Empathy for the Devil
Why big companies behave badly, and why smart people do dumb things.
I made an uncontroversial claim about ghosting recently — I said that it’s extraordinarily common. It’s so common that it’s the become the rule of what you can expect while job searching, rather than an unpleasant exception. That sucks.
In the comments, some reacted as though I was defending the ghosters. That stung! I’ve written enough by now about courtesy in business. I won’t prattle on about that now.
It does raise a question that I want to explore this week. The question is this:
If everyone agrees that ghosting is bad, why does it happen?
While we’re at it, what about the other discourteous, harmful, dumb things that companies do? Things like launching ill-considered “return to office” policies, or implementing travel & expense policies that cost more in lost productivity than they could ever save from the bottom line.
When someone does something we don’t like, empathy calls us to react with compassion and understanding. It’s true in life, and it’s true in business. It’s especially incumbent on leaders to approach such moments with curiosity and empathy. That’s the first step if we hope to change or improve the behavior in our own workplace.
Empathy comes easily for someone you agree with. You don’t need an influencer or a coach to tell you that a bad thing is bad. We can all agree that neither companies nor people should do discourteous, mean, classless, harmful things.
I want to go a bit further, though, and to try to understand the “why.” If ghosting is as prevalent as everyone says it is, why is everybody doing it? If “return to office” policies are counter-productive and hypocritical, why are they littering the news?
Perhaps it’s rampant hypocrisy, or maybe it’s a misunderstanding of what’s really going on. Probably it’s both. Someone once said “assume good intent” when confronted with bad behavior. Any emotionally intelligent person, once they’ve processed their revulsion and judgement, should feel an urge to ask why.
After a lifetime in business I’ve learned that when an otherwise successful company is observed doing something harmful or stupid, it’s almost always for one simple reason.
If you want to be successful working in the corporate world, understanding the why can help you preserve your sanity without giving up your common sense.
When Easy Things are Hard
The simple, shared root cause of a lot bad corporate behavior is this:
Common sense doesn’t scale.
Bad decisions in business can often be better understood when you think about them this way. It doesn’t make them suck any less, and I’m not excusing or apologizing bad decisions. I do think that working to understand the cruel world a little better can open the door to some opportunities.
Recently I came across a metaphor that helped clarify my thinking. Let me try it out on you.
A right-hand turn on a red light is generally permitted almost everywhere in North America. It might be forbidden at a particular intersection, but there are only two major jurisdictions that forbid it city-wide: Montréal, Quebec and New York, New York.
Both are large island cities with high population densities that predate the modern automobile. Both have cultural orientations that favor pedestrians and bicycles — at least compared to many other places.
Why is the very sensible and convenient red right turn (“RRT”) banned in these places? Because regulators believe that the public safety benefits override the convenience of motorists.
Doesn’t that seem a little basic to you? Wouldn’t a modern, thoughtful policy call for a more flexible approach? Why can’t I make an RRT when the design of the intersection makes it obviously safe? Or when it’s simply clear that nobody’s around?
There are a lot of complicated ways to answer that question. The best answer, though, is a very simple one. In fact, “simplicity” is the answer.
Simple rules are easier to understand, remember, and follow. Complicated ideas, rules, or explanations are harder to process, especially at the scale of a large population. Experienced people who make decisions about complex environments prefer simpler approaches, even when a more complicated one, in theory, might produce a better result.
That’s because simple things get harder to manage as the contextual complexity rises. It’s a simple thing to explain the exceptions to a rule to a single person. Making that work at the scale of a dense city — or a corporation — is much harder.
Urban policymakers understand this, and the leaders of corporations get it all too well.
That doesn’t make it ok for leaders to do stupid or hypocritical things, but it might be easier on you if you understand why they’re doing it.
Wielding a Blunt Instrument
If you didn’t like the stoplight metaphor, here’s a snazzier one for you.
Ian Fleming, the author who created James Bond, described the spy as a “blunt instrument” for achieving the goals of the British government. The writer envisioned the spy as a tough, quiet character who rendered the subtle complexities of statecraft into sudden, violent action — with all of the musical nuance of a hammer striking a bell.
(There’s a great moment in Casino Royale where Judy Dench as Bond’s minder “M” makes an oblique and insulting reference to this aspect of his origin story. The full line in the film is “Bond, this may be too much for a ‘blunt instrument’ to understand, but arrogance and self-awareness seldom go hand-in-hand.” That’s a great piece of emotionally intelligent coaching, right there.)
As a leader, I think about this a lot. “Blunt instrument” captures exactly how I sometimes feel when I’m trying to get something done with far less nuance and grace than I’d like. This comes up in my other work, as well. Some days I feel like I’ve made my point with a very sharp pencil. Some days it feels like I’m trying to work a keyboard with boxing gloves on both hands.
As an agent of change in a corporate setting, I prefer the practice of persuasion, empathy, and finding mutual benefit. And sometimes the job does call for that.
But there’s a tough lesson I’ve learned through successively larger roles in increasingly complicated companies: Sometimes I’d like to play the violin, but the part I am playing has been written for the gong.
Measure Once, Cut Twice
The effort to reduce a complicated issue to a simple one for the purposes of leadership can be found everywhere in corporate life. You’ll find them in mission statements, company slogans, T&E policies, job descriptions, and on the first two slides of your VP’s quarterly all-hands.
A great example of this is “remote work” or “return to office” policies. These can seem brain-dead and counter-productive in so many ways. Truly, I’ve never met an executive who really believed that everybody in the company needs to work in the same building. I don’t remember that idea coming up in the previous decade, when the same executives were gleefully off-shoring talent as quickly as they could to countries with lower labor costs.
There’s a more subtle and complex idea behind most RTO. Execs are looking at their global, distributed, remote-first workforces and wondering — for everything they’ve gained — if something has been lost in the process. Perhaps they feel the pendulum has swung a bit farther towards remote than they’d really like, and they’d like to measure the effect of seeing it swing back the other way for a while.
There’s a smarter way to do that than a sudden about-face. The quickest approach is always tempting, though, even if it will strike some as as hypocritical or ham-fisted. Even if there are probably enough people in the company who agree with the idea that if only they were affected, the CEO could have gotten the result they wanted just by asking for volunteers.
Very few CEOs are trained in leadership tactics that include asking for volunteers. And it’s just not practical to implement a policy in a company of any size that requires scrutinizing every person to decide whether or not they should be. So a big dumb simple “return to office” policy will have to do. RTO is often the stupid-looking part of a idea that you can see. It’s probably concealing a decent, more complicated idea in its hulking, heavy shadow.
Sharpen Your Pencil
What use is the observation that sensible intentions appear brain-dead by the time they get to us? They’re still bad! And aren’t I bad for being an apologist, explainer, or defender of them?
Maybe. In a corporate environment, it pays to be aware that decisions that seem dumb on their face aren’t necessarily made with malice, ignorance, or even bad judgement. I have very often seen a good idea — like a way to manage costs, liability, or complexity — grow some extra heads and horns by the time it was put to work.
Somebody starts out with the idea to try to spend a little less on airfare, and now people are being forced you to take a 12-hour flight instead of a 3-hour one to save the company $100. Separating the intent from the effect can be helpful when you’re trying to decide whether your workplace is safe for you.
That understanding can reveal an opportunity. Very often these clumsy policies come with an asterisk that provides for some exception, often involving the approval of an executive or the requirement that you provide some kind of justification in writing. That asterisk is usually a signal that the person who wrote the policy realizes that it is, on some level, broken.
People who make decisions like this leave doors open like these in order to try to avoid unpleasant, unintended consequences. Let that embolden you — my smart, brave, courageous reader — to go after that exception when you think it matters.
Many years ago, I nearly accepted the loss of a very valuable employee to the revelation of a very silly new policy forbidding remote policy except for “special exceptions.” As I was steadying myself to deliver the bad news, a colleague encouraged me to apply for the exception. The asterisked exception process was described in such a tiny font, I’d foolishly assumed it would never be granted. After some paperwork and ceremonial bureaucratic incantations, it was approved. A decade later, that person is still working in that remote-by-exception-only job.
Before I finish up, let’s revisit that idea of “assume good intent” and I’ll now take a moment to revisit some of the advice I gave about ghosting in that other piece.
When you encounter some bad behavior, or what you feel is a very poor decision, it’s always worth asking yourself “why is this happening?” Is it out of ignorance or stupidity? Or could it be the result of someone who is struggling just as hard as you are to get something difficult done?
I have tried hard to gain some peace from trying to think this way when I am ghosted by a potential business partner, the plumber, or a friend who has hasn’t replied to some texts. I’m trying to remind myself that I might not be the most important person in that other person’s life at that moment. It’s hard enough for me to understand my own decisions half the time, so I’m probably not in a perfect position to judge someone else.
I know I have made bad decisions in the past. I’ve probably implemented bad policies. I will probably treat someone worse than I should, or ghost someone unintentionally some day. (But never my paid subscribers 😉)
Right is right, and wrong is wrong. We shouldn’t ever be discourteous, but sometimes we are. Bosses shouldn’t fire people in order to avoid having to do smarter and more difficult cost-cutting work. But sometimes they do.
Knowledge is power. There’s real power to be gained from considering the reasons why people and companies act the way they do. At a minimum, it helps deepen your understanding of the confusing world we live in.
And, you never know. You might find yourself in the position of being asked to do a stupid thing someday. You’ll be better prepared for that moment if you’re ready to ask “why?”