Every year or so, some tech CEO does something massively stupid, like declaring “No politics at work!”, or “Trump voters are oppressed and live in fear!”, and we all get a good pained laugh over how out of touch and lacking in self-awareness they are.
We hear a lot about the howlers, and much less about the practical challenges leaders face in trying to create a work environment where people from vastly different backgrounds and belief systems come together in peace to focus on the mission and do good work. Or how that intersects with the deeply polarizing events that now seem to shatter our world every other week — invasions, Supreme Court rulings, elections, school shootings, and the like.
Are we supposed to speak up or stay silent? Share our own beliefs, or take a studiously neutral stance? What do we do if half of the company is numb and reeling with grief, and the other half is bursting with joy? Nothing at all? That feels inhumane. Is the reality that we live in a world where we can only live, work, and interact with people who already agree with us and our political beliefs? God, I hope not. 🙁
This has been on my mind a lot recently. We are 103 days out from a US Presidential election, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
So here goes.
Caveats, challenges and cautionary tales
There are some immediate challenges to things I’m trying to say here. A couple:
The term “politics”, much like the term “technical debt”, can mean way too many things. Local, regional or national electoral politics; activities associated with power distribution or resource allocation; influence peddling or status seeking behaviors, putting your needs above the good of the group, and so much more. Therefore I will use the term sparingly, and prefer more specific language where possible.
I don’t often do this, but I am explicitly addressing this piece to other founders and execs. Not because it doesn’t apply to people in other roles; it does. It just got really wordy trying to account for all the possible variations on role, scope and perspective involved.
As a leader, your job is to succeed
This might sound obvious, possibly to the point of idiocy. Yet I think it bears repeating. For all the mountains of forests of trees worth of books that get written every year on leadership, it remains the case that nobody knows what the fuck they’re doing.
“I think great leaders treat money like oxygen: they make sure there is plenty of it, and understand that if you’re talking about it all of the time you’re in deep shit and better take drastic actions to make sure you have enough.” ~ Mark Ferlatte
As a founder or leader of a venture-backed startup or public company, your #1 job is to make the business succeed. Success comes first. It’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs all over again; you must ensure your company’s continued existence before you earn the right to tinker.
Success in business is what earns you the right to devote more time, attention, and resources to cultural issues, and to experiment with things that matter to you.
One of the most common ways that leaders fail is that they get so bogged down in the daily chaos of running the company, managing a team, raising money, responding to crises and scoring OKRs is that they struggle to keep the focus zeroed in on the most important thing: succeeding at your mission.
Know your mission, craft a strategy, execute
And how do you do that?
Know your mission, craft a strategy, and execute. It’s as simple and straightforward as it is unbelievably difficult and devastatingly complicated.
The system exists to fulfill the mission. I’ve written before about systems thinking in organizations, how hierarchy emerges to benefit the workers, how we look up for purpose and down for function.
Your mission is what brings people together to collectively build something that they could not do as individuals. The more crisp and well articulated your mission, the more employees can tie the work they do back to the mission, the more meaningful their daily work is likely to feel.
Your culture serves the business, not the other way around
A great culture can’t compensate for a weak product that users don’t want. If people want to work at your company more than they want to use your product, that’s a bad sign.
A company culture with tremendous energy, ownership and transparency can be an accelerant to your business, it can grant you unique advantages, and it can help mitigate risks. But it is not why you exist. Your mission is why you exist.
It would be nice to believe that having a warm, supportive culture, with friendly people and four day work weeks, could guarantee success, or at least give you a reliable advantage. Wouldn’t it?
Companies with shitty cultures win all the time
We’ve all watched companies become wildly successful under assholes, while waves of employees leave broken and burned out. I wish this wasn’t true, but it is. People’s lives and careers are just another externality as far as the corporate books are concerned.
Many live through this nightmare and emerge dead set on doing things differently. And so, when they become founders or leaders, they put culture ahead of the business. And then they lose.
Most companies fail, and if you aren’t hungry and zeroed in on the success of your business, your slim chances become even slimmer.
I don’t believe this has to be either/or, cultural success or business success. I think it’s a false dichotomy. I believe that healthy companies can be more successful than shitty ones, all else being equal. Which is why I believe that leaders who care about building a workplace culture rooted in dignity and respect have a responsibility to care even more about success in business. Let’s show these motherfuckers how it’s done. Nothing succeeds like success.
Good culture is rooted in organizational health
I feel like a big reason so many leaders get twisted up here is by trying to make employees happy instead of driving organizational health. This is a huge topic, and I won’t go deep on it here, but my understanding of organizational health owes a lot to “The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business”, by Patrick Lencioni, with honorable mention going to “ Good Strategy/Bad Strategy”, by Richard Rumelt.
A terrific company culture begins with organizational health: a competent, experienced leadership team that trusts each other, a mission, and a strategy, clarity and good communication. If everyone in the company knows what the most important thing is, and their actions align with that, your company is probably pretty healthy.
People’s feelings matter, and you should treat them with dignity and respect, but you can’t be driven by them. You have to let go of underperformers, deliver hard feedback, set high standards and hold people accountable. A lot of this does not feel good.
You will make mistakes. Things will fail. You will have to spin down teams, or entire orgs. People are going to have huge emotional reactions about your decisions and take things personally. They’ll be angry with you and disagree with your decisions. They will blame you, and maybe they should.
If you do your job well, with some luck, many people will be happy, much of the time. But if your goal is to make people happy, you will fail, and then everyone will be unhappy. Feelings are a trailing indicator and only roughly, occasionally a sign that you are doing a good job.
Survive in the short term, but live your values in the longer term
Most companies have seen times where all of the options seem like bad ones, even a betrayal of their values. There are times that hurt your conscience, or rouse up anger and cynicism in the ranks. Some hypothetical examples:
- When you’re doing layoffs to save the company, and realize the list is disproportionately made up of marginalized groups 💔
- When you have an all-male exec team, and desperately need a new engineering leader, but all of the qualified candidates in your pipeline are men
- When you had to let someone go for cause, and they’re going around publicly lying about what happened but you can’t respond
These things happen. And when they do, you have a legal and ethical responsibility to make the decision that is right for the company, every time.
And yet.
You must remind yourself as you do, uneasily, queasily, how easily “I didn’t have a choice” can slip from reason to excuse. How quickly “this isn’t the right time” turns into “never the right time”. You know this, I know this, and I guarantee you every one of your employees knows this.
Don’t expect them to give you the benefit of the doubt. Why should they? They’ve heard this shit a million times. Don’t get mad, just do your job.
Living your values takes planning and sacrifice
No halfway decent leader spends ALL their time reacting to the burning bushes in front of their faces. Being a leader means planning for the future, so you can do better next time.
So you had to make a tough decision, and the optics (and maybe the reality) of it are terrible. Okay. It happens. Don’t just wince and put it behind you. If you don’t take steps to change things, you’re going to face the same bad choices next time.
- What will you do differently?
- Why were there no good alternatives?
- What will the right time look like? How will you know?
- How will you do a better job of recruiting, retaining, or setting them up for success?
If you don’t spend time, money, attention, or political capital on it, you don’t care about it, by definition. And it is a thousand times worse to claim you value something, and then demonstrate with your actions that you don’t care, than to never claim it in the first place.
Your resources are limited, and you must spend them with purpose
As an exec, you get a very limited amount of people’s time and attention — maybe a few minutes per week, or per month. Don’t waste them.
Jess Mink, our director of platform engineering, has a lovely story about this. They work with local search and rescue teams, which are staffed by people all over the political spectrum. The mission is crystal clear; all of them know why they’re there, and they don’t talk about things that aren’t tied to the mission. Yet Jess is giving a talk about pronouns at their next training. Why?
”Because there’s a really crisp, clear mission, I can say, I don’t care what your politics are. I’m not asking you to change your beliefs, but this is the impact of what you’re doing on these people that you’ve said you’re here to help.” ~ Jess Mink
There are a million things in the world you could say or do that would have intrinsic value. Why this thing? You should have a reason, and it should connect to your mission or your strategy for achieving it, or you are just muddying the waters.
Should political speech at work be a free-for-all?
Many leaders have opted to ban political speech at work. What’s the alternative, a free-for-all? Trump gifs and Biden Harris banners and a heated debate on the border in #general
?
Please. Nobody wants that. Most folks seem to understand that work Slack is not the place for proselytizing or stirring up shit. There’s an element of good judgment here that extends well beyond political speech to include other disruptive actions such as criticizing religious beliefs, oversharing extremely personal info, posting sexy selfies, or good old verbal diarrhea. These are all, shall we say, “good coaching opportunities”. You don’t have to ban all political speech just to enforce reasonable norms.
In general, people want to work in an environment that is relatively peaceful and neutral-feeling, where people can focus on their work and our shared mission. But people also need spaces to talk about what’s going on in their lives and process their reactions.
At Honeycomb, we prefix all non-work slack channels with #misc
. We have #misc-bible-reading-group
, #misc-politics
, #misc-book-club
, #misc-shoes-and-fashion
, #misc-so-fuzzy
(for pictures of people’s pets).
People don’t join those channels automatically upon being hired — you have to seek them out, and you can leave them just as easily. Nobody has to worry about missing out on critical work conversations co-mingling with off putting political speech. And it’s easy to redirect non-work chatter out of work channels.
The value (and limitations) of neutrality
Neutral spaces are a good thing — a societal necessity. However, it becomes a problem when it fails to honor the paradox of tolerance — that if we tolerate the intolerant, intolerance will ultimately dominate. We cannot be equally tolerant of gay people and people who hate gay people, in other words.
At their worst, statements of neutrality punish the victimized and protect the victimizers. As Yonatan Zunger puts it, in one of my favorite essays of all time, “Tolerance is not a moral absolute; it is a peace treaty.”
But even peace treaties have their limits. Some problems are just fucking hard . As Emily put it,
“What does it mean to feel silence from the majority of your coworkers on a topic that feels like life and death to you? In normal times, silence can seem like a lack of political speech; in extraordinary times, silence speaks volumes. This creates division, even if your coworkers have landed there through ignorance or low awareness.” ~ Emily Nakashima
The hard thing about hard things is that they’re really fucking hard. There is no playbook. I can’t solve them for you here. Every situation is unique, and the details matter — details really matter, in fact. You can only take each situation as it comes with humility, sensitivity, and a willingness to listen.
Good leaders don’t invite unnecessary controversy
If you are a CEO or founder, especially, the things you say will be heard as representing the views of your company. Period. Keep this in mind, and try to be extra respectful and responsible. You don’t want your big mouth to accidentally create a wave of distraction and drama for people throughout your company to have to deal with. Your opinions are more than just your opinions.
If you’re thinking that I’m an odd person to be delivering this particular message, I sheepishly acknowledge the truth of this.
If you work at a company where the CEO and leadership openly espouse a particular set of partisan beliefs, you are inevitably going to feel somewhat othered. You wonder uncomfortably whether or not they are aware you hold different beliefs. If so, will you be promoted, will you be given equal opportunities? Would your leaders like you as much as they like employees who share their political convictions? Would they be as willing to chat with you or hang out with you? Does it matter?
People aren’t wrong to be concerned. There’s scads of research that shows how much we automatically prefer people who are more like us. It’s automatic — it’s natural. That doesn’t mean it’s right. Nor is it inevitable. We have to work harder to give an equal shot to those who aren’t like us, and we should do that.
Good leaders don’t make it all about them
One of the hardest parts about being a good leader is managing your ego, and keeping it from taking center stage or making things worse.
I have done and said a lot of dumb things online, but the worst of them was probably during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. I was trying to express my support, so I tweeted something about how actions matter more than words, and that we were trying to help by building a workplace where Black employees could thrive, or something like that. I don’t remember exactly (and the tweets are gone), but it was awful. I made it about us; it was super tone deaf. And I got whaled on, in a way that really threw me for a loop. I tried to apologize and made it worse. Friends blocked me.
It took me a long time to process the experience and come to terms with my mistakes: first, by framing my comments almost like a promo for how great honeycomb was, and second, by reacting so defensively when called out over it.
You don’t need to have a take on everything. And the more you have a track record of taking stances on issues, the more it’s expected of you, and the more dicey it becomes, because even not taking a stance is taking a stance.
Good leaders look for ways to de-escalate
Any time the conversation sails into the terrain of morals and ethics, it’s an automatic escalation. It raises the stakes, it exacerbates differences. It can transform an ordinary, practical matter into the forces of good versus evil in the blink of an eye.
There are bright lines and moral dilemmas in business. (Should you pay women less than men for the same work? No.) But most of our everyday work doesn’t need to be so emotionally fraught.
An example may help here. When you have a geographically distributed company, you have two basic choices when it comes to comp philosophy:
- have a single set of comp bands, which apply no matter where you live
- peg their salary to their local cost of living
When this question first came up, back in 2019, I came out swinging for the fences on option 1). I treated it like a moral question, a matter of basic human equity. “What kind of company would dare pay you less money based on where you live? What business is it of theirs where you live?” — that sort of thing.
In this, I was hardly alone. A lot of people have really strong feelings about this (I still have some pretty strong feelings about it 😬). But there are also some pretty reasonable arguments for and circumstances in which geo wage arbitrage makes a lot of sense, and can offer more opportunities to more people than you could otherwise afford. It’s not as simple as I made it out to be.
Having taken such a strong stance though, I have definitely made it extremely difficult for our finance team to change that policy, should we ever decide to.
Good leaders turn the volume down. They dampen drama, they don’t amplify it. They don’t ratchet up the stakes or the rhetoric, they look for practical solutions where possible.
Good leaders connect the culture to the mission
I started off as one of those leaders who cared more about culture than the business. In honesty, I assumed we’d fail. I never planned to start a company, it was an impulse decision. I really didn’t think I’d have to be the CEO. I wasn’t equipped for the job; I didn’t even know the difference between sales and marketing. I did however have MANY strong opinions on company culture.
The first few years of Honeycomb, any time I thought of some neat thing to try, I did it. Put an employee on the board? Yes! Run regular ethics discussions? Hell yes! Put together cross-functional teams to discuss company values? Cool!
I don’t regret it, precisely; I think it played a role in instilling a culture of curiosity and ownership. I think it helped us figure out who we were.
But as we grow past 200 people, and as the pace of growth accelerates, I am increasingly aware of the opportunity cost of these experiments. It doesn’t mean we don’t do things like this anymore, but there needs to be a much better reason than “Charity thinks it would be cool.” It needs to add up to something bigger.
Good leaders have conviction, and don’t pretend to give a shit when they don’t
I appreciate it when leaders do real talk about their values and how they make decisions. Too many leaders hide behind the bland slogans of corporate piety, in ways that tell you nothing about how they make decisions or where their priorities lie when the chips are down.
Honestly, I would rather work for someone who holds different values than I do, but who seems honest and consistent and fair-minded in their decision-making, than someone who holds the same values but whose decisions seem impulsive and subjective.
This is a business, not a family. If I believe in the mission, and the leaders and I align on the facts, and I respect their integrity and the way they make decisions, that matters more.
As it turns out, all of this has been said before…by my antagonists?!? Oh dear…
As I was wrapping up this article, I went back and read a few of the pieces written by and about the companies who banned political speech, and my mouth literally dropped open.
You could copy-paste entire sections between my article and theirs, without anyone knowing the difference.
Companies exist for the sake of their mission, check. They don’t have to have a take on everything, check. Your work day shouldn’t consist of arguments over abortion and other hot button topics, check. It IS distracting. It’s NOT why you’re here. Uh…
How can I have written the same fucking article as theirs, and come to such a radically different conclusion?
Or is it that radically different? After all, I’m not out here advocating a free-for-all, or that companies should take a stand on every social issue of the day. I actually pretty much agree with most of the sentiments these founders wrote in their official posts on the matter.
Shit?
I was sitting here having a legit internal crisis, and then I stumbled into some other pieces, where rank-and-file employees were talking about the changes and what led up to them.
Employees say the founders’ memos unfairly depicted their workplace as being riven by partisan politics, when in fact the main source of the discussion had always been Basecamp itself.
“At least in my experience, it has always been centered on what is happening at Basecamp,” said one employee. “What is being done at Basecamp? What is being said at Basecamp? And how it is affecting individuals? It has never been big political discussions, like ‘the postal service should be disbanded,’ or ‘I don’t like Amy Klobuchar.’
The whole article is required reading. It goes on to detail a hair-raising amount of hypocrisy and high-handed behaviors by the Basecamp founders; a bunch of workers who self-organized to improve internal hiring practices and culture, and how they got shut down.
“There’s always been this kind of unwritten rule at Basecamp that the company basically exists for David and Jason’s enjoyment,” one employee told me. “At the end of the day, they are not interested in seeing things in their work timeline that make them uncomfortable, or distracts them from what they’re interested in. And this is the culmination of that.”
Then there was this damning piece from the NYTimes about the appalling way Black employees were treated at Coinbase, and this one, which closes with an anecdote about the Coinbase CEO tweeting out his own (noxious) political views in direct contradiction of his own policies. Oopsie-daisy. 🌼
Are these policies designed to protect the mission, or the CEO?
All of this paints a very different picture. These bans on political speech seem to be less about protecting the commons from wayward employees who won’t stop distracting everyone with hot button political arguments, and more about employees doing their level best to grapple with real tensions and systemic problems at work — problems that their leaders got sick of hearing about and decided to shut down.
There’s a real stench of “politics for me, but not for thee!” in a lot of these cases, which makes it extra galling. At the beginning of this piece, I noted that “politics” is an obscenely broad category — it can mean almost anything. So when the CEO arrogates to himself the right to define it and silence it, it generates a lot of confusion and uncertainty. That’s bad for the mission!
The fact is, this shit is hard. It’s hard to craft a strategy and execute. It’s hard to train managers to have hard conversations with their employees, or gently de-escalate when things get emotionally fraught. It’s hard to reset expectations on how much of a voice employees can expect to have in a given area. It’s hard to know when to take a stand on principle, and back it with your time and treasure, and when to settle or compromise.
But you signed up for this, bro. It’s part of the job, and you’re getting paid a lot of money to do it. You don’t get to just nope out when the going gets rough.
Just because you made a rule that people can’t talk about the hard stuff, doesn’t mean the hard stuff goes away. It mostly just serves to reinforce whatever power structures and inequities already exist in your company. Which means a lot of people will go on doing just fine, while some are totally fucked. You’ve also shut down all of the reasonable routes for people to advocate for change, so good job, you.
You don’t have to agree with them, but you do have to be respectful to your employees
Look, none of us are perfect. That’s why systems need mechanisms for change. Resiliency isn’t about never breaking the system, it’s about knowing your systems will break, and equipping them with the tools to repair.
If you want to lead a company, you have to deal with the people. It comes with the job.
If you want your people to care as much about the mission as you do, to feel personally invested in its success, to devote whole long stretches of their brilliant, creative, busy lives to helping you make that mission come true…you owe them in return.
If a bunch of your employees are waving a flag and urgently saying “we have a problem”, they are very likely doing you a favor. Either way, they deserve to be heard.
You don’t have to do what they want. But you ought to listen to them, and reserve judgment. Open your eyes. Look around. Do some reading. Talk to people. Consider whether you might be missing something. Then make a decision and give an honest answer. They may or may not agree, and they may or may not choose to stay, but that’s what treating them with respect looks like, just like you ask them to treat you, and each other.
To instead say “Sorry, your feedback is a distraction from the mission and will no longer be tolerated” is so unbelievably disrespectful, and wrapping your decision in the noble flag of the mission is dishonest. It’s hard to tell sometime whether people are deluding themselves or only trying to delude other people, but holy shit, what a doozy.
Good leaders know they will make mistakes, and when they do, they own them, apologize properly, and fix them. They do not use their power to silence people and then swagger around like they own the moral high ground.