Stop Rewarding Bad Behavior
Recently, a friend from college who is a chef and food writer posted about Gordon Ramsay's abusive behavior in the kitchen -- violently assaulting cooks while hurling verbal abuse and threats at them. The clips were from the documentary ('Boiling Point') filmed at his restaurant when he was attempting to get his 3rd Michelin star. It's what gave him a mainstream TV presence and birthed his persona.
The day before I chanced upon clips from David Letterman's shows harassing female celebrities like Lindsey Lohan, Paris Hilton and Janet Jackson. They were bad enough that I had to stop watching. The harassment was relentless - until the guests were in tears, repeatedly pleading with him to stop, squirming in their seats at his sexist comments and interrogation. The man simply would not stop. It was inhumane, vile and mean-spirited. He was clearly exploiting a system that rewarded his behavior -- with more eyeballs, more clicks, better ratings -- at the expense of these women's humanity.
Our continued tolerance for bad behavior by the powerful or popular gives us men like Donald Trump, who after a lifetime of getting away with it, know that "when you're a star, they let you do it."
For me, this was first and foremost a reminder of my responsibility in being more curious and judicious about people propped up by media and popular culture. Ignorance is not an excuse in 2021, and I do not want a role in increasing their clout by being part of their fan club. "Please do not be inspired by him", was my chef friend's simple plea about Ramsay. This behavior should not be dismissed as personality quirks, as still happens every day in tech leadership circles.
And, it reminded me of the oversized role media plays in putting these men on pedestals and giving them airtime to bump up their popularity, the role institutions play in handing them social and financial rewards, the role other powerful individuals play in protecting them even as they violate basic boundaries of human conduct. Unless these men stop being rewarded for their bad behavior, more young leaders will continue to aspire to this behavior.
But perhaps the most critical point is this: this behavior cannot be isolated from these men's success, because: (a) they have achieved this success in part due to this behavior, by exploiting a system that rewards them for it - in DL's case more abuse, better ratings, more shows, and (b) It is precisely their success that makes it critical for them to model better behavior. With their oversized influence, they are setting industry standards, creating culture and building value systems. What they do gets normalized and deemed acceptable. Behavior like this is what makes people think "this is what it takes to get to the top!". When successful people continue to be rewarded for bad behavior, it becomes second nature to us to ignore it or to separate it from their success.
I also could not help but be reminded by this of the bad behavior of tech leaders, which gets glorified and rewarded. I hear friends say: "Yes, they may not be perfect humans but I can still be inspired by their success and genius, at how fast they grew!"
There comes a point in these companies' trajectory where it's clear that one of the reasons they were able to grow so fast is because they abandoned basic standards for worker pay, rights, dignity, and ethics. They abandoned boundaries and guardrails. We must ask ourselves the question -- how much of Uber's scale can be attributed to the financial benefits afforded to it because of extractive practices with its drivers (underpaid by algorithms opaque to them, not offered paid time off, nor health insurance). Would Amazon's pace of outgrowing competition have looked different without its exploitation of workers and its violation of anti-trust policies? Could Facebook have seen the growth it did without its unethical but monumentally profitable business practices year after year?
Use markets, don't abuse them. Use your workers, don't exploit them. As Jacqueline Novogratz puts in her new book: "Isn't that the point of markets? To enable a fair and reasonable exchange of goods and services between parties so that both benefit from it?"
And this is possible. Let's not let these bad actors convince us that one must model their behavior in order to succeed. Let's instead be inspired by the models --of which there are many -- of those who achieved success and scale while treating people well, and doing justice to their influence on building norms, policies and culture.
I am inspired every day by business leaders who have shown us a new way, such as Rose Marcario, the ex-CEO of Patagonia, who used the company's influence in the outdoor gear industry to pressure large institutions and state governments into more environmentally friendly policies. Innovation is not more of the same - it's imagining new and better ways to push humanity forward. These are leaders who understand that the tension between financial success and societal benefit that we are so hung up on is a false dichotomy. They have unlearned the half-lies we are taught about the artificial boundaries between ourselves and our work, between a company's financial and societal impact.
Rose Marcario says 'Work is where the self meets the world', and I love that. Leaders like her see their work as an extension of themselves. They see the companies they run and the products they build as an opportunity to advance their views and values. Imagine the world we'd live in if more leaders thought this way.
