Power play
Bosses be bossing. But surviving this period demands working together.
When I began my newspaper career Down Under, there were basically two options: Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited or Fairfax. In Brisbane, there was just one: Murdoch. And his approach to people management was to set them against each other: you’d be chasing a story only to find someone else had also been assigned to it, under the theory competition would spur a better end product.
I used to joke that pitting me against someone else in a news-gathering death match wasn’t effective—if you wanted performance, pay me a lot of money, pamper me, and give me resources. I wasn’t actually joking. And back in the 1990s, that was a point of competitive differentiation for Fairfax: while Murdoch paid peanuts and expected gratitude, Fairfax paid well and was grateful.
I suspect it’s not that way any more, not after Warwick Fairfax imploded his family’s company, it drifted through the Conrad Black years, the rivers of gold dried up, and what was once an empire is now a neutered part of the Nine stable. As it happens, though, being nasty to employees is back in vogue, with companies seemingly eager to avenge the handful of years where workers had some degree of leverage.
“Corporate America’s long-running war for talent sounds more like a war on the talent these days,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “Not long ago, bosses routinely praised workers as their most prized asset, so much that some hoarded new hires before having enough for them to do. Today, with a giant question mark hanging over the economy, executives are pulling no punches in saying employees need to work harder, complain less and be glad they still have jobs.”
There’s a lot to unpack. No company exists without the people who work there, and people need jobs. Balancing this tension typically results in both sides reaching some kind of uneasy equilibrium. Yet AI’s potential to do more with less and the state of economic uncertainty has swung the power dynamic toward employers, which is why we see increasingly rigid return-to-office policies and statements like that of Emma Grede, the co-founder of Skims: “Work-life balance is your problem.” Or, as JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon infamously ranted amid complaints about reducing worker flexibility: “I’ve had it with this kind of stuff. I’ve been working seven days a week since COVID, and I come in, and—where is everybody else?”
Well, Jamie, you’re also a billionaire who was paid $39 million last year and has the resources to structure your life however you need to. For the vast, vast, vast majority of workers, a little bit of flexibility is essential to keeping life’s plates spinning—especially in a world where households need two incomes to survive. And if there are issues with employees multi-tasking during Zoom calls or failing to be productive outside of the office—two big Dimon pain points—that suggests a failure of leadership.
Are people multitasking because they’re yet again on calls they don’t need to be on? Because they have no clue of the organization’s strategy and don’t feel invested in its success? Because their boss is so busy managing up they feel unheard and undervalued? I’m not suggesting issues of worker motivation aren’t complex, but it sure as heck isn’t as simple as screaming that the beatings will continue until morale improves.
There’s certainly blame on both sides. I’m not averse to sweeping stereotypes, but I see directly and hear anecdotally about worker behavior that makes any leader want to tear their hair out. A quick example: a couple of years ago, someone told me they’d lost sleep over an incredibly trivial issue (the color of a ribbon in an image), described my shocked reaction as “offensive” (when I expressed surprise that anyone would lose sleep over it), couldn’t tell me how to “fix” the problem (which I thought already had by three days earlier declaring I couldn’t care less about what color the ribbon was), and then ended the back and forth by saying “I don’t have to explain why I’m offended, you should just accept it” and hanging up.
Just as Donald Trump rode to the White House partly on the back of a backlash to “woke” overreach, it often feels like workplaces have the sensitivity dial cranked to 13. Respect should be a given, flowing both ways. But it does seem that the notion of paying one’s dues is now viewed as, yes, offensive—as if merely doing a job for a few months entitles someone to a promotion, or anyone at any time with any level of experience not only expects to provide “feedback,” but for that to be taken as gospel.
For older managers, I understand why that’s jarring—and there are plenty of reasons why cliches have developed about the work ethic and expectations of certain generations. What I would note, though, is the precariousness of the current business environment and why it calls for graciousness and empathy on all sides.
Leaders face the vagaries of a mad king with no understanding of economics, wrenching America from its superpower moorings and creating uncertainty at every level. But workers are coping with way more than that. At big companies—which employ more than half of working Americans1—AI is increasingly being deployed to boost efficiency and earnings at the expense of jobs. Employment feels so tenuous, that workers are literally dying from overwork and the pressure of pulling insane hours. Prices keep rising, making every day essentials increasingly unaffordable. The housing market is a disaster. The rich only get richer, while a full-time job is no a guarantee of making ends meet. Kids are unmoored in a sea of social-media algorithms. Younger workers don’t see a path to prosperity. Healthcare costs are insane, college expenses basically require selling your internal organs, you can barely find childcare, and life is generally just really, really draining.
“What I hear in so many people’s anguished LinkedIn posts is a disconnect between the world they thought they were in versus the one they actually are,”
write in a Substack post titled “Everyone I know is worried about work.” “They sound aghast that the jobs, companies, and industries that were supposed to provide both meaning and security haven’t kept up their end of the bargain.“They thought they were working in companies with values, morals, and ethics. Turns out, the logic of the market prevails every single time. And as we reach the upper limits of this system, it’s all becoming more brazen, the bottom line less obscured. Welcome to collapse.”
Here’s the problem. The market’s logic may prevail for goosing earnings in the short term. But over the longer term? Fewer good jobs and fewer people employed equals less money in pockets equals lower consumer spending equals slower economic growth equals less demand equals business collapse.2
Telling workers to stop whining has never been effective, nor is telling them they’re lucky to have a job. Most people want to do good work with good people, feel like they make a positive contribution, and earn enough to live life with a bit less stress. In an American economy generating $30 trillion a year with corporate profits totaling $3.3 trillion in the final three months of last year alone, you’d think that would be possible. In the current environment? It’s essential—for both sides.
I write this for fun, not money. But if you want to shout me to a (probably terrible no-doubt-inferior-to-anything-in-Australia) flat white or magic, it’d make my day!
A note about whatever this is …
After writing a few thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, I spent a long time trying a bunch of other stuff. I guess I figured what came (relatively) easily must by definition be less valuable, so I wandered in the corporate wilderness, becoming increasingly frustrated and doing work that felt increasingly lousy.
Sometimes with age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized finding something (relatively) easy ain’t a bad thing. So, this is a space where I’m resurrecting writing for myself, on topics weird and wild and wonderful.
Around 55% of Americans work for companies with more than 2,500 employees, at least as of the last big data dump on this in 2019.
We all hope, of course, that a disruptive technology like AI results in even more jobs—many that don’t exist today. That’s been a feature of these cycles in the past. But in the meantime? It’s gonna be rough.