Your Employees Are Mercenaries, But They Should Be Cultists
Your Employees Are Mercenaries, But They Should Be Cultists
Lessons learned about loyalty and opportunism from the June 2023 Wagner Group rebellion against the Russian Federation
We’re paying a quick visit to Executive Mountain today. In case you’re behind on the news: the Wagner Group sounds like a German manufacturer of dish soap, but it’s actually a Russian mercenary army! The Wagner Group has been involved in the Russian war against friendly invasion and totally-not-bellicose occupation of Ukraine.
…until recently, when the Wagner Group rebelled against the Russian government. The thick plottens.
Instead of munching on popcorn as we watch the drama unfold, we wanted to glean some lessons that we can take back to our roles in leadership.
Niccolò Machiavelli’s Disdain of Mercenaries
In The Prince, Machiavelli opened a can of vitriol on mercenaries:
Mercenary forces are useless and dangerous. Any ruler who keeps his state dependent upon mercenaries will never have real peace or security, for they are disorganized, undisciplined, ambitious, and faithless.
[…]
They have no tie of devotion, no motive for taking the field except their meager pay, and this is not enough to make them willing to die for the prince.
[…]
If mercenary captains are skilled, you cannot trust them, for they will always seek to gain power for themselves either by oppressing you, their master, or by oppressing others against your wishes. If, on the other hand, they are not skillful soldiers, they will still be your ruin.
[…]
Experience shows that only princes and republics with troops of their own have accomplished great things, while mercenary forces have brought nothing but harm.
We might look at a loyal fighter on one hand, and a soldier of fortune on the other, and treat the distinction between the two as little more than an intellectual curiosity. After all, most of us aren’t blue-blooded royalty with a kingdom to defend. But don’t be fooled by labels – just like the Wagner Group’s misleading name distracts you from its true nature, the term “mercenary” can distract you from the fact that your organization hires them. Or that you work with them. You might be one yourself.
Except we don’t call them “mercenaries;” we use the term “employees.”
Ask yourself:
If my organization stopped paying me, would I continue to work for free?
If a competitor offered me a 20% raise, plus my own private office, would I switch my allegiance to them?
If my organization asked me to miss my kids’ award ceremony to work on a big momentous project, would I agree to it?
If your answers were no-yes-no, congratulations! You’re a modern-day mercenary. Once upon a time, it was normal to be hired by an American corporation and spend three decades working there. Nowadays, it’s more common to roam about the capitalistic battlefield and sell one’s time, skills, and dignity to the highest bidder.
Niccolò Machiavelli Hates on Auxiliaries
In the following chapter of The Prince, Machiavelli pilloried auxiliary soldiers borrowed from another ruler:
Such forces may be useful and trustworthy in pursuit of their own interests, but they are almost always disastrous to the one who borrows them. If they are defeated, the prince is ruined. If they are victorious, the prince becomes their prisoner.
[…]
With mercenaries, the danger lies in their cowardice; with auxiliaries, it lies in their capability. Hence, wise prices have always shunned such troops and have relied on their own. They have thought it better to lose with their own troops than to win with those of others, judging it no true victory to win with another’s arms.
The modern-day equivalent of an auxiliary soldier, borrowed from elsewhere to accomplish a specific purpose, is a consultant/contractor. Hiring a consultant or contractor to complete one job is certainly cheaper than keeping them around full-time, but often there are agency costs in doing so. In last week's post, we alluded to the conflict of interest between what the client wants (to solve a problem once and for all) and what the consultant/contractor wants (to keep the problem alive so the client must keep paying for services). Some examples:
Company McCorporateface, Inc. hires a management consultant firm to evaluate a complex problem, and the firm proposes an even more complex solution. The solution creates consequent problems, like new heads sprouting from the neck-stump of the freshly-decapitated Hydra. Company McCorporateface, Inc. must re-hire the management consultant firm to propose new, increasingly-complex solutions to these new problems.
You hire a realtor who’s more interested in flipping your house quickly than in getting you the best selling price.
A government agency hires an IT consulting firm to build a software platform that’s so complex that the firm must be retained for ongoing updates, bug fixes, and tech support.
You hire an attorney who’s more interested in accumulating billable hours than finishing work efficiently.
In Machiavelli’s day, a ruler may literally become imprisoned by borrowed soldiers, or become figuratively imprisoned by his dependence on them. Our modern-day “auxiliaries” mostly fall in the latter category; it’s not like the housing contractor will forcibly occupy your kitchen and refuse to leave after remodeling it.
Lessons from the Wagner Group Deadly Dish Soap Private Military Company
Five hundred years after Machiavelli poured out his invectives against mercenaries and auxiliaries, we can summarize and generalize his thoughts as follows:
Loyalty and opportunism are opposites. A loyal follower is more dependable than an opportunistic one.
Try to view loyalty and opportunism amorally, without associating one with “good” and the other with “bad.” For example, job-hopping (opportunism) is very lucrative for people with marketable skills, and a history of job-hopping can even signal that you’re in high demand. But that same opportunism is costly to employers who must recruit replacements and train new staff, and takes resources away from investing in existing employees. This creates a vicious cycle where employers and employees point at each other and say “I’ll be more loyal when you are.”
Likewise, loyalty carries a positive connotation, but it’s not all rainbows and soap bubbles. Loyalty to friends is great…until it leads to cronyism, adoption of their bad habits, and complicity with their bad behavior. Loyalty to family is great…until we feel compelled to aid and abet blood relatives who happen to be toxic jerks.
You can’t trust mercenary employees and auxiliary consultants
A mercenary is loyal to themselves, just like most at-will employees are. Hiring a consultant from Accenture, McKinsey, BCG, or Deloitte means you’re hiring an auxiliary who answers to a different master – a master whose interests aren’t fully aligned with yours.
Reliance on mercenary employees and consultants can lull you into a false sense of security. Like a Thanksgiving turkey fed daily by human caretakers, our belief in our star employee’s continued performance reaches its maximum…just before they leave for a competitor. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group, built trust with the Russian government over 25 years – trust that peaked just before he turned his private army around from the Ukranian front lines and marched against Moscow.
Clearly, Machiavelli was right: the best employee is a loyal one. How do you get one of those?
Patriots, cultists, and loyalty
When Machiavelli dedicated The Prince as a half-résumé, half-instruction manual on prince-ing to Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino, he strongly advocated for all rulers to use their own forces. That is, they should deploy patriots – people who have very clear ties to the ruler’s territory, or to the ruler himself.
What does that mean, in the context of the modern workplace? Well, since slavery is (mostly) illegal, and indentured servitude is (mostly) a relic of the past, all of the low-hanging fruit have been legislated away. You’ll have to create workplace patriots yourself. You’ll have to make people want to stay with you and your organization.
The standard playbook for creating patriots is to start kids early. In the United States, we put kids in maximum-security schools and make them recite the pledge of allegiance very morning. We teach them sanitized versions of American history where the Founding Fathers were superheroes. We inculcate the belief that Americans won at everything: we won at the Revolutionary War, we won at manifest destiny, we won at the glorified autoimmune conflict known as the Civil War, and we saved the world twice in both World War I and World War II (you’re welcome, Europe). We skip over the genocides, the costs we externalized on the rest of the world, and the wars that we “won” in a George Dubya Bush “Mission Accomplished” sort of way.
We can’t indoctrinate working adults the same way we pound patriotism into the heads of young kids. However, we can use propaganda techniques to build an organizational culture that fosters loyalty:
Loyalty to a higher purpose/power
American military officers receive their commission (authority) from the commander-in-chief (the U.S. President). However, they pledge loyalty to the Constitution of the United States. Contrast that with mercenary armies, where the soldiers pledge their loyalty to only to the commander. The outcome became abundantly clear when the Wagner Group turned against the Russian government.
Employees who believe in the organizational mission is the closest thing you’ll get to a “workplace patriot.” After all, a patriot is someone who believes that their country is better than all others because they happened to be born there. A local sports fan is someone who supports a team for no other reason than the team being associated with the city he happens to live in. A workplace loyalist is someone who believes that her company is better than all others for no other reason other than her working there.
Loyalty to other people in the organization
Sometimes, you can’t get an employee “on the bus” of your organizational mission no matter how cool it is. Your organizational mission could be to solve world hunger by delivering high fructose corn syrup from low earth orbit and there will be some mercenary employees who only work to pay the bills.
That’s where building a Temple of Trust comes in. An employee who’s hesitant to get “on the bus” might still acquiesce if all their friends are on the bus. You might not be able to foster their loyalty in the organization, but you can encourage them to build loyalty to other people in the organization. Just make sure some of those other people are organizational loyalists, or they’ll take all their friends with them when they get bitten by the opportunist bug and leave for a competitor.
Loyalty to both purpose AND people
Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX companies are known for brutal working conditions. Once upon a time, Apple operated under the tyranny of Steve Job’s “reality distortion field”. Memoirs of the early days of PayPal and Intel tell similar stories. Yet, there seemed to be no shortage of people lining up at the door to gain entry into these prestigious companies. Why is that?
Our best guess is that these companies are essentially cults that make money. Like any cohesive cult, their members are fanatically loyal to the organizational mission and to the leader. The organizational mission cannot be mainstream, keeping the group small, insular, and exclusive to outsiders. Disillusioned cultists are summarily exiled from the group, which circles the wagons against outside influence.
If Niccolò Machiavelli were alive today, he would nod approvingly at the cult-like organizations staffed by loyalist employees, rather than by mercenaries and consultants.
We’re publishing this article while the news about the Wagner Group is still fresh – striking while the iron is hot, as they say. We’ll skip this upcoming Friday and return to Liar’s Lair on July 8.