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Despicable leadership: US Coast Guard

Today, I start a new section on the blog with examples of leadership which displays very little regard for employees as human beings. The point is not to shame individual people, but to prompt self-reflection: none of us is free from doing something less human despite our best intentions.
The honor of the first post goes to the US coast guard, who offered the advice to employees during the US government shutdown in early 2019 that included the following:

Other than cutting back on your expenses, the only other way to compensate for the loss of income is to add new income.

Be creative.

Finding supplemental income during your furlough period might be challenging, but here are a few ideas for adding income:
-Have a garage sale — clean out your attic, basement and closets at the same time.
-Sell unwanted, larger ticket items through the newspaper or online.
-Offer to watch children, walk pets or house-sit.
-Turn your hobby into income.
-Have untapped teaching skills and expertise? Tutor students, give music or sports lessons.
-Become a mystery shopper. Retailers are desperate to check how their in-store customer service is and will employ you to shop and rate their service.

See the full text in this link.

Is culture an effective leadership tool?

Culture may be a far less effective leadership tool than previously thought. In a 2016 paper, Professors Stephen Vaisey and Omar Lizardo found that the values that people hold later in life are mostly shaped by the values acquired in their early life.

What does this mean for leaders?

Well, this research suggests that leaders may have very little power to change people’s values through corporate rituals and other ways of managing corporate culture. If people’s values are difficult to change, then leaders need to pay far more attention to the role of values in the hiring process. Leaders have to chose, rather than develop people with values and beliefs that match their company’s culture.

I am Kimi

Kimi Raikonen left Ferrari F1 a few days ago. He was Ferrari's last F1 champion. However, Kimi was never considered one of the greats. The team and the fans snubbed him in relation with whomever he partnered with at Ferrari. Nevertheless, neither Sebastian Vettel nor Fernando Alonso who are considered much better than him were able to win a title with Ferrari F1. I feel like Kimi. I have some good results, but never got real credit for my accomplishments. Never considered a peer by my colleagues from MIT. Nevertheless, like Kimi still races, I still write and publish. For the love of the game.

Maybe it’s time to rethink the open office

Open offices are popular and for good reason: they reduce cost and they have the potential to improve interaction (and eventually foster innovation and creativity). However their very design emphasizes the relationship of domination of senior managers over junior managers and employees (senior managers have closed offices, everybody else works outside), leads to performance-killing interruptions and support sexism and harassment. What is the alternative? Well, according to these ‘focus blinders‘, not co-working spaces. I personally love working in those nooks that you can find in libraries, where you can be on your own but also be with others in the same space.

Why I am pessimist about CSR

After spending time with managers inside and outside their companies, I lost whatever little faith I had in the increasing drive towards Corporate Social Responsibility. For me, the most painful proof of how little companies care about values and doing good is the need to make performance arguments for human rights, such as gender equality. Would it be ok to discriminate against women if it was more profitable? Of course not. And yet, that argument continues to central to the fight for equality (just take a look at these citation counts).

And then there is this: a purely calculative approach to taking a stance on social issues: a tool to find out whether companies should do so or not.

My only hope is that a few of my students will escape the structural conditions pushing for unethical behavior (see my recent Organization Science piece about how powerful these can be).