In world literature, few stories have captured the impact of shame and social stigma more vividly than The Scarlet Letter. Set in Puritan New England during the 17th century, Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic tells the tale of a woman who conceives a daughter with a man to whom she is not married. For that act of adultery, she is charged to forever wear a scarlet letter “A” on her garments, a mark of shame that highlights to the rest of society to steer clear.
Today, we are worried a new scarlet letter has been ushered in, yet this time, it seems to be the letter “M” for management. Why do we offer such a dramatic characterization about the leaders of companies, or the management, more broadly identified? Try the following exercise: Venture out beyond business schools and boardrooms (yes, that world does exist), start talking to people of various backgrounds, and casually sneak in that you are in any way related to management. What do their reactions generally look like? We dare to bet you’ll get a fair number of blank faces, crinkled noses, and lectures about ethical misconduct.
Why is this happening? To be sure, increased media attention and click-bait framing has put managers and their potential missteps under a looking glass. Across all industries and fields, stories about bad managerial behavior are publicized with a considerable amount of vicarious pleasure and gloating. As you read this article, we are pretty sure most of you will be able to immediately visualize a couple of “despicable” managers, crucified for the leadership practices and positions they represent. From Enron to Theranos, from Madoff to cryptocurrency exchange FTX, there are too many glaring examples of mismanagement and uncaring, unethical, and even illegal behavior — with the image of management ultimately being tarnished for more than the obvious offenders.
Yet, when gauging popular opinion more closely, it seems the problem runs much deeper than can be accounted for by sheer media exposure. For many people, management seems to have yet again become the great distinguisher: For the lucky few who practice it, money and power emerge aplenty; for those who do not, pay and stature seem to become ever slimmer. In business schools, we herald success stories of CEOs and top leaders, which are associated with substantial financial rewards, seemingly earned and justified. In corporate life, we promote those who outperform others and shoulder their way to the front. In broader society, we esteem those who have “made it” versus those who have not — only to find ourselves often in cognitive dissonance, if not repelled, by the very inequality this polarized worldview leaves us with.
Only 10 years ago, David Garvin published a study in Harvard Business Review that examined the reputation of Google managers as being more destructive and interruptive than beneficial.1 Nevertheless, the findings were encouraging for validating the value of managers. However, we fear that the past decade has seen too many examples of regressive management behaviors and that we may need to find ways to bolster and restore much of the promise Garvin’s study advanced.
We believe that if we want to reposition management as what it is essentially meant to be — an occupation geared to provide support and guidance to others — a drastic change is due. In our experiences with managers over the years, we have seen excellent leaders practice and display behavior that is distinctly different from that of their more easily reproached counterparts. In all, we found the following four practices are key.
1. Tell it like it is. If there is one thing people dislike about managers, it is the whiff of insincerity and dishonesty they often manifest. When managers speak, employees' BS radar starts working overtime: Frequently enough, we hear managers being characterized as phony, hypocritical, and bloated. In such cases, it is worth noting the manager in question is not necessarily deceptive or inaccurate but often just overly euphemistic. Challenges become opportunities, layoffs become right-sizing, and so on. While it is true genuine optimism can inspire people and help them see the light at the end of the tunnel, many managers tend to forget that unwarranted sugarcoating often comes at the price of authenticity and credibility. Even apologies, when sugared, ring hollow — a point painfully illustrated by Southwest Airlines earlier this year.
There are, however, examples that model the right behavior. Airbnb has recently been a shining example of straight talk and respect even when delivering bad news. During a massive COVID-induced layoff, affecting over 25 percent of its total staff, there were no faux tears or right-sizing euphemisms. Instead, there was emotional authenticity, balanced information, and respect for both the “victims” and the “survivors.” Management explained how the company would go above and beyond to help those being laid off secure new jobs — and how, despite those efforts, people would still be right to feel upset about it. Rather than focusing on sharing a professional message that avoided opening the company to liability, managers chose to address their employees with an almost aching sense of candor, empathy, and compassion.
In the public sector, we have also found similar examples across various school systems, with superintendents who openly acknowledge how test underperformance is a ticket to lifetime struggles and potential poverty. By calling out the problem as it is, such superintendents pry the system loose and confront difficult changes to tenure systems, resource allocations, and distributions of power. While this approach does not always grant you the easiest access to potential solutions and is unlikely to win you popularity contests with multiple stakeholder groups, we found it does offer something no great manager can ultimately do without: authenticity.
2. Deflate your belief of how well you understand others. As someone leading people, it is always a good idea to realize that those around you uphold different views of reality than you do. However, what we often see managers do is mistake such basic awareness for genuine insight: Just because you know another person’s vantage point is different does not grant you the same perspective altogether. Humility is a far more effective quality, to acknowledge that you appreciate where your knowledge ends and where the other person’s knowledge begins. To be a leader is not to know it all, but to know who to look to and rely on other than yourself. After all, how could management be conversant with issues in fields as wide as pandemics, chatbots, the optimal office architecture, and the new generation of employees? Bad managers convince themselves they can fully incorporate other people's views into their processing; great managers make room for such views to take over processing altogether.
Singapore Airlines is a good example of a company where managers understood the limits of their own perspective. For airline companies, few things are as dangerous as waste. Because the industry is highly competitive, failing to use resources efficiently can quickly spell disaster. Yet how to effectively reduce waste is a question that is often difficult to answer from the vantage point of the managerial tower. At Singapore Airlines, this led management to offer employees a far-reaching say over most operational decisions, ultimately allowing cabin crew to decide which types of drinks were brought on board and ground personnel to offer free customer vouchers as they saw fit. By recognizing managerial limits to knowledge and ensuring those closest to others — especially customers — were given discretionary authority to leverage their insights, the company not only significantly reduced waste but also achieved a more engaged workforce.
3. Share what you hold. One of the most potent theories ever imagined in organizational literature may very well be shareholder theory, or the idea that the primary duty of a corporation is to maximize the profits accruing to its shareholders. The main flaw with the theory, however, is that it evaluates companies from a purely competitive perspective, leaving out the dramatic managerial implications that such a unidimensional focus typically has: namely, that it marginalizes the importance of other stakeholders and limits the contributions of employees to bottom-line results alone.
In reality, we have found great managers generally don’t focus on shareholders but rather on sharing what they hold. Money, power, knowledge, physical energy, time, kindness — what great managers share varies, but the fact that they do so consistently does not. For example, at Acorn Health, a network of autism care providers, managers went above and beyond to share personal experience and knowledge to get the company through the COVID pandemic. Whenever the stress of the situation inevitably reached a boiling point, the team's default response was to be open and react with compassion. Management's bird's-eye perspective of the company gave them an overview of coping tactics that few employees could access on their own. Yet, by consistently sharing such insights with others, the managerial team enabled others to benefit beyond the “elite.” It made people feel supported — not having to struggle solo in holding themselves together but making them feel cared for instead.
4. Stay rooted and humble. When informally polling non-business people about their image of managers, we persistently got responses reflecting a vivid description of the smug white male, sitting in his Porsche Carrera with sunglasses on his head and a latte in the cupholder. For many, managers are synonymous with arrogant and pretentious individuals who have shouldered their way to the front of the line only to look down upon those still queuing. In all honesty, we have rarely encountered managers who were as pretentious as they are portrayed in society's collective psyche (or in the television series White Lotus, for that matter). But, to be fair, some degree of cockiness is rarely far off. Most successful managers are (rightfully) proud of what they have achieved, but as such success builds, many start believing their personal input has been much more important than it really was. In many cases, contextual factors or even dumb luck are just as important.
Invariably, those managers we found most widely esteemed and respected were not those floating at higher altitudes but rather those who stayed rooted. A great example of a leader consistently staying humble, and being respected for it, is Mark Rutte, prime minister of the Netherlands since 2010 and leader of the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy since 2006. Despite his title, Rutte is known to ride his bike to work every day. He offers his time teaching in a school once a week. When spilling his drink, he makes a point of mopping it up himself. We have found that such small acts, trivial as they may appear, convey a more important message to people than any loud speech or statement ever can.
The challenges to restore trust in our business leaders and management at large are formidable, but there are encouraging signs. At our business school, courses and workshops have large enrollments when the focus includes issues of multiple stakeholders, diversity and inclusion, ethics, employee empowerment, and humanistic cultures. In 2022, the Edelman Trust Barometer survey found that people want better business leadership and that “businesses must lead in breaking the cycle of distrust.”2 If managers are to shed the contempt their practice too often carries with it, drastic changes are due. The “M” of management need not be scarlet, and it is up to all of us to see its hue revised.
Other articles in this series
Bureaucracies Are Surprisingly Resistant to Evolutionary Pressures. Here’s How We Can Break Free
Brave New World Revisited: 5 Trends Reshaping Business Practices
About the authors
Bart De Keyser is an assistant professor (i.e., lecturer) in strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship at the University of Sydney Business School. He holds a PhD in management from the University of Antwerp and has worked as a researcher at HEC Montreal and Columbia Business School. De Keyser’s work focuses on organizational and managerial transformations and has been published in several top-ranking academic journals.
Todd Jick is a leading expert in leadership and organizational change. He has had a long career in both academic and consulting work in this field and is faculty director of the Reuben Mark Initiative for Organizational Character and Leadership at Columbia Business School. He was a professor at Harvard Business School for 10 years and a visiting professor of organizational behavior and human resource management at INSEAD and London Business School. Jick has built several top-rated courses at Columbia Business School, receiving the Singhvi Prize for Teaching Excellence twice. In May 2024, Jick was honored with Columbia University’s 2024 Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. The award recognizes his commitment to teaching excellence and is given annually to outstanding members of the faculty whose pedagogy fosters critical thinking and inspires students to engage the quest for knowledge as a value and as a craft. His textbook, Managing Change, has been the leading offering in the field for the past 15 years, and his more than 100 cases have been among the top sellers in case clearinghouses.
Footnotes
- D. A. Garvin, “How Google sold its engineers on management,” Harvard Business Review 91, no. 12 (2013): 74-82.
- Edelman, “2022 Edelman Trust Barometer,” 2020, www.edelman.com/trust/2022-trust-barometer.