Avoiding Contagion

Bad leadership and aggressive management practices are highly contagious. So are bad attitudes. If you spend your time around mean-spirited, aggressive, dishonest, and narrow-minded people, you will find that some of it will rub off on you. The same goes for listening to cruel gossip, constant backbiting, and formation whining. Like germs and bacteria, behaviors of this type gradually undermine our resistance and destroy our mental and spiritual health.

Organizations and executives that tolerate—let alone encourage—negative, mean-spirited, and aggressive behavior in the cause of driving up profits and shutting out the competition defile themselves. Why do they do it? Because they focus only on the outcome. It's that myopic emphasis on the bottom line. Yet the true bottom line, the only one that really counts, is the result of all additions and subtractions—not just the financial ones. And a toxic culture—bosses who treat their staff like dirt; staff who whine and complain, and indulge in backbiting and dish the dirt on one another—and executives who happily pocket the cash and hold their noses, are huge subtractions that can turn just about any level of purely financial profit into a thumping great social, emotional, and community loss.

I have seen reasonable, ordinary, basically decent people treat their colleagues in cruel and malicious ways—quite thoughtlessly—under the influence of a boss who made that kind of behavior both acceptable and necessary to keep his favor.

It’s very easy to get used to what you experience every day. In time, it becomes almost normal. It doesn’t feel too bad—or too hard to put up with. I have seen reasonable, ordinary, basically decent people treat their colleagues in cruel and malicious ways—quite thoughtlessly—under the influence of a boss who made that kind of behavior both acceptable and necessary to keep his favor. I’m sure those people no longer felt that what they were doing was particularly unpleasant, let alone wrong. It was “business as usual” and “the way we do things around here.” The unpleasant boss’s attitudes had rubbed off onto everyone else. Days and weeks spent in a poisonous atmosphere of jealousy and political intrigue had hardened people without them even noticing.

We all want to survive. We all find it easier (and much more comfortable and safer too) to fit in, rather than stand out against someone who seems to have the power to harm us or our careers. If that is what we do, over time the pain and the dissonance between our true feelings and how we have convinced ourselves to think and act lessens. It is no longer so hard. The famous experiment is well known where students were persuaded to administer strong electric shocks to their colleagues as part of an experiment (in reality, to actors who mimicked being given agonizing “punishment”). The students did it because that was what they were told to do. That was what they believed was expected and required of them. By moving them slowly from administering small, apparently totally harmless shocks towards inflicting what seemed, on the outside, to be severe pain, they were induced to treat the whole process as “acceptable.” Their minds denied what they were seeing. Most claimed afterwards that they assumed that it had to be safe, however much the supposed subjects yelled in pain.

. . . they have gradually been induced to believe that this is “normal.” This is how business has to be in the 21st century. This is what it takes to succeed.

That is what happens when you spend too much time in a toxic environment. You become hardened. You no longer notice what is going on. And that is what is happening in too many organizations today: people working horrendous hours, driving themselves and others ever harder, treating subordinates like servants, and allowing themselves to become part of unethical, even sometimes dishonest business practices—all because they have gradually been induced to believe that this is “normal.” This is how business has to be in the 21st century. This is what it takes to succeed.

The ends cannot ever justify the means. That is the one all-encompassing, underlying truth of ethics—in business and everywhere else. Howyou do something is as important as what you do. Achieving even great results by dishonest, disagreeable, or downright noxious means removes any benefit or luster from the outcome. It becomes tainted and worthless.

The ends cannot ever justify the means. That is the one all-encompassing, underlying truth of ethics—in business and everywhere else.

Contagion requires frequent contact. It needs you to breathe the same air, share the same office space, inhabit the same environment, laugh at the same jokes, as the source of infection. Jerks, bullies, unethical weasels, and domineering, egotistical fools spread the infection of their attitudes and opinions wherever they go. Keep away from them. Keep away from the contagion of bad, Hamburger Management. Treat it as you would a bucketful of germ-ridden, noxious sewage. For that is what it is, and it is slowly poisoning our organizations—and our business values.

We do not have to allow this to happen. We can fight back and we can win. Mankind has conquered many of the infections that used to make human life nasty, brutish and short. We can do it again. If enough people quietly refuse to allow themselves to be tainted, the contagion will stop spreading. If enough organizations refuse to turn blind eyes to those who deliver profits by unacceptable means—and root out the bullies, the petty dictators, the cheats, and the assholes—such behavior will ultimately be ended. It is simply a matter of choice.

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