of companies differently than org charts and hierarchies.

The traditional way of thinking about companies and management is so ingrained it seems impossible to do have anything different.

Defying gravity seems impossible until you do it. 

We are capable people

My father, who would’ve celebrated his 68th birthday if he were alive today, would always tell me that I was a very capable person. It left an impact on me; I can still hear his voice saying it. It’s refuge I retreat to when I feel capable of nothing. 

Nobody ever comments about what our generation, millennials, are capable of. And I don’t think we were destined to save the world, but I think we are capable of something equally important.  

What I think is interesting about how we grew up is that we saw the before and after of a lot of changes, right as we came of age.

We saw both sides of 9/11. We saw both sides of the internet and social media. We saw both sides of the Great Recession. We saw both sides of online dating. We saw both sides of globalization. We saw both sides of climate change. And on and on.

And because of that we understand keenly what can be and what should be. We’ve lived it. 

Before a change in culture, someone has to take a stand and say, it doesn’t have to be this way, it can be different. And taking that stand is really hard, and takes tremendous courage. Because to change a culture requires going up against years, maybe decades of momentum the other way. 

I think we are capable of taking that stand, sharing our vision of what the culture could be, and clearing a path for the change to happen.  That seems trivial, but it’s really quite significant.  We are capable people. 

Moving on from work-related resentment

I’ve already spent too much of my life angry, anxious, or ashamed about work. It’s time to move on. The best way I know to move on is to forgive.

I don’t know who “you” are in all instances, but I forgive you. I forgive you for the late nights away from home. I forgive you for the bogus deadlines and useless meetings. I forgive you for treating me with less respect because of my age, role, or race. I forgive you for the implicit threats of public shaming and demerits. 

I forgive you for making me believe career was an idol to be worshipped. I forgive you for pushing me past my breaking point. I forgive you for giving me work that didn’t have any real value. I forgive you for constantly changing the plan. I forgive you for making me feel foolish, small, and sometimes without worth.

I forgive you for misleading the client. I forgive you for holding the team to unreasonable expectations. I forgive you for pandering to the boss at the cost of our weekends. I forgive you for the flight delays. 

I forgive you for lying through your teeth at recruitment events. I forgive you for thinking I was soft. I forgive you for pressuring me to be someone I’m not. I forgive you for laying off my Pops, who was an honest man, a hard worker, and a damn good engineer.  

I forgive you for making me lust after a bigger paycheck. I forgive you for inflating my ego. I forgive you for implying that I was fooling myself about the data. I forgive you for making me miss bedtime, so many times.  

I forgive you for taking credit for someone else’s work. I forgive you for throwing me under the bus, even though I never did you wrong. I forgive you for messing up my check. I forgive you for my MBA debt. 

Most of all, I forgive you for taking my joy from me, over and over again. I’m grateful that you let me have it back, eventually.

I’ve been in the workforce for 10 years, and I’ve had a difficult relationship with American work culture the whole way. I’m tired of fighting you and being angry. This is the best way I could think of to start moving on. 

Whoever you are, wherever you are, I forgive you.  

I’ve gotta be in my brother’s business

I’m pretty skeptical of the idea that “it’s none of my business.”  It’s a cop out. 

On the one hand, it is admirable that the phrase conveys a sentiment of not judging. If it’s none of my business, I’m forgoing my ability to judge you for how you've handled your business. 

On the other hand, I’m also letting myself off the hook. If I care about you, when you are struggling or behaving in a way that doesn’t reflect your values, it ought to be my business to help you get back to being your best self. If I’m not in my brother’s business, I’ve got a loophole out of being my brother’s keeper.

So we have a choice. If I say “it’s none of my business”, I’m telling you that I'm not going to judge you. But if I say “it’s none of my business” I’m also saying that I’m not your brother nor your keeper. 

The family I would’ve wanted to be born into

We don’t choose our parents. Obviously. The family we’re born into is something we have no choice about.  

But what if we did have a choice? What would a family you opted into be like?  Here’s what it’d be for me. 

They’d get along and love each other. They’d be honest. They’d get along with their neighbors and extended family. They’d be wealthy enough to not have to worry about money, or have to be apart to make ends meet like my parents had to. They wouldn’t be super wealthy though, because that would probably mean that one parent spent a lot of time working.

They’d do fun stuff together. They’d eat healthy and exercise. They’d let me be myself. They’d have a few siblings and a dog. They’d love me unconditionally. They’d put family first. They’d treat other people with respect and kindness.

I suppose it wouldn’t be that different than the family I was born into. 

I don’t understand why anyone would want to have a family that kept up with the Jones’s or was really career focused. It could be just me, but that’s precisely not the type of family I’d want to be born into.

I also don’t understand when “people” talk about equality and equity they imply an equality in folks’ ability to be economically rich. Why is that the type of equality we’d want to solve for? 

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe my conception of the family I’d want to be born into, and in turn create with Robyn, is an uncommon viewpoint.  

I spend a lot of time thinking about death and the sort of life I want to live. Losing a parent early and suddenly has made me think like an old man gripping onto life preciously, much earlier than I would have. And stopping murders and shootings puts death on my mind literally every day. It changes a man’s heart.

If my conception of family is not unique, however, living a life focused on money and power must be easier somehow, otherwise nobody would do it.  I seriously don’t get it.

“Kids have the courage to do hard things when they’re little, how do we shake it out of them?”​

“Kids have the courage to do hard things when they’re little, how do we shake it out of them?” 

Mark, a good friend from Ross, and I discussed this question for minute over dinner with his business partner. 

His colleague thought competition may have a negative effect because it often breeds fear. Robyn pointed out to me this morning that the way we approach schooling is to achieve obedience instead of exploration.

It occurred to me just now that a parent can have a mindset of “what do I want my kid to be able to do” vs “in what ways do I want my kid to grow”.

My guess is that if a parent has the former mindset, it probably makes it harder to grow courage. The latter is probably a mindset that encourages courage.  

On the question of why some kids lose courage as they age, what do you think?

How’d you do it?

Papa, 

That’s what our boy calls me now. I hadn’t said it out loud since you went ahead. It feels natural, like I was born for it. It has a nice ring to it, too.

I’m thinking of you today. I’m stuck in an airport and I’m going to miss story time. I’m having a hard time keeping it together. I think the bartender noticed, and luckily he’s very kind. 

Pudi’s getting married in a month. That’s why I was away - in Montreal. It was his bachelor party (don’t worry, I behaved. I always do, especially now). I think you would like that place, because it is quiet, people are friendly, and there is water. I can’t remember if you’ve been there.  Maybe Ma will know. I guess it doesn’t really matter now.

I have been wanting to ask you a question. As I sit here, I’m a wreck and only because I’m going to miss story time. That’s a good reason, I guess. But still, it’s a small moment in life. 

How’d you do it?  

You overcame so much in your life. You persisted through some of the hardest challenges I’ve ever heard of. You were a good man, an honest man, the whole way. Your capacity to sacrifice - what I’m starting to see as the noblest of all virtues - was seemingly limitless.

How’d you do it? 

You were so devoted, until the very last day of your life. You hardly ever let me down, especially on things that really mattered. And you never let me off the hook either. Even still, I feel like I’m learning lessons from you.

How’d you do it? 

And on top of all this, I didn’t even know you were molding me, shaping me. You made me think I did it myself. You never took a curtain call, never allowed anyone to give you credit. 

I feel like an imposter sometimes, like I missed getting that gene. Especially on days like today, where I feel like something so small is making me crumble.

But you just did it Pops. How? 

Wish you were here, 

Neil

Letting love in

I’ve been away from home (Robyn, Bo, Riley) more than I ever have over the past two weeks. It has been difficult, and at times excruciating. I miss them terribly. I think that’s a common feeling for many of us who are partners, husbands, and fathers.

Fortunately, the solitude has helped me learn a lesson about matters of the heart.  

I used to think it was dangerous to feel this way - to allow my own peace to be tied to someone else’s ability to fill up my heart and soul.

But I think maybe that’s the wrong way to ponder the question.  

Maybe what’s dangerous is not dependence on who fills our heart, but who opens it. If we are able to open our heart ourselves, why not let it be filled with love and peace from wherever it comes? 

This idea, of course, is predicated on the assumption that our hearts will be filled if we open them up. I’ve found that to be true, even from unexpected places or from unlikely or unknown people. Even when I’m far away from home - the universe has a way of filling our hearts if only we let it.

How we learn to open our hearts, especially when we are away from those we have the greatest intimacy with is hard.

I don’t have a great answer on how to do this. The best I can think of is to share what is in our heart.

If we share our heart - say in prayer, contemplation, self-expression, or intimate conversation - our heart is forced to open let those thoughts and feelings out. Once that happens, all we must do is keep our heart open long enough to let love in.

That moment between when my heart is opened and when it is filled is scary. It takes trust and is risky. But the alternative is keeping our heart closed. The risk is worth it. 

Mirrors and friends

“Eternity” (2014) by Montreal-based artist Nicolas Baier @ Aresenal Contemporary gallery in Montreal.  

To see ourselves clearly and fully, we need mirrors or the help of others.  

If we use a mirror, it mustn’t be warped. If we seek the help of others they mustn’t lie to us. 

That means, then, to see ourselves clearly and fully we must be committed to the craft of reflection and the craft of building trusting, intimate relationships.

Which implies that it is also an important craft to help others with the previous two. 

Character Muscles

I have come to think of character as a muscle that has to be built with exercises and training rather than a a deeply embedded trait that we have or we don’t.

If we build those character muscles up, we’ll have the strength of character, so to speak, to make the “heavy lift” when right thoughts and actions are hard to do.  

But just like when lifting something heavy, character doesn’t involve a single muscle. Rather I see character as having a few “major muscle” groups that need to be developed to be able to make the heavy lift of right thought and action. 

Those muscle groups are curiosity, courage, and persistence. As I see them at least.

Curiosity gets us to learn about character and whether we have it - a quest with little extrinsic motivators. Courage gets us to do the hard work of transforming ourselves - because we will inevitably find that we are not perfectly good if we are curious. Persistence gives us the endurance to stick with the hard work of transforming ourselves - which never happens overnight.

The way I figure it, if we can intentionally develop these three muscle groups - curiosity, courage, and discipline - we will have the strength of character needed to do the right thing, even when it is heavy. 

The key question is how.  

I hope they’re wrong

I am on a business trip right now, and I miss my wife. And my son, and my pup too.

When the conversation comes up, I say to my colleagues, “It’s really hard to be away from my family for so long.”

And folks will kindly suggest that I’m a newlywed and a new father. That the feeling of longing will wear off, and that I’m still influenced by the newness of these relationships. And that in a few years, I’ll look forward to business trips or nights off or some other kind of time away from them.

And they may be right, but I hope they’re wrong. Right now, being away for even one day is too long, and I hope it stays that way.  

It’s hard to be the yogurt

Being Indian, I have seen how yogurt is made, up close. My parents would make it at home. Here’s how it works.  

First you put milk in a vessel. Then, you take a spoon of yogurt (you need the live culture to start the reaction) and put it in the vessel. Then you add gentle heat to the vessel; my parents always used a yogurt maker.

Then you give it time. The heat helps the culture from the spoonful of yogurt react with the milk. Eventually the milk becomes yogurt. 

This is how culture change really works. A new active idea enters a stable environment, and slowly changes it over time. This is harder than it sounds.

Culture change requires steady heat. In organizations, this equates to a leadership team that allows change to happen and provides the time and money to support it.  

You also need the spoonful of yogurt with its strand of active culture. In organizations, this is the change agent that’s willing to be different for a long time, slowing changing the environment to something new, one interaction at a time.

It’s hard to be the yogurt. But for the culture to change, someone has to be.  

Becoming good / Leg day

Philosophy isn’t enough. Arguments about hypothetical moral dilemmas aren’t enough. Biographies of people living exemplary, moral lives aren’t enough either.  

I need, and I think we all need specifics. Like athletes, I think we need training regimens as if our character were made up of muscle groups to be worked on with specific exercises.

The funny thing is, I love reading moral philosophy, arguments, and case studies. In fact, I need those ideas to push my own. But after all this time thinking and writing letters to my son about goodness, they aren’t enough. 

I’m bad at most things, okay at some things, and good at a few. But this one idea, might be what my voice was made for.  

I really, really believe we’re missing something when we talk about becoming better people. It’s not just about what is right and wrong, it’s about becoming. For us in the real world, the becoming is the whole ball game.

Becoming, in any domain, requires deliberate practice. The question is what do we practice? What are the exercises that strengthen our character? And why does it matter?

I think of curiosity, courage, and persistence as the three major muscle groups that make up our character. But how do we cultivate those three characteristics within us and within others?

That’s what I’ve been working on figuring out for almost two years now. And, I can’t wait to share it more.