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The activities and interactions were great. They really helped to push the material forward without being corny. The program was very professionally delivered
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Be Kind to Your Employees, but Don’t Always Be Nice
Dan Pallotta of Harvard Business Reviews
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At 39, I was the CEO of a company with a few hundred employees. Depending on the day and the employee you asked, I’d rate anywhere from a zero to a seven on the unkindness scale (10 being a tyrant). I’d guess that I normally hovered around 4.5. I doubt anyone would have rated me a 10—that takes a particular kind of malevolence. I wasn’t taken to raging, other than on one occasion when the lives of the participants in our Montana AIDS Vaccine Ride (a 1,500-person, seven-day bike ride across the Rockies to fight the disease) were in jeopardy during a horrific mountain wind storm that literally blew our temporary city apart. But day to day, I was fairly consistently stern and serious.
Stories of the raging, maniacal CEO are the stuff of legend, from American Apparel’s CEO, Dov Charney, who was accused of choking an employee with both hands, to Walt Disney, whose underlings warned each other he was approaching by repeating the line from Bambi, “Man is in the forest!” Bill Clinton was infamous for his temper tantrums. Even Tim Cook, Apple’s seemingly mild-mannered CEO, terrifies people. In an upcoming book on the CEO, author Yukari Iwatani Kane writes, “When someone was unable to answer a question, Cook would sit without a word while people stared at the table and shifted in their seats. The silence would be so intense and uncomfortable that everyone in the room wanted to back away…Sometimes he would take an energy bar from his pocket while he waited for an answer, and the hush would be broken only by the crackling of the wrapper.”
Is fear and intimidation the only way to build a truly great (not just really good, but great) company? Is kindness a recipe for mediocrity? It’s a tough question. And let’s not kid ourselves that we are always the champions of kindness. When we, as customers, are on the receiving end of a consumer brand screw-up, whether it’s an airline gate attendant ignoring delayed passengers or a software update that disables our cell phone, we sure wish that the company had a dictator at the top prohibiting a culture where these things could happen.
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