Suck It Up: Can People Be Led to Reality?
1. Our new information ecosystems intentionally make it harder to come together around a shared reality.
2. This makes is harder for organizations and people to lead.
3. We have some ways to get around this.
We’ve just concluded a juicy little dust-up that, ten years from now, will probably reside in a deep footnote in some book about Election 2020. But it has a lot to say in this moment about how many of us are processing the worst year of our lives, and even some lessons about leadership. It all took place in a magical little village called Michigàn. Even though Donald Trump lost the state by over 150,000 votes, the Wayne County Board of Elections was briefly deadlocked 2–2 on certifying the results in the heavily Democratic region that holds Detroit. This was, like much of the past 4 years, unprecedented, without good justification, and came off as a petulant virtue signal that would disenfranchise thousands of Black voters, if successful. After the two stonewalling Republicans came under excruciating public pressure for this, they recanted hours later and certified the vote…only to recant on their recant the next day (unfortunately for them, the vote was certified and the matter closed).
On Monday, November 23, Michigan certified its vote for president, but not before state lawmakers flew to DC to listen to Trump’s personal appeal to overturn the vote; not before an “elite strike force” of lawyers held a number of bizarre press conferences, complete with dripping hair dye and accusations that dead Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez stole the presidency; not before another GOP politician abstained from the final certification; and not before hardworking election officials across Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere received death threats for doing their job. Certifying vote totals is dreadfully boring business, the stuff of Styrofoam coffee cups and disheveled volunteers sitting in personality-free conference rooms. What’s going on here?
This VEEP-ready skirmish is a new breed of civic animal: the performative morality play, breathlessly amplified by others via social media, used to signal effectively to the appropriate in-groups before everyone goes home without consequence. This cynical public discourse takes place at community board meetings, on message boards, during the holidays, and around the water cooler. And it is laden with a new kind of perverse incentive. In fact, the two GOP operatives who began this comedy of errors in Wayne County have likely increased their standing within the party, opening the door for some plum speaking opportunities, if not new jobs entirely. They may have lost the war, but they won the battle.
REWARDING DELUSION
It’s not that we’re in uncharted territory; these silly bouts of pettiness go back to the founding of the Republic. What is new is a rejection of obvious shared facts, the ostentatious performance of that rejection, and an environment that rewards such behavior. That Joe Biden won 306 electoral votes became pretty clear within a week after the election. The reaction to that emerging reality — from daily protests in Huntington Beach to internecine GOP warfare in Georgia to the Chief Conspiracy Officer at 1600 Pennsylvania — is what we want to look at here, and what it means for the rest of us. Tens of millions of people in this country had to process very bad news this month. We’re not interested in mocking that, but we are interested in learning from that reaction, and pulling out some lessons around leadership and communication. Because this troubling trend isn’t ending in 2020.
There are two things happening in the cultural moment that make it hard for an organization to lead during difficult times. The first is an outright rejection of facts on the ground. Again: it’s not that this a new feature of the American psyche (see, say, Vietnam War, 1955–75), but what is new are the supercharged information ecosystems designed to incubate outright falsehoods. We’re not talking about Star News proclaiming to have Monica Lewinsky’s autopsy photos next to the candy bars at the checkout line. We’re talking about a global, instantaneously distribution system that reaches you in your jeans pocket, that has the power of social trust (your Facebook friends), invisible manipulation tools (Photoshop & misleading URLs), and millions of dollars of ad spend behind it.
The difference in scale is most effectively laid bare not by the election, but by personal stories like the recent viral posts of a nurse in South Dakota who chronicled dying COVID patients — who insisted the pandemic was a hoax — as their oxygen numbers fell below unsustainable levels. The person who bought Star in 2001 did so as a lark, a silly trip into the funhouse. No one is suffocating to death in an ICU to have a little naughty fun. Furthermore, this is not the sole domain of conservatives in America; remember that the anti-vaxxer movement found purchase in Santa Monica before it did in Sioux Falls, and it was Jill Stein who — with the most delicious of irony — raised millions of dollars for worthless vote recounts in 2016. A MAGA conspiracy site or a “dirtbag left” podcast has zero incentive to educate a listener on shared facts. Like any decent business model, their incentives form around helping the audience get to where they already want to go. The past decade has seen an explosion of information environments: instantly accessible, globally connected, and able to wall themselves off into epistemic bubbles. This is new, at least in degree.
The second challenge to contend with is performance. Excluding the diehard MAGAs on Parler, there is virtually no one in the halls of political or media power who believes Joe Biden won’t be sworn in as president in January 2021 (including the actual loser). But there is little downside and quite significant upside in pretending as if it’s a live question. The research is quite diverse and compelling that ideologically homogeneous environments are more prone to extremism and radicalism. If you hate socialism, there are a lot of little social rewards you can receive by showing you hate socialism THE MOST! to others who hate it. Like-minded groups are a breeding ground for hyperbolic performance, but when someone broke a taboo in the John Birch Society in the 1950s, it didn’t really get outside the circle. Even with something as heated as Gamergate in the early 2010s, bespoke information systems weren’t really mature enough to reward outrageous actors with, say, brand new careers in trolling. That’s no longer the case: there are clear financial and social benefits for being outlandish. Trump lawyer Sidney Powell finally got kicked off the president’s legal team for her QAnon-level insanity. But make no mistake, she is a hero in far right media. She will get more clients, be a regular on the OAN and Newsmax networks, and monetize her behavior without much fear of consequence for besmirching the reputations of thousands of election officials and volunteers.¹
HOW DOES LEADERSHIP WORK IN THIS WORLD?
All of this travels down the street level. So we have a politically charged cultural environment, frictionless and immediate communication hubs that reward extremist kabuki behavior, and a shared inability to absorb hard realities. How does this play out in the real world? Imagine this scenario: It’s Summer 2021 and the COVID vaccine is now available to everyone at scale for free. At the same time, your company has completed an internal review that shows that WFH has reduced organizational efficacy by a good 15%. Morale is low, demand remains soft, OKRs are slipping, the company culture you spent years building is quickly crumbling. In order to start phasing in shared office time, people need to take the vaccine. But a diffuse, loud, ideologically scattered group on Slack begins to push back:
“COVID was never that serious.”
“There’s nothing in my employment contract that allows for forced vaccination.”
“For a place that prizes D&I, it’s sure not hospitable to diversity of opinion.”
The question isn’t really about what to do here: the legal liability implications alone around bringing unvaccinated people together so soon make this an obvious decision. But how does a founder get skeptical people to go along with her? How can she identify areas of real concern while reducing the level of performative pushback to controversial initiatives? Now, you can look at the process of making and communicating tough decisions through the lens of management principles, psychology, spirituality, or even what they do in the military. From 10,000 feet, these things are always going to serve you well:
Clarity of Intention: clearing explaining and confronting the problem, not dancing around the controversy
Value Complexity: reconciling that even “good decisions” can hurt people and plans
Mitigation of Harm: making a good-faith effort to minimize the pain for those affected
Acceptance of Uncertainty: understanding and communicating that things may still go wrong
Honesty, humility, and empathy are never going to hurt when getting people to go along with bad news. But I’d argue there needs to be a reassessment around trust and values. In short, we are at a social nadir in terms of group trust, and yet American workforces remain quite homogeneous. So the danger that founders and executives face when trying to get their organization to do a hard thing is twofold. First, many people are conditioned today not to trust that the messengers of bad news are acting with good intentions, regardless of the evidence they provide. Second, those same folks have new incentives to push back in bad faith — even if they don’t actually believe in the pushback or it’s doomed to failure — as the rewards from such performances can be significant.
It’s not outlandish to see how the above COVID situation could handicap a small or medium-sized business. And the next two years are going to be filled with hard decisions and bad news as we dig out of a series of crises. In addition to the resources above, I’d lay out some basic tactics for workplace leaders and educators who have to persuade people on hard realities:
SLOW DOWN.
This point refers to all conflict, but really shines here. Almost all disagreement is fueled by a rising tempo. Leaders want to come to consensus, have action items, move forward. When there’s hard news to deliver to people in the organization, resist the emotional impulses and slow things down instead. This can express itself through multiple briefings, open door policies to address the situation, even speaking more slowly.
Remember: in the overwhelming amount of scenarios, you do not have to respond right away. You do not have to fire back. For example, the awkward silence has many uses; here it can lower temperatures, and sort of muffle a lot of the obnoxious tactics that have become commonplace in public discourse. Give it a try.
CAN YOU ARGUE THE OPPOSITION’S POINT?
This is a technique that I wish was mandated for all political debates and most family arguments. Can you make a compelling case for those who disagree with you? No short-changing the other side, no setting rhetorical traps. If you were hired as their advocate, how would you make their case? If nothing else, this technique is a good backstop against you working in a bad faith manner against well-intentioned dissension or opposition. Plus, you’ll be amazed at how empathetic you’ll be toward yourself when attacking yourself!
IS THIS PERSON RESISTING IN GOOD FAITH?
In normal times, trying to divine the intentions of an antagonist — especially when they’re antagonizing you — is not a great look for an organizational leader. But that’s not where we are because of [gestures around wildly]. Leaders have to start asking themselves if opposition to a difficult choice is genuine or performative. Here are some questions to ask yourself when making that assessment:
Is the argument quickly breaking down into aspersions around personality, identity, or motive?
Is this antagonism continuing unabated after a decision has been made?
Is your opposition treating this disagreement as an ongoing negotiation, as opposed to an executive decision?
Whatever the assessment is, don’t make this judgment alone. You are not a disinterested party.
WHAT ARE THE INCENTIVES AT PLAY?
If a workplace disagreement descends into personal attacks and obstructionism for its own sake, it’s important to ask what risks and rewards exist in the environment. People tend to act in their own self-interest. While an employee might really put herself at risk of sanction to get better sexual harassment training put in place, is she really going to take the same risks to protest a rule to keep her Zoom camera on? Are there rewards that exist besides getting what she wants…?
The incentives for performance and behavior are built by leadership, but maintained by the culture. If some faction simply won’t accept a difficult decision, ask why before making any concrete moves. Are they just that committed to a just cause? Do they think you’ll fold? Are there non-obvious rewards for obstruction? Understanding the carrots and sticks that drive them will dictate a large part of your response.
RECOGNIZE THAT THE “LOSER” HAS AN INCENTIVE TO KEEP FIGHTING…AND DON’T CATER TO IT.
If you ask any losing basketball team if they’d like a 5th quarter, they will gladly jump on it. Processing loss or defeat is usually less enjoyable than continuing to fight on about literally anything. A Twitter troll arguing that the media doesn’t crown the president, and your Product Manager continuing to hammer the data on why you should keep investing in a discontinued product both hail from the same impulse. Fighting is eternal, while losing is final.
It’s important to understand what’s going on, but that doesn’t mean you should mirror it. Too many leaders continue to engage in these conflicts far past their sell-by date. Sometimes it’s that smart people can’t stop showing how smart they are. Sometimes leaders don’t like to pull a “power move” and unilaterally end dialogue. But helping people process hard news doesn’t mean humoring useless conflict under the false guise of “healthy disagreement.”
DON’T MATCH TONE.
This is an extension of the point above, and anyone reading this has experience here. A colleague or friends reacts to bad news by yelling, pointing, accusing. You, feeling defensive, pattern match and soon you’re having an argument about gestures and vocal tone instead of the actual bad news. This is the often unconscious point of an aggressive reaction: your employee can’t “win” the argument about a lost bonus, but it’s possible to score a point about your sarcasm or rudeness, providing more grist for his mill. This isn’t happening in a Machiavellian/3D chess sense. People naturally want to regain control at a time of loss or defeat. It’s easier to do that in an argument about manners and tone, for instance, than in one about a decision where they don’t have the power to change the outcome.
When delivering tough news, go in committed to a specific style, and don’t let others’ reactions knock you off of it.
ARE CONSEQUENCES CLEAR?
Many of today’s workplaces are conflict-dysfunctional zones: conflict is avoided until it explodes. Everything is fine until your boss calls you in out of the blue to complain that you’ve been undermining him for two years. This is bad for myriad reasons, but one of the really bad things it does is make it hard to understand what’s OK and what’s not at work. That overbearing project lead bullies and intimidates her team, but gets great NPS numbers at the end of the day; it’s going to be very hard to argue that her bullying is a problem when you’ve overlooked it for four years. Similarly, when an ambitious engineer will take the bad performance review from HR because he knows that his boss will still promote him due to their all-night coding sessions, it tells you that the company’s incentives are upside down.
Employees and hires cannot write the system of incentives that make up your workplace. They can only work within them, or try to game them to their advantage. If the latter is happening frequently, that’s on you to recognize and adjust them.
LOOK FOR HOMOGENEITY…IN VALUES.
The above suggestions might be new to you, but probably not controversial. This suggestion might be. Workplace leaders need to understand that we are in a polarized moment, from politics to culture to identity, and it has seeped into every aspect of waking life. That’s not going to change soon. Historically, organizations have put emphasis on things like experience, competency, certifications, and network when building their team. Those things are obviously still important. But understanding a person’s values should be a Tier 1 evaluative metric in hiring today.
We are not advocating for homogeneous workplaces along racial, gender, or even political lines (the opposite, in fact). We don’t think that ideological sameness is good either. But a company today — startup or Fortune 500 — has to wear its values on its sleeve. The team should also share those values, whether that’s a touchy-feely startup in the Bay or an uber-capitalist trading desk on Wall Street. Better screening for shared mission is a strong antidote to the eroding trust taking place more generally, and shared values easily cross traditional cultural divides. Look at the wacky patchwork of personalities that make up the crypto movement, or the surprisingly bipartisan attitude about skilled immigration. Passion about disrupting traditional currency or maintaining America’s competitive advantage through diversity overwhelms political affiliation, religion, or other old benchmarks. They create new coalitions animated by powerful ideals.
Companies should build themselves on this foundation. There are a lot of benefits of mission-driven workforces, and one underreported feature is greater trust in each other. Greater trust leads to less tribalism, which leads to less performative antagonism. Why? Because the incentives aren’t there! If I’m sure of our shared commitment to clean drinking water for rural communities, I’m at least inclined to listen when you tell me that layoffs are coming to our non-profit, and less inclined to immediately speculate that you just want a new swimming pool. Value homogeneity is not a cure-all to conflict or pushback, but a valuable tool. As people, we want to make sure that someone’s on our side before we give them the benefit of the doubt. Build a team that makes this easier to do, through shared values.
The above is a loose playbook for a new world, one that’s going to be around for awhile. Overwhelming force, shame, or avoidance simply don’t work when trying to get people to absorb a hard, new reality. But neither does being a pushover. Build a team that organically inspires trust, slow down, own your authority, remember your enemy is a person, and likely not an enemy at all.
¹ A small caveat here: Powell might be one of the few folks who faces actual defamation charges, most likely from voting machine company Dominion.
Justin Wolske runs CASEWORX and co-founded GRID110. He teaches at Cal State LA, and is working with Started in December 2020 on a workshop around Managing Conflict for Founders. He is based in Long Beach, CA.
