When the CEO is told: ‘You’ve shattered morale’
An all-hands company meeting can be a CEO’s worst nightmare, as the office hierarchy is flipped, staff diffidence miraculously transforms into belligerence, and humiliation is but a laugh away.
What’s a chief executive’s most unpleasant experience? Her first board meeting? Shareholders’ annual questions? Choosing an executive assistant?
It may be the all-hands staff meeting. For a short period, the office hierarchy is flipped by the force of group psychology. Staff diffidence miraculously transforms into belligerence. One wrong phrase and the room can erupt in jeers. Humiliation is a laugh away.
Mark Zuckerberg, a man whose fame is inverse to his popularity, experienced the pain of the semi-public putdown last month. A meeting of Meta Platforms, the day after some 4000 staff were dismissed, was recorded and shared with the Wall Street Journal.
As a transcript demonstrated, the chief executive’s decision to submit himself to feedback didn’t engender universal goodwill.
“You’ve shattered the morale and confidence in leadership of many high performers who work with intensity,” one employee said. “Why should we stay at Meta?”
Perks
Why, indeed. Because the pay is good? The free meals and snacks? The four months parental leave? A head-office barber, dentist and video arcade? The power to spy on relatives?
Meta’s metaverse is not very popular. Bloomberg
Zuckerberg could have said that, but didn’t. After all, there was one person responsible for the cuts, which totalled about 21,000, or about a quarter of Meta’s workforce. Him.
After founding a business that built one of history’s greatest time-wasting websites, Facebook, Zuckerberg had forced the organisation to concentrate on something it calls the metaverse.
If you don’t know what a metaverse is, don’t worry. Almost no-one goes there.
‘A great place’
Zuckerberg, who isn’t yet 40, had already accepted responsibility for the miscalculation. His response to the angry employee made Facebook sound like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
“There’s no other company in the world that delivers social experiences at the scale that we are and that does so across such a diversity of different products and use cases,” he said.
“So if you want to reach people in the billions and have a massive impact, I think this is a great place to be.”
Local leadership expert Margot Faraci says Zuckerberg deserves respect for facing his scared employees, many of whom may be unfamiliar with the business cycle.
“He’s having a conversation, which a lot of people don’t do,” she says. “It’s obviously risky and we have got to give Zuckerberg credit for being brave.”
Not slack at Slack
CEOs prepared to face their staff, en masse, have to prepare for adverse publicity.
The popularity of in-house messaging systems such as Slack, and a social media-saturated workforce, means unpleasant internal interactions are now often shared for the world’s benefit.
Slack is a great tool for office co-operation. Who would have thought it could be used for office division?
The New York Times Co didn’t.
A wage dispute at the newspaper this year led one reporter to post on a Slack channel created to praise staff achievements: “I want to #celebrate the fact that those fat executive bonuses were the result of the company hitting its business goals – which it did because of the hard work of its employees, including nearly 1500 Guild [union] members.”
Survivors
To avoid Slack backlashes, some big companies now fire staff by private email, and end their IT privileges immediately.
Career coach Tony Crosby advises CEOs to issue a brief statement assuring survivors they will be looked after. Work is a selfish place, and those left behind apparently can feel neglected when the departed get all the attention.
“The remaining staff often become frightened and angry,” Crosby says. “Management often neglects the emotional impact whilst trying to support the redundant people in a caring and compassionate manner.”
The most interesting staff meeting I attended was at the Journal after Rupert Murdoch bought the paper. Standing on copier paper boxes in the New York newsroom, the billionaire didn’t take questions.
After finishing a short speech, he just said: “Now get back to work. You don’t want to be scooped tomorrow.”
Murdoch, who is now 92, was saying: I don’t answer to you, I’m the boss.
It was such a power play that Murdoch’s fictional alter ego, Logan Roy, performed the same stunt in Succession.
Not many CEOs can pull that off. But it was hard not to respect the old man’s grit, I thought, as I returned to aimlessly scrolling through Twitter.
Read the original article at afr.com
