Lies We Tell in Leadership, Part 3: Polite Fictions
Lies We Tell in Leadership, Part 3: Polite Fictions
Where the elephant in the room feels peer-pressured into saying "the emperor has no clothes!"
Deep in the bowels of Leadership Land, you’re sitting in the seedy tavern known as Liar’s Lair. Above the rim of your lip-smeared glass, you spot your dentist across the room. You’d recognize that face anywhere; what else is there to stare at when you’re slouched awkwardly in his chair, with your jaws wide open and a bright light in your eyes?
He comes over and asks if you’ve been brushing and flossing after every meal, like he directed. “Yes,” you reply, performing all manner of mental gymnastics to rationalize the lie.
“Good,” says the dentist, secretly relieved that you’re not meticulous enough about your dental hygiene to put him out of a job.
The two of you enjoy your drinks in polite (if slightly uneasy) silence.
“They Pretend to Pay Us; We Pretend To Work”
In many human societies, there are gaps between the collective ideal and how people actually behave. Polite fictions are the lies we tell each other to keep those gaps propped open. Most polite fictions are maintained by false signaling and lies of omission (deceit by leaving the truth unsaid), rather than lies of commission (telling outright falsehoods).
Polite fictions generally fall into two categories:
Lies to lubricate social interactions; many polite fictions are designed to avoid stirring the cauldron of seething emotions like envy, anger, and lust. These polite fictions usually originate in the Desert of Good Intentions.
Lies that are downright dysfunctional; a group of conspirators can fabricate a polite fiction to enrich or protect themselves at the expense of the collective. These polite fictions spawn in the Straits of Conflicting Interests.
Here are some of the lies we tell – lies that create and reinforce polite fictions.
“You have problems, we have solutions.”
Your dentist cares about your welfare – especially if you have dental problems to which he can sell you a solution. A consulting firm cares about clients, to the extent that the clients can pay for solutions to their problems.1 A non-profit organization cares about the world…at least, we assume they do, since they made a full-time job out of fighting injustice.
What if you have no dental problems? If your dentist is a nice guy, he would salute your hygiene, bow gracefully as he retreats out the door, and treat another patient whose teeth are as rotten as yours are impeccable. But would a consulting firm be happy to put itself out of business by solving all their clients’ problems? Would a non-profit organization go quietly into the night after winning its war against injustice?
The Shirky Principle states:
Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
One of the biggest whirlpools in the Straits of Conflicting Interests is named the Shirky Maelstrom in honor of the Principle.
The tree of evil has many branches. If your business, non-profit organization, or government agency becomes adept at trimming those branches, what incentive do they have to attack the root of evil?
“We follow all the rules, all the time.”
Note: we’re talking about rules that govern human behavior, not the laws of physics or sound engineering principles. Disobeying those rules lead to catastrophic failure, not polite fictions.
We work in organizations with byzantine bylaws. We use procedure manuals so thick they can stop a sniper’s bullet. We sign 50-page contracts containing 7 pages of content and 43 pages of legal boilerplate.
When there are too many rules, we end up with a polite fiction that everyone follows them. In reality:
Some people will enforce all the rules, all the time. In organizations governed by trivial and arbitrary rules, petty tyrants use their sense of self-righteousness and high levels of activity to cover for how little value they actually provide2.
Other people will selectively enforce the rules, creating two parallel universes:
The de jure universe where people appear to be following the rules. From the outside, this universe looks identical to the realm ruled by the petty tyrants.
The de facto universe where people follow a secret unwritten set of rules.
If a benevolent and competent leader creates a de facto universe, her team will be nimbler and more productive than the rest of the organization. The leader can even inspire loyalty in her team by forming a protective bubble against dehumanizing rules.
If a negligent, capricious, or incompetent manager creates a de facto universe by selectively enforcing the wrong rules, his team will perform worse than the petty tyrant’s (who at least enforces mediocrity with an iron fist). Unbound by clear rules and expectations, this universe becomes corrupted by individual interests. The result is a patchwork of self-serving ambition, apathy, and an accumulation of hidden risks that the rules were designed to prevent in the first place.
Think about that next time you tap “I accept the terms and conditions” without ever reading the T&Cs because they’re too effing long and you just want to watch cat videos.
“We treat everyone fairly.”
Let’s put aside issues like CEO vs. line worker pay; workplace discrimination; and aristocrats pole-vaulting off piles of privilege, easily clearing obstacles that peasants must clamber over. These are very real inequalities, but they’re not polite fictions. There are many people actively working to close the gap between ideals and stark reality.
We’re writing about instances when leaders are quietly complicit with workplace inequalities, such as:
Ranking subordinates to parcel out the bonus pool during good years, or to triage layoffs during bad years.
Protecting a high-performing team member whose character flaws would’ve gotten a less-productive member fired. This is most common in industries where profits are governed by the power law (e.g. ~20% of the employees are “rainmakers” who earn ~80% of the company’s money).
Matching people’s natural strengths with certain tasks → makes them better at those tasks (at the exclusion of developing other skills) → inviting ever more of the same tasks, in a self-reinforcing cycle. It can be a virtuous cycle for those who receive a stream of interesting assignments, and a vicious cycle for those who excel at performing janitorial work.
Meanwhile, we maintain a polite fiction of fairness and equality to avoid workplace conflict. If people feel like they’re being treated unfairly, you can almost hear morale deflating with the pphhhhhhhhhht noise of a balloon imitating a long, wet fart.
“I'm uniformly productive while I’m in the office.”
Note: this is not a universal polite fiction. If your company culture is “whatever, as long as you get your work done,” you can laugh condescendingly at the office drones.
Crack open the Company McCorporateface, Inc. employee handbook, and you’ll probably find expectations (written in third person and passive voice) like this:
Employees are expected to maintain a professional appearance that obliterates any hint of individuality.
Employees are expected to report to work promptly at the start of business hours and turn on the fountain of productivity. The employee’s fountain is expected to discharge a steady stream of productivity.
Employees that are subject to labor laws or union mandates are expected to turn off the fountain of productivity for:
one break (not to exceed 15 minutes) in the morning
one break (not to exceed 15 minutes) in the afternoon
one lunch period (not to exceed 30 minutes) at exactly noon o’clock.
Exceptions to the above may only be approved under the light of the full moon, by the CEO’s aggressive pit bull, after a blood sacrifice at the Altar of Workplace Productivity.
These are reasonable expectations for a manual laborer who creates interchangeable widgets. Anyone who deviates from the assembly line’s rigid schedule becomes a bottleneck, holding up everything downstream. But for knowledge workers whose job is to problem-solve and whose “widget” is their insight, everything is variable – from the input parameters to the quality vs. quantity of the output.
So why do we maintain the polite fiction that people are robots? Some possibilities:
The bureaucratic fantasy that only a record of steady productivity can justify an employee’s steady paycheck
To avoid resentment among colleagues when one group believes the rest aren’t pulling their weight
To weaponize the rules against low-producing employees while simultaneously protecting against accusations of wrongful/unfair dismissal
To vaccinate against pseudo-productivitis, an infectious organizational disease driven by unpunished social loafing
Is the sound of crickets on a Friday afternoon the result of everyone furiously wrapping up work to close out the week? Or is it the sound of everyone mentally checking out for the weekend?
You decide.
“I left my libido at home.”
Every few months, there’s a rumble atop Executive Mountain, and a high-level employee (usually a man) of some big-name corporation comes tumbling down. The reason: having an “inappropriate relationship” with another employee (usually a woman from the Middle Management Foothills). While “inappropriate relationships” can also involve other types of favoritism, the ones that are scandalous enough to be newsworthy are typically romantic/sexual in nature.
Our bodies don’t come equipped with a biological light-switch that we can flick from “on” → “off” when we transition from our personal lives to the office. Our pupils dilate when we make eye contact with an attractive person. Our brains release a cocktail of addictive chemicals when we interact with someone we like, creating a carnal hunger for more interactions. We’d be deluding ourselves if we believed that physical attraction doesn’t influence workplace interactions simply because everyone pretends like it doesn’t.
But consider the ways that a workplace romantic drama could play out, and it becomes clear why we maintain this polite fiction:
If one person isn’t interested in the other, that’s a potential harassment lawsuit.
If both people are interested in each other and work closely together, then there will probably be accusations of favoritism from colleagues.
If a torrid relationship ends badly, it results in icy silence between the ex-lovers. Everyone else must awkwardly tiptoe around the shattered remnants of their relationship.
A burgeoning workplace romance doesn’t just add one more distraction to a world already overflowing with dings, buzzes, and notifications; it’s a serial drama that sucks you in like an addictive TV show.
Workplace romances swirl in the push-pull eddies of the Straits of Conflicting Interest. A lot of things must align perfectly for the interests of two lovers to outweigh the distraction to themselves, to organizational leadership, and to spectators.
We left this polite fiction for last to emphasize that lying can be justified if the truth carries greater harm. Imagine importing an idle housewife’s fixation on celebrity gossip into your office – how productive would people be? By maintaining the polite fiction that we’re paragons of purity, we’re suppressing a fertile source of scandals so that people can chatter about other rumors focus on getting actual work done. But if you’re willing to risk a one-way trip to the Career Swamp for the possibility of short-term euphoria…go ahead and tell your attractive colleague that you daydream about removing the dress she wore to the last holiday party.
Using your teeth.
Peering into the Taboo Tunnels
Back in the tavern of Liar’s Lair, your dentist stands up and bids you farewell. He hands you a goodie bag containing a toothbrush, a roll of floss, and a small tube of toothpaste. You make a mental note to antagonize the first Halloween trick-or-treater who visits your home by re-gifting your dentist’s goodies to that poor kid instead of candy.
As your dentist exits the tavern, you notice two large tunnels leading out of Liar’s Lair to places unknown. The floor of one tunnel is strewn with sand, and the rocky walls of the other is caked with a white flaky substance. A cool breeze blows out of the second tunnel, and you catch a whiff of moist seaweed and salt spray – you realize that the white flaky stuff is encrusted sea salt!v
You ask the bartender what the tunnels are for. His raspy answer emanates from somewhere deep within his bushy beard:
Them’s the tunnels that take you to other parts of Leadership Land. Sandy one goes to the Desert of Good Intentions. Salty one takes ya to the Straits of Conflicting Interests.
S’mtimes, a sandstorm blows in some liars from the Desert, and they c’mere to have me pry off the unintended consequences that’s bitin’ them in they’s rears. Other times, the Straits flood the salty tunnel, and wash in a buncha scoundrels whose lies mixed badly with them’s companies.
‘S good fer my business.
You nod. It makes sense that leaders sometimes lie with good intentions in mind, and sometimes to further their self-interests at the expense of the collective.
Or maybe the bartender’s lying to you. This is Liar’s Lair, after all.
We openly admitted that we face the same bad incentives in this earlier post.
This only applies to trivial and arbitrary rules; complex rules are not inherently evil. Draconian regulations and Gestapo-like enforcement are mandatory when leaders must guard against huge downsides (like accounting fraud or the release of weapons of mass destruction into the wild). We’ve advocated for the judicious use of mistrust in past articles.