Hippie CEO Life #30 - Be Kind
November 4, 2022
“Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for a kindness.” ~Seneca
Watching Elon Musk unceremoniously layoff large numbers of Twitter employees and the all too predictable reaction from many on social media cheering him on, has left me incredibly sad this morning.
Mergers, acquisitions, downsizing, taking a public company private, turning around a company that is hemorrhaging money, are all very hard and often involve, what should be viewed as a very difficult task of, removing people from their jobs, from their livelihood, from their ability to provide for their families.
But there is a reason so many sociopaths rise to the top ranks of many, many companies, it is because they are able to make cold, calculated business decisions without once thinking about how their decisions will impact people.
The sociopath CEO doesn’t care about you or me, they do not care about right or wrong, they don’t care about your feelings, they don’t care about the harm they are doing to the earth, they don’t care about pain they inflict on humanity, all they care about is themselves and how their actions can result in ever increasing personal gains.
Over the many years that i have been in a leadership position, i have had to deliver the news that an employee was part of a layoff round, i have had to tell employees that they were being terminated for poor performance. i’ve had to do it many times but it never once got any easier. Even when i let someone go that was truly a bad employee, it was incredibly hard, i struggled, i felt pain for them, i worried about them and their future.
Difficult decisions have to be made in business all the time but there is an empathetic, caring way to do it and there is a sociopath, asshole way of to do it. Which one do you prefer?
We can run incredibly profitable companies without being a sociopath. We can run high performing teams without being a sociopath. We can rise through the ranks of our organizations without being a sociopath. But until we as a society can hold the many sociopath leaders that run many of our largest and “most well respected” organizations responsible for their bad behavior, rather than celebrating them as the heroes of the business world, i fear nothing will change for the better.
Even as an employee, within a highly toxic organization, led by a sociopath leader, you still have the ability to be kind. So be kind because the world really does need more people like you.
