Straight Talking

Time to call a spade a bloody shovel

You Oughta Know

If we want to change the world, why are we being so bloody polite?

Ever since I got involved in what I call the Progressive work movement, I have been struck by how polite it is, how well-meaning and reasonable everyone is. How, well, nice it all is.

Yes, I know you can change the world with love but you also need to wrap it around a bit of steel. A hug can get someone to change but sometimes a punch in the face is more appropriate. The hug can come later, when they’ve stopped being a dick.

What’s got me wound up about this? Well, I went to a talk by the Center of Compassionate Leadership and was chatting to people beforehand, one of which worked on inclusion. I told him about Decrapify Work and he said he liked the directness of that and that language was such as important thing.

And in that moment, I knew exactly what he meant. The language around making the workplace better is failing to convey the power of the ideas. It’s too soft, it’s too ephemeral, it’s too reasoned. It’s too bloody nice. We’re up against the entrenched forces of exploitation, dehumanisation, capitalism, power and status. We’re coming to the fight with a comfort blanket and they are machine-gunning us down.

They set the rules a long time ago. Emotions have no place in business.You are a unit of production. You should be grateful to have a job and do as you are told. You must comply with the rules and norms of behaviour, but your bosses don’t have to. You are expendable and replaceable. Work is not meant to be fun. All that matters are profits and efficiency. There is no alternative to this system.

And what are we coming at it with? ‘Soft skills’. Empathy, compassion, care, love. Human-centred. Community. Inclusion, diversity and equity.

We want to make the workplace ‘better’ but we don’t define what that is in hard terms, we often fall back on describing some utopia and and ill-defined future state full of fluffy bunnies and cuddles.

Look, I am being deliberately provocative here, I believe in this stuff. I know it is important, I believe there is true power in these ideas, rather than the brittle bluster and ego of the status quo. But the brittle egos are coming out on top, the status quo remains impregnable.

It so easy for them to dismiss us. ‘Soft skills’ is an albatross they hung around our necks decades ago. The ineluctable (but flawed) logic of capitalism, the cold-blooded calculation of MBA grads and failed orthodoxy of management science steamrollers over our humanity, which it deliberately excludes.

The bastards keep winning.

And I can’t help thinking it’s because we keep being so polite, so reasonable, so earnest.

See how easily DEI got swept aside. See how they weaponise our own language against us, how they turn our ‘nice’ words into jibes, turn our aspirational words into something to be despised.

The reason that Decrapify Work resonates so much is that we get it. There’s way too much crap in work and we want less of it. I’ve never had to explain what I mean by it because everyone has a relevant experience and reads that into it. There’s so much crap that it is unavoidable and in a way that wasn’t the case a couple of decades ago.

So when it comes to leadership, do people want compassionate leadership? Well, look, I’m not going to say no. I’m not going to criticise people who promote that (I commend the work the Centre for Compassionate Leadership do and wish more power to their elbow) or those leaders who apply their principles. Of course most people would like to have a compassionate boss. Who wouldn’t?

But what most people really want is for their boss not to be an arsehole.

Over half of people change jobs because that simple criteria is not met. I’ve met too many people to count who have endured a boss who’s an arsehole, or suffered under whole pyramids of arseholes, sometimes with really bad impacts upon them and their careers (not to mention their health and their personal life).

There is research that shows the disproportionate impact that an arsehole boss has on an organisation, the huge shadow of shithousery that they cast over employees and the subsequent hit to culture and performance. And yet still arseholes abound in management, organisations keep recruiting them and promoting them.

It’s time to start speaking plainly and call them out. It’s time to inject our language and our actions with a bit of steel. We want stop the arseholes winning, we want less of them in management positions. We want arseholes taken out of the organisation.

Let’s put the hugs on the back shelf and give these bastards a bloody nose.

Perhaps I should start something like ‘The Anti-Arsehole League’. What do you think?

Torn

Of course, I understand why consultancies and coaches don’t speak out so plainly. They can’t criticise the guys signing the cheques. If they said what they really thought, they’d hardly ever get hired and then we’d be making even less progress. So they sanitise their language, avoid certain framings and work with the willing. They tread a fine line between challenging their clients but not upsetting them.

I admire them and applaud their conviction, persistence, tact and effort. They are moving the dial, one leader at a time, diligently and determinedly. Every person they influence is one more in the ‘good’ bucket and we need that bucket filled as much as possible.

But I couldn’t do that. To be honest, I’ve never tried. This stuff just makes me too angry and I think I probably have authority issues from the institutional abuse I experienced. So I’ve never bothered. I also think that there’s a danger that you water down your message so much in order to make it palatable to the bosses that you end up delivering something that has little or no impact. You end up compromising your work and get little in return.

So I can just shout at them from my little corner of the internet, go full-on keyboard warrior against the bastards. I don’t expect everyone else to do the same.

However, this incremental approach does not meet the scale of the problem. Arseholes are simply everywhere. They are not a bug but a feature. As I’ve said before, it’s the system that makes people behave like this, it makes good people do bad things (and undermines all of us in the process).

So I think we have to call it out and say we won’t accept it any more. Call it the silent majority finding a voice, if you like. The system won’t change if we all appear to be going along with it, if it looks like we accept it even if we don’t like it.

Besides, coming together will make us stronger, it’s how we make real change happen. They know that, it’s why they have undermined and attacked Unions.

Like I said, sometime you have to give them a punch in the face first. Save the hugs for when you make up afterwards.

Bitter Sweet Symphony

We know that these more human approaches to leadership are a win-win-win for organisations. They make employees happier and more productive, they make leaders more capable and resilient and they make organisations more effective and productive. You’d think the bosses would be pulling the arms off of the likes of the Centre for Compassionate Leadership, right? Who wouldn’t want all that?

Well, here’s the paradox of how leadership works at the moment. Organisation largely think about leadership as a positional thing. The ‘leaders’ are those at the top of the hierarchy, the further you go up the pyramid of power, the more of a leader you are.

The people who get promoted up the pyramid are those who are high achievers, the ones who meet their objectives, hit their targets and, most importantly, deliver their numbers. You are assessed on your suitability for promotion on your achievements.

So the highest achievers get to be the bosses. However, because these people are driven by personal achievement, they are the worse people to create the type of environment that enables others to achieve and to thrive. The system selects and promotes people to the roles they are least suited to. In short, the people who get to be ‘leaders’ are just not equipped to lead.

How do we stop this happening? Well, those at the top are unlikely to make the change themselves because, firstly, they have done just fine with the status quo and secondly, they are blithely unaware of their own shortcomings. Even if they were aware, they are highly unlikely to accept and acknowledge them.

So we have to reject them. Point out that they are arseholes and shouldn’t be where they are. Refuse to play the game, refuse to bow to them on the basis of the status that has been wrongly conferred on them.

It’s already happening in places like Glassdoor, on TikTok, on Reddit. It’s time to turn up the volume.

Learn To Fly

I realise that I have the luxury of not having to work for anyone and am free to say what I like. If you are in a job then you are probably going to be careful about what you say. If you are in a job where you genuinely feel able to say what you want and call out bad behaviour, that organisation probably has a low arsehole quotient so you don’t have a problem in the first place.

However, amongst your coworkers, you can speak more freely and have an open conversation about the reality you are in. What I’m saying is it’s time to drop the deference, to give up the pretence that this is normal and something you just have to put up with.

The reality is that many organisation don’t really care about their employees, they don’t care about the things you value like dignity, fairness, equity, opportunity for all. They don’t want to give you a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work, they want exploit you and constantly attempt to tip the balance in their favour. They not only tolerate arseholes but promote them. Wherever they can, they will exploit the power differential to push an unequal contract upon you, which can easily tip into abuse.

It's like being in a bad relationship, they want you to love them but they will dump you in a heartbeat and steal your wallet.

Resistance is speaking your truth and calling out what is unacceptable. It’s refusing to go along with pretence and play nicely, it’s a withdrawal of co-operation.

It’s saying plainly, I don’t want to work for an arsehole.

Not exactly an unreasonable request, is it?