AA243 - How Corporate Turns Good People Bad: The Neuroscience of Power Corruption

20 years in tech and you know, the one thing that bothers me is , I told this story on a podcast before. There was a guy I used to work with that we were coworkers on the same team working together. And genuinely a good dude attentive good engineer as well. And then I watched that guy get promoted to director and then to vp and a couple years later, this same person that was a good dude supporting the team. Standing up for the work that needed to be done. Same dude is out here telling the team there's no money for raises and lobbying the offshore of the entire development team. While he's using his executive level bonus money to buy a brand new BMW

Boy, oh boy,

same person, same brain. What happened?

I think during the time when this transition happened in his career, I think his brain literally changed. The neural pathways in his brain started rewiring themselves, from the moment he moved into the corner office.

So we're saying the org chart is basically a corruption machine or a brainwashing machine,

brain brainwashing. Oh. No, but I'm saying that power not only reveals character, it rewires the whole psyche of the person in most companies, the structures and the org politics, et cetera, are designed to accelerate the process. Mm-hmm. I hate it. Yes, agreed. That's one thing we're gonna agree on today, by the way.

Welcome back to Arguing Agile. This is your first time. Welcome. I'm product manager Brian Orlando. And this is my co-host Enterprise Business Agility consultant, and also the sorcerer of sticky notes. Mr. Om Patel,

the sorcerer of sticky notes.

Indeed. It took a while to climb this hill, but I'm glad we're here today. So today we're tackling something very personal to me which I've brought up the last couple of podcasts, but I didn't exactly know how to form this agenda into podcast form or into something other than rant form., And it's also something backed genuinely by unsettling neuroscience, I'm gonna let you know now, I did a lot of research for this podcast, which is different than our normal podcast. So this is gonna be a good one.

This was gonna be based in science, basically. That's right. Stick around folks.

If you ever watch a good colleague turn into a terrible boss or a good boss, turn into a tyrant in the organization as they get promoted and you've wondered like, is is it just my perspective? Is it just me? This is the podcast for you. So by the end of this podcast, you'll understand several things. First you'll understand three mechanisms that erode empathy especially in the corporate environment. You'll understand the warning signs , that you are changing. And hopefully before other people notice, so you can actually do something about it. And then we'll talk about how to actually advance yourself through the ranks and climb in the organization without being no corporate tyrant. Yeah. Without losing your integrity that let's, let's call it integrity.

That's it. I like that one.

What if I told you that getting promoted literally changes your brain chemistry, not metaphorically. Not over decades. We're talking measurable neural change that makes you worse at reading other human beings. So let's talk about what power actually does to your brain.

Cool.

I'm showing on screen the journal article with the citation, the Journal of Experimental Psychology from 2014. Power changes, how the Brain responds to others was the name of the article. I'm not, just because we're trying to fit this. Podcast into like a 45 minute to 55 minute time box. I'm not gonna be pulling up each stu like the podcast I want to do is pulling up each individual study, going through how they did the study, what it means for in the corporate world.

It's a solid

three hour podcast, the one I want to do. But if people want us to do that one, like, let us know in the comments.'cause I, I, I am ready with all these papers. But for the study that we're talking about here, power changes how the brain responds to others. It found that high power individuals show reduced motor resonance when observing others indicating diminished. Automatic empathy that's academic speak for saying, when we measure their brains, when the empathy areas in their brain should be lighting up these folks in quote, higher power positions they got some cylinders that aren't firing.

I'm saying some, some synapses that aren't firing. The brain is a very malleable organ. So I can certainly get along with the conclusions of this study that over time your brain does change. Basically so there's this thing called the amygdala hijack, which is what happens once you start getting into the position of power. And you start making decisions because you are empowered to make those decisions, right? But you don't necessarily make those grounded in reasoning, right? Mm-hmm. It's positional authority, right? In the military we call that command presence. Sure, yeah. Same thing, right? So, so people will start marking orders as opposed to making requests. Yeah. And this doesn't happen quickly. It happens over time. Sometimes it happens reasonably quickly depending on your psyche. Yeah. So if you're prone that way to begin with, you feed on power, is what I'm saying then this is gonna happen faster for you.

See, the research combined with this story makes me think that it's like you're being lazy. Here is like, since you have this command authority. You just yell at them and then storm outta the room. Which brings us back to the story I told earlier, Which that dude did many times. Sure. But there are people that probably, none of them, that will listen to this podcast. But there are people that are gonna listen to us and go right into the steel man points. I prepared for exactly this reason today listen, they're not good, but this is what people are saying on the internet. Two things. Leaders, they need to make the tough decisions. And in order to do that, leaders need to keep emotional distance. I'm trying very hard not to slip into emotional damage. Leaders need to have emotional, you need a

meme

and then empathy overload. Like it causes burnout and poor judgment. I've never heard anyone say that before in my life, but I have heard people say psychological safety, empathy, all this kinda stuff that's just like, that's not real. the, the Twitter takeover, the Elon Musk Twitter takeover was big on, like, everyone keeps saying the psychological safety Elon Musk is like, I don't understand what that means' Om: cause he is used to, he really didn't, he really didn't understand what that means. That's genuinely didn't. Let, let's take those two points. So leaders need emotional distance in order to make tough decisions. You are making tough decisions, right? Yes. Yes. So you need certain things in order to make the best decision you can in the light of everything that's in front of you. So you need all of the in bits of information. You need people that you trust around you to opine on some of these things that you can bounce off of them. Right. You can say, well, what if we do this? What's the trade off here? Et cetera. Having that emotional distance to me sounds like, Hey, listen, you're gonna do, as I say e even though you come across very confident, hopefully if you're good at feigning this stuff mm-hmm. You're really not okay. you're just simply barking this order at people. You, you are the boss. Yeah. You're supposed to make the decision. And it seems like a, it comes across as a vulnerability or a sign of weakness to collaborate and ask people, what do you think? Right. Your leaders, depending on where they fall on this, they might say, well, hey, I hired you to make the decision. Or if they're not on that side of the spectrum, and they might say, Hey, this guy's getting all the facts, getting the opinions of his team and making a consensus based. Decision. Hopefully that's grounded in some sort of fact and evidence. Yeah. What a loser. Yeah well, there you, there's the other side. So listen to, to what people say. What a loser. Yeah i, I I mean, since we're talking about emotional damage I put on the screen like emotional distance. Like first of all, the, the, the steelman point that leaders need to maintain emotional distance for them to be whatever it's the special or on fire, I, whatever it is. I don't put any credence behind that one because emotional distance is not, that's a, that's a python is not, by the way, everyone necessarily, now emotional distance is not like empathy shutdown. That's not what emotional distance means keep your emotional distance from your subordinates or whatever, you know? Right. The study was talking about that this process happens automatically as people ascend in quote, power and authority. It's not a choice,

it's also not a conscious decision most of the time.

Yeah. And then it's a very interesting study. It's not that long. None of these studies are that, like the longest study I think I have in here, I think was 26 pages. I think the shortest one was eight. That's not bad. They're not. I mean, you could read them 10 minutes, 15 minutes you could read them. And if you really, really lazy, throw 'em into AI and have it summarize and then give you quotes or whatever., You should read these. If you're listening to this podcast, you're, if you're interested in this subject matter that we talk about, you should read these. And I'll have links to all these, 'cause I've got the PDFs but the research, showed that empathy correlates like the reduced empathy of people as they get in power and they don't really need to answer to people below them, they don't need to use their empathy muscles anymore. And as those muscles atrophy it correlates with increased stereotyping and worse people decisions, which you and I might hear and be like, well, of course, of course it does. But again, these are people in the executive positions that are supposed to be judging you make great decisions, you make the best decisions. You're supposed to be making the best decisions. That's why you're in that executive spot or that chief product officer spot. Sorry, I couldn't help myself, everyone. Oh, that was good. I guess what we're saying here is you can have and make hard calls.

They're not exclusive. but also the second point of the steel men empathy overload calls is burnout and poor judgment. I've personally have not witnessed that anywhere. It's just one of those things, like you said, people will just put up that to just argue against, oh, you need empathy. No, you're the boss now so I've never seen somebody have too much empathy.

That's one of those ones on the interview where they say, Om, what's your weakness? And you're like my weakness is I just care too much. That's my weakness though. That's for Ed right there. Only 'cause he brought it up I'll also say, and I'll leave this, part of the reason for me escalating this podcast up is because a couple of us here in the product community listened. I dunno if we all listened to the same podcast recently. There was a very popular product podcast show that if, if that, that should be remain nameless. If any, if, I mean, it's gonna rename nameless'cause I don't want to like throw people onto the bus. But if anyone wants, send me a message and I'll give you the exact length of the episode. But it's just the dude that was on the show just had a remarkable lack of empty oh, empathy. The longer the show went on, the less and less empathetic he became because like the mass kind of slowly slipped back. You know, that barely controllable mask that he was wearing over time it just got worse and worse. And, that's a very real thing. My experience in this category,, as people get promoted, their empathy degrades unless they're taking some sort of extraordinary steps, which I've never seen anyone take to maintain it. I've worked for several managers who have gotten promoted well above where they were ready to get promoted. And for various reasons, like, I'm not digging into the reasons why, they're all deserved it, they're all great. Sure. Um, But they all turned around and did this. They all turned around and started blaming and finger pointing , but the more that they considered their peers, the executives, and the less they considered their peers, all the people that they used to work with day to day, that they spent all their nights and weekends with. The worse they were to be around, you

I can think of only one time in my professional career where there was a person who got promoted from a manager of professional services back in the day when that was the thing. And so they got promoted to a VP role in Europe, managing director, that kind of position equivalent. But they never lost touch with people that they worked with. So when making these decisions that have real impact, they would call people into a room way before COVID. So it was all in person, go into a room and say, look, if you are sitting in my chair, what decision would you make? And he would get feedback from most people around that. People that were willing to speak up and he wouldn't make the right decision based on the feedback. That is very rare. And the thing that really kind of was striking is when he did that, when we were on a client site in a different country.

Mm-hmm.

And he said to the client who was asking for the decision, demanding the decision he basically said, give us till tomorrow. Or we'll get you that decision. and then that evening we all met in the hotel and he asked each one of us, what decision would you make and why? And without fear of any kind of retribution, you could say, I would do this and here's why. And he made what we all believed was the right decision he told us about what he was going to tell the customer the next day.

Yeah.

that's exactly what he said. And he actually told the customer the same thing. He said, I got with my team last night and we all considered all the viewpoints and here's our decision. There was some nuances there. he didn't make the snap decision that most people are likely to do, but even the morning after it was, this is what we decided, not I decided. Yeah. Very, very rare.

Interesting. Yeah. If you find yourself being promoted then you might find that your promotion comes with a neurological side effect of less empathy. And it wasn't even in the offer letter. You get it for free.

Oh boy.

Yeah. So only because it's the Arguing Agile podcast and we gotta have some takeaways in each category. Let me get your opinion and see if you think they're good or if, if they're factor crap. Sorry. Let's see. So I got a neuropathy checks. I have a scheduled monthly one-on-ones with people that are basically don't set at your level. So if you're a VP or executive, I'm talking worker level folks, like two levels apart. this is sort of like we talked on the podcast before about the, the random coffee , or the, yeah, the rotation where every week you're meeting with different people, that kind of thing. Meet with two people, talk talk about where you ask questions and they talk. Basically, you're not, you're not the one dictating, you're not the one leading the conversation basically, number one. Number two is after, every time you make a hard decision, you write a sentence about how it's going to affect somebody. Somebody specific, like a person by name. Name them, yeah. By name. And then the third one is to kind of just ask yourself to check yourself, when's the last time you felt genuinely uncomfortable about the impact of a business decision, even if it wasn't your direct business decision, something you had influence into. I mean, I don't see a lot of people asking themselves number three at all. Especially the folks that are out there talking about gamification, so those are three things. You know, the one-on-ones, I feel you should be doing that. That I think that's probably the strongest thing on here. That helps.

Yeah. And here, just to clarify, we're not talking about one-on-ones with people that are directly beneath you or reporting to you, we're talking about one-on-ones with people further down. This is fantastic. And they don't have to be necessarily formal on a calendar. They don't have to be that. Yeah. You can invite people, like you said, for coffee or whatever, And talk to them. Just have a conversation. This isn't done nearly often enough.

So what do you think have you felt this empathy shift in someone that you used to work with that got promoted or have you been promoted and are you the captain now and then you feel this empathy like gulf within you? Either way. Let us know in the comments. And the best way to support the podcast is to like, like,, and subscribe. Subscribe. Look at my

eyes. I am the captain now.

Oh. Speaking of being the captain so that we talked about what power does to your brain, but what if some people were already wired like this? Before they ever got promoted. What if the problem isn't that power corrupts people, like absolute power corrupts Absolutely. But what if the people that most want the job that is powerful? Like what if they're already like, broken as individuals? What if they're already wrong before they even step up to the plate? Like they're the wrong people on the wrong seats. Like if we're going, all the metaphors are today on the podcast. They're the wrong people, on the wrong seats, on the wrong bus in the wrong city.

Well then they're all set because they're most likely to get promoted. Oh. So, well that's, we're gonna talk about why that just rise faster. Heck yeah. That's gonna surprise a lot of people, right? I hope not, because I think that's reality.

Yeah, let's make this a fast category.'cause I don't think there's anybody in the world that's gonna disagree on this category. And if there is, let us know in the comments.'cause I definitely wanna know what your sources are because I found so many sources for this. I didn't even bother writing down a particular paper or whatever. I was like, well, we're just gonna make note of it as a footnote. Check it off and we're gonna get out of this category. So narcissistic traits correlate with faster promotion velocity. People that have these traits, get ahead because they're looking for these positions that give them authority over other people.

Well I think the flip side of it's true too. People that are looking to promote, people are looking for these traits, right?'cause they believe that these traits are conducive to success,

Oh, well, sounds like you're going into the steel man. Step into my office. And let's talk about two points. Listen, ohm, I hear what you're saying, but confidence and ambition, they're necessary. Leadership, their leadership skills, Om!,

Listen, confidence.

I don't like the way you said listen.

my goodness.

Hear my second point. Okay. Listen, let's finish you a second point. Narcissism. Like that's overused. That's an overused term over everything. Everything's narcissism. When you're talking about yourself. Can't, can I promote myself? Narcissism is over-diagnosed. It's just drive home. It's just drive. Some people have more drive than others. Some people have confidence and ambition. I need that on my leadership crew. And some people are that they're just more driven. They got more grit.

They got more grit.

Yeah, they're greedy

I think if you can't differentiate between healthy confidence and being narcissistic, those aren't the same thing. First of all, there's a difference between those two. And the difference is measurable. So if you can measure that difference and say these aren't the same thing. I think you might be onto a winner. The issue is not just being ambitious. You need to have that drive that's fine. Except promotion systems often cannot tell the difference between narcissism and healthy confidence.

Yeah. Well, there's another podcast right there about like sit down and let's talk about the current state of hr that's meant to protect the company rather than, you know everyone's changing their job role to chief people officer, but no one's actually concerned about the people. It's about chief protecting the company officer. Chief Legal Compliance Officer. Chief Protection Officer, that's right. But I don't see those titles anywhere.

No, that's right.

I checked, I looked in all my pockets. I don't. They're not here. Sorry, I'm not flashing everyone. And also like I'm not crying that ambitions is the problem. People know where the, where they, what they want to do and where they want to be. but also like, that's disingenuous.'cause that's not what we're talking about,

right?

We're talking about the people that are weaseling their way so they have power over the people who already start with little empathy.

Self-promotion skills are not the same as you know, these narcissistic competencies that people have.

Sorry, you're gonna have to say that another time because I like self-promotion skills. Actual leadership skills. Oh yeah, that's what I meant. Like they're not even the same thing. Yes. They're not in the same sport.

Actual leadership skills don't lead with self-promotion. Self-promotion is kind of like very, very lightly used in that scenario at all.

There's gonna be people out there that if I, if I just cut self-promotion skill, an actual leadership skill are completely separate. Competencies, not even in the same ballpark, not even in the same sport. And just leave that as a clip. There's gonna be people that just blow their lid, let's down. Seriously. This is the same person from my story at the beginning of the podcast where this was the quote, high performer on the team where to be a high performer. He was taking credit for the entire team's accomplishments and being the person in the room when the news about the team going over the finish line, he would always be the person that delivered it.'cause he was the only one that got invited to those meetings. And if by chance somebody else from a team was invited, he'd make sure to just drown them out or whatever. But also he was much better at visibility, not necessarily value.'cause there were better developers on, I mean, I'm not saying he wasn't a good developer there. He was a very good developer. There were much better developers on the team and they did a lot more work comparatively, like they were there till nine o'clock at night when I was there. He was better at like dropping the nude in the front of the right audience repeating it enough times, that kind of thing.

You can almost like perceive these people from the language they use in front of leadership and others I led the team too. Yes, I oversaw right. Those kinds of things. You know, I planned the team delivered. It's like these people are always looking to get credit basically. Right. Or claim credit whether it's deserved or not. Oftentimes it's the team that deserves credit. But invisible all the time.

I understand. so a add awareness to promotion criteria. So something I had where I worked up here, yeah. tell me about a time when your team succeeded and you had nothing to do with it. That can be hard. The second one, skip level feedback before promotions what do your coworkers think? I could see a lot of people, I could see the higher levels of your organization scoffing at that one to be like, why would I ever ask what the general opinion of this person is? And then which patterns or ratios do I hear, which is what you just said, is do I hear them only ever saying I achievements? Versus we achievements, like for example, this dude is gonna say, even if he wraps a we achievement, oh, the team did this, we stayed up real late, it's gonna be wrapped in a but I was the one that got everyone together and I coordinated this and I set the deadline and pushed the team. It's gonna be a we, but it's gonna be wrapped in an eye and to the uninformed observer they will hear the eye part of that, and then it'll get reinforced.

They look like a hero, basically. Oh, oh, hero.

They look like someone trying to take credit is what they look like. They look like a jerk, what's the term? Something jerk. A brilliant jerk. Is that the term? I don't know. There's a term in tech for like brilliant jerk or something like that, that that's what they look like to the team. Whereas they might not be perceived with the executive team because the executive like, I don't care. Just get it done. I guess , with the two things I have on here that I just realizing now with these, this is what happens with this feedback. Sometimes, like I'll draw it. By myself. And then when we're doing the podcast, I'll Yeah. You see a different side of it. Yeah. I'll see a little different side of it now. Now I'm talking through it. Like one and three basically is do you catch them taking credit for groups' achievement or other people, it could be another single person achievement. Sure. And then wrapping that in an I achievement statement and then presenting it. Because even that is the same thing here about they, they're gonna tell you about a time, they're gonna make it sound good because they're better promoting themselves in a sneaky kinda way than you are pointing out when people are doing this disingenuously and leaving their team out of it. So they, they get away with it a lot of times. So we keep promoting the people who are best at seeming like leaders, and then we all act surprised when they're terrible at actually leading.

Right, right, right, right. Well,

if you like that one, I got another one. I, I didn't know which one that I wanted to use. We keep promoting the people who talk like us and then act surprised when they're terrible at actually doing their job and leading or managing.

You would know these people. These are the people that say, Hey, the team stayed up all night to deliver, but I'm the one who fed them pizza because if I didn't do that, they would've gone home.

We keep promoting people who make us comfortable and never challenge us and always tell us that we're great and tell us positive things, and then we act surprised when they actually can't get anything done.

Suck at it. Yeah. True.

Yeah. So those are my three. I couldn't decide on, which, little zinger I wanted to add to the end. So I just gave you all three of them. But I'm not gonna make you pick favorites on the podcast. We're not picking. I think they're all good. We're not picking favorite children tonight. So what do you think about this category here? Have you seen this selection problem play out in your company? Let us know in the comments.

Cool. All right. So some people may actually be wired already, they arrive, precor corrupted. Is that a, state of mind? I don't know. But that's where it gets a little murky. So what if the organization itself is designed to make it worse and propagate.

Every company says they value collaboration and integrity they have pictures of eagles on wall Om. That's what I'm saying. and then they promote the person who threw the team under the bus and fudged the metrics and answers messages at

00 AM on Slack and constantly writes a LinkedIn post about how teams should, disconnect in their off hours.

Oh my goodness.

So let's talk about, what your culture actually rewards versus what they got on the Eagle poster in the hallway. Oh, yes. With dust on it.

This could be a whole podcast, by the way,

organizational Behavior research shows that the stated values and rewarded behaviors diver significantly in most corporate environments employees follow incentives, not values posters, but it wouldn't be a podcast without a steelman. These are things that you're going to hear the pushback you're going to get. And it's gonna say, Hey, results matter. Companies need to reward output because results matter. We have to have results that matter. And also, like how culture is difficult to measure. Culture is nebulous. It's about behaviors, and it's about things that we can't necessarily track. Performance can be tracked. We set a goal, we did it, or did not achieve the goal. We're not measuring executives on performance here. Thank you very much. Get outta my office. Yeah, they have a different scale. Get outta my office. Yeah, they're on the buy a new BMW plan. That's you, what they're on. So yeah, so those are the two, two things. I mean, I know you got some feedback from me right off the bat with this one.

I do. So on that first, Steelman results matter. Sure. But at what cost? How you getting those results matter too. Not just getting the results themselves, especially if your organization leads with all this stuff about work life balance and you work to live, not live to work, right. Results without examining how they were achieved creates some perverse incentives. Yes. And you can absolutely measure culture to your second point, right? There are many different ways to do that. Are people hanging around your company for a reasonable period of time? Your retention data, get some skip level feedback that we've already referred to and then some management 3.0 techniques, like 360 reviews for example what about this asking your clients about your corporate culture?

Or how about you take your Glassdoor review seriously and actually sit down and talk to your HR folks about what they're doing to stop having negative,

hide behind the fact that these reviews are only ever placed by people that are disenchanted and it's like they,

they always do say that too. It's like, oh, look, we, and also our, our low reviews on product sites or whatever is because only people that are upset leave product feedback and nobody ever leaves us five stars what? Terrible.

Well, if that is true, you have some work to do, don't you?

Right. One, one would think Right. Unless, unless, unless you return us back to the previous category or the first category of the podcast where you're lazy and you don't care 'cause your empathy has degraded. So we talked about a toxic hyper. So, the other one that we haven't talked about is that toxic high performers, the toxic high performers, they get the company, the short term gains they're looking for, or the short term objectives that the things cross the finish line, or they get, they promote themselves as being perceived as the people that make those plays. Which, as like any kind of short term gain, there's some kind of trade off where in the end, there potentially could be long-term damage that happens based off of all the short term incentives and shortcuts and tech debt, whatever we're taking on relationship burning, whatever we're taking on.

These are though the types of people that get themselves promoted pretty quickly, right. To going back to the previous segment of the broadcast. So these are the very people that get promoted through putting on this song and dance about how they are performing So performative, really? Yes.

And then all the stuff you see the, like the bottom of the slide here, 9, 9, 6. Culture always on culture where you gotta answer

00 AM on a Sunday or something like that. Hero developer worship they're all design choices for your org.

The irony of this is a post I saw on LinkedIn just the other day. Somebody put a screenshot up from a. Message from his CEO and it said something ungodly hour, and the tagline underneath was, I value work-life balance. So while it suits me to send this, now, please respond in your own time, but they were demanding an answer. It's like, what do you really believe in that case?

I don't know if I have a great story all my experiences with this are depressing. The, the one that I talked about when the, the manager was up in front of the, the VP was in front of the whole company and claim credit for the whole development team while, while all his peers were throwing over to their team and bringing up people and being like, yeah, here's a manager with so and so. Let him talk about how his team got this across the finish line. Like the whole company got won a massive deal or something like that. Yeah. I tell that on a previous podcast, so I don't wanna like, make people bored that, that have listened to it before. I wanna say, your culture is not in all the eagle pictures that you put up on the wall. It's about who you promote, who you protect, and who you let get away with murder.

Except for that last bit, which is never written down. You could objectively try to measure your culture by tracking those things.

So I wrote down a few points for the culture audit here. I want to just bounce 'em off of you. Culture audit of promotions like the last three people that got promoted in your, the last three people that got promoted in your organization. What behaviors got them there? Go ahead and jot'em down like just 30 seconds is what I'm saying. Yeah. Alright, go ahead. Take 30 seconds. Compare that list to your values, right? Show me the gaps. what are the gaps? and then what I feel is most important is ask yourself, if I copied this exact playbook, would I get promoted? But also, like, would I be proud of myself if I follow this playbook?

You might get promoted, you might not like who you are.

You might not get promoted at all because there's a bunch of other factors that I specifically sanitize out of this podcast of like, well you don't go golfing with the CEO on the weekends. So when you cross the line to do whatever, it's seen as bad. Whereas where Gary from sales did it. It's just normal.

Gary from sales has a lot to answer for.

So those are the three things it's like, hey, if, you know but it requires you really to be paying attention to the behaviors that got a person where they are. Right. I wasn't necessarily doing at this stage of my career when that person got promoted and then suddenly I found myself like, oh, how are they now crafting the story? Even though they had very little to do with it, I don't because I wasn't paying attention to that kind of stuff at work.

Yeah. You just gotta be cognizant of this. I guess it's one of those things that come with growing experience. I feel like most people that are just in their young, in their careers, they don't think about this that way.

Yeah. A ton of substance in this section. Like the, we can't measure culture. Like you absolutely can measure culture.

You just need to want to, madly enough.

Right. Okay. So what do you think about this category? What was the biggest gap between the stated values and the actual rewards at your company? Like, let us know, let us know if you got a zinger for this one. So the org rewards bad behavior, but there's another layer here.

What happens

when that person quits being relatable to everyone they used to work with. Yeah. And basically they don't even know themselves anymore. When I cooked up the podcast, this is the category I started with that I really wanted to talk about. So if I get excited, you gotta reel me in, is what I'm saying. So here's something wild from the research rich people. So that's not cool. The, research does not call them rich people. It calls them high socioeconomic status people. Oh

yeah. So Rich,

I mean uh, like they're measurably worse at reading emotions than poor people. That's what I'm saying. Oh, sorry. Low. Socioeconomics status. Yes. Low SES not because they're bad people. I'm not saying like all rich people are evil. I'm not saying they're bad humans. But it's because they don't need to be good at it it's kinda the same concept as like when you got a bajillion dollars, you don't need to be good at finances. That's why you, that's why you hire an accountant.

Yeah.

So what happens when your promotion creates a class divide between you and your former peers?

Nobody's talking about it. But my kind of somewhat cheeky answer to that is you find new peers that are just as rich as you. Oh. This is sad actually, because you forget where you're from at that point and what brought you here. So, yeah, I've seen. This, I guess this is what they mean when they say power corrupts.'Cause I've seen that you just turn your back on people that Yes, well, your people basically, or,

or I don't mean to go full like with super villain here, , or communities Sure. Or groups or companies, you know. Yeah. So the research here, I have the research on the screen for people. I guess for anyone listening, I'm gonna throw all of the different studies into the comments. At least the titles, and then you can go find them yourselves. This is a study done in 2010 called Social Class contextualism and Empathetic Accuracy 2010 study. The takeaway here is that lower class individuals demonstrate higher empathetic accuracy because their survival depends more on reading social cues. And each of these. Sorry, each of these I could go into, again, I'm not just,'cause I'm trying to move through this podcast fairly quickly. Yep. This one was interesting, there's a lot more in this study about being goal oriented and anything that drives you toward or away from your goal. that's one of the cues for being less empathetic'cause your goal is more important than your relationship with that person, that kind of thing. So there's some interesting stuff in here. Again, I wish we had more time, but as you know, with any point, there is gonna be a steelman So two points here. Leaders, they face different pressures and that requires different skills. And, the most cynical take here is you've outgrown your circle of friends. You need to get new friends, better friends. And who's the one to tell you they're better friends? Me, I'm telling you, they're better. And then the other one is you can't lead effectively when you're stuck in an individual contributor mindset. You know, the management requires a completely different mindset and all the skills that got you there in the IC role. You now need to learn new skills. And the people you learn new skills are from the new crowd. So hey, none of those other people can tell you anything. You know, all the people that were responsible to help you with success to get here, they're useless.

They're useless. And also you have now become them. And you were ones us. Yeah. Different pressures though. They don't require you to abandon. The ability to understand your team's reality. The day-to-day that they're experiencing is you are there. Who better positioned to understand that than you? Right, right. An outsider may not have the full appreciation for that, but you were there.

Well, I mean also going back to the first category we talked about today, where you like physically start losing. Like your brain doesn't fire empathy as intensely as it did before because you just don't care about that with this new team that you're on with this new culture that you're in, that these new group of friends you're trying to ingratiate yourself that are all right, that are all jumping off a bridges. Didn't your mom ever tell you don't jump off a bridge if your friends jump off a or something? I don't know. If you're saying these people they've either lost touch with the IC experience because it's been so long since they've been an individual contributor or worked on a team or worked with other people, or had to actually back up their assumptions with evidence, because that's, I find another one, like, that's a big gap. Huge with leadership. and even like mid-level supervisors, it's been a while since they had to make a bet and then go get evidence and then sit in front of the panel and get at talking to about why things didn't pan out, let alone like everyone, like everyone's, everyone could talk trash when they're successful of course, but not a lot of people can truck trash and then go and try to execute when they really don't know how it's gonna turn out.

The irony of this situation isn't lost on me though.'cause I mean, look, you were one of several people around the table at one point before you got promoted and so Yeah. You know, you were in the ic, you were steeped in the IC world, but just 'cause you got promoted doesn't mean you are not.'cause 'cause guess what? You, you are now judged for you Right. Still by those that judge you you know, the leadership the higher leadership if you will. The irony of it is you still need to now continue working in that mode where you value other people's opinions, you're just not gonna win by yourself in the long run. Yeah. Short run maybe. So that's the first thing I would say about that first steel man. And then the research shows this empathy loss is not about. The greater good or your capability, it's about the need of the hour I need to do this. Right. And I think it's self-reinforcing in that when you look around at, your new peers, you tend to emulate what their behaviors are. Which are largely not what yours were before you got promoted.

I mean that human beings are social creatures first more than they are creatures of the truth first, that's a big, bold statement. But I mean, if it's true, like it does help explain why people can rewire their own brains to get along with a crowd that they know or like not telling the truth about this thing or they know that like the company's busting record profits, there's no reason to do layoffs now. But I guess we're okay with it'cause that's what we do this week. So you rewire your brain, you become okay with it, and then you sleep just fine at night and now you're the villain at the end of Die Hard. I, sorry. That was a, that was an escalation. I know, but

not much of one though. Not much of one.

The higher you climb, the less you need to understand people. And that is exactly why you stop being able to

Your amygdala has already been hijacked.

Yeah.

So the executive bubble that you're in now, that's not wisdom. It's a blind spot that gets worse and worse and worse the longer you're there.

It's a blind spot that could tank your company.'cause now your idea is the best and everyone else's stink. And no one's willing to challenge you and you wash out people that you know, even. Raise a finger in a meeting. Sorry, not that finger. I mean, any, any finger. It doesn't matter which finger. I wrote some takeaways here'cause as you know, we have to have some takeaways on the podcast. We went on. Bob Ians here. So the class bridges to leadership class Bridges.

Your SES bridges.

So suggestion number one. Periodically do the work. You know, take a support ticket, sit in the sprint, do some pair programming,

This is basically the walk, the gemba. It is, it's a what better way to really appreciate what the team is going through than to step into their shoes and steep into their culture for change that's when you're gonna see things and experience it firsthand as opposed to hear it third or fourth hand, which we all know is diluted every time.

We're recapping things that are well worn knowledge here.

20 plus years, and now we're still there.

I mean, that makes sense. Just to zing us through the rest of these when, making policy decisions it would be good to ask the actual people affected by the policy, what am I missing here? You know, would this be good or bad in your opinion? Get to get feedback from your users that would be good. and then you want to also track how long it has been since I would say I put in the slides here that since you were surprised by feedback, but I also would say track your basically your wins and losses. I do this as a product manager sometimes is I'll write in Epic or, or a test or I'll write basically I'll write a backlog item from the perspective of, a test that I want to do against the market, but I'll always write it in the negative of the, what I believe the outcome will be.

This could almost be the negative hypothesis, right. That you're leading with.

I always do that because I am aware that there's ego involved and a bunch of other stuff that I may not be able to track the day-to-day as we do things. I might be caught in the work and do whatever. I might be down a rabbit hole or too busy talking to too many customers or whatever. And then I'm surprised when the evidence comes in. If you've ever had a boss or another coworker who is the kind of person to say like, what, that can't be right. Let me do my own. And they start digging in the SQL or digging through logs and doing whatever. It comes off as they don't believe that you did your work

but they have reasons to

yes.

Believe that they know better and they can go find out if they do or not.

That's fine. And then what they, when they come back and they're like, wow, I can't believe that is what it is. Like, that's the feeling I'm talking about. Track, track those feelings. Because I'm looking for where I'm wrong.

Yeah.

To change maybe I can gain some experience there. That's what I'm saying, and, and level up in our Lizards and Wizards game that we're playing. That's what I'm saying. So I'm really surprised when I'm wrong in those kind of situations which is why I write the negative scenario usually. And I want. To dive into the data and find out, but not everyone is, and first of all, nobody tracks that that's like something that I just like occasionally tracked once every six, eight months or something like that so I could be ready on my yearly reviews but also like a fun little thing for me to do. I've never been in a company that tracks, you know? And also like when the executive says, oh, well sign this deal if you just do this one feature or whatever, put all those on that board too. CEO comes down and says, we've gotta get into this business. We gotta add AI to everything. And then eight, 10 months go by. Nobody's bought your stuff because of ai sorry. At any moment Joey could have popped out with the accordion. Because I said because of ai.

Yeah, absolutely. Nobody tracks this stuff. That's true. And as a, you don't have to be part anybody as a leader who's just been promoted. Be prepared to be surprised if you are, if you've got your radar tuned to that. Yes. But that's the point. Keep your radar active and keep your powder dry.

Keep your, keep your radar updated. Keep your radar updated. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, no. Post pages of it. What do you think about this one? When is the last time you genuinely were surprised by your team? And , let us know because we are, interested in finding out other avenues that we could have gone down. So we painted a pretty grim picture about the power changes and what happens to our brains. And we talked about how bad actors rise faster than everyone else, and then how orgs reward the wrong things so is there any hope here? Can we actually escalate through the positions of power and stay good human or at least decent human beings? So, om here's the plot twist to all this research. the gaining authority, gaining positions of power in your organization, it doesn't automatically make you evil. It makes you more of what you already were before you got that promotion. So if you're generally prosocial, because this is a research term that we're gonna talk about here in a second. Then the power actually makes you better at empathy. So how do you amplify the right version of yourself as you gain in power? That's the question we're gonna talk about.

Yeah. So let's start with the steel man argument here on this one. Okay. All right. It sounds like just be a good person too simplistic. What are the actual day to day things that you could do? Right. And then the other one is systemic pressures override individual intentions.

So those are points. Sorry. Instead they were good points. See this is the way I feel and I'm like, I didn't say they were good points. So the study that I have here, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Study from 2011, here on the screen. It found that power amplifies existing pro-social orientation, pro-social plus powerful individuals showed increased empathetic accuracy. So to the first Steelman point, like, be a good person is not the advice here. Okay? Right. the advice here is to build systems that reinforce your pro social goals. So by the way, I keep saying prosocial. The paper calls prosocial orientation. It calls it the, the, the desire to help and benefit others. It's a way of being oriented as a person so that you have a desire to help and benefit others. So, pro-social orientation

so going back to what you were saying, be a good person isn't the advice, right? Correct. By the way, all of these things apply to you individually. So when we say the advice is to build systems that reinforce your pro-social goals, so what does that look like? Build systems. Well, surround yourself with people that are those people that you want to be around. Right. Emulate those people. Basically you'll, you'll, you'll find those people, you'll find plenty of people that are not like that. So try and try and find the right company.

Find the right company was the only thing I was about to add. And then you just said it so I've got nothing to add. Sorry. it was like, don't go work at the people trying to scam all the old ladies outta their money or whatever, Don't go work there.'cause it doesn't help with your goals of helping people. Right. Empathetic folks don't scam old ladies outta their money. So I don't know why we're scamming old ladies today, but it's happening a lot. It's profitable apparently. But yeah, you're right. Like if, if you heard be a good person out of this, like you heard the wrong thing. Systemic pressure. Yes. It's real. It's, it's prevalent. It's real. I'm gonna put it right here. No, you know what? I gotta put it here because of the, because of the thumbnail process I gotta put over there. it is real. I'm not saying it's not real. You, you deliberate, but,, you should know that like you work in a job where like you have to sit in a seat for a long period of time. You can't get up like an airline pilot or something like that , you're sitting in a seat Yeah. For a very long amount of time. And the older you get, like you need to take countermeasures to make sure that your body is physically fit enough to sit in a seat for a very long amount of time and be aware. I kind of consider this very similar in terms of one is putting you in a position where physically you're gonna be challenged if you don't keep a good body ratio and keep yourself fit. None of your metrics rely on it. None of your indicators is a company or whatever, your bonuses, nothing like that relies on it. Yeah. And in fact, you could be the opposite. Get a lot of short term gains and you're gonna be on in four years anyway. So,

well, this is exactly what happens out there, right? Right, right. Four year tenure is probably very, very common for leadership,

The systemic pressures are real. But you, if the systemic pressures real, the reality, the position is I'm gonna be sitting in a chair a long amount of time like I have a decision to make. I need to now enact certain countermeasures to that. Well, what is the countermeasure to being stuck sitting in a chair for 12, 16 hours and whatever the flight day is, I don't know what the flight day is. Yeah. But being in a chair. Unable to basically go far from that chair, you know what are the kind of measures I'm gonna apply? And this is the same thing. If you're in this role where everyone just tells you what you want to hear, what kind of measures are you going to apply? We listed a few in the previous categories of start having one-on-ones with these people that, that you, they don't necessarily work for you, you don't necessarily supervise them. They're more than one level away from you in the organization. Maybe the things that they tell you are not super important, but it's, you want them to talk and for you to listen. The thing that you can learn from that exercise is how to generate, create, build empathy, maintain it, keep it in the back of your mind, not be a psychopath. Right. That's all I'm asking.

Yeah. The other thing we mentioned in the last segment is walk the gemba, put yourself in their shoes to really appreciate what's going on.

So the leader's job is to design an environment, where power amplifies people's best qualities, not where the power emphasizes the opposite. There should even be guardrails for going too far off that track in one direction where the power is meant to emphasize only positive traits. And when we start measuring these negative things happening, because we know that power also escalates other traits, then the guardrails kick in.

Absolutely. But unfortunately, those kind of measures either are completely absent in most orgs or are confined to some HR manual somewhere and never enacted upon. This is what it takes. Oh, by the way, though, we prize work-life balance, however, we want you to work this weekend.

Yikes. Yeah. This Sheryl Sandberg needs you to come to the back of the plane real quick. Oh boy. There should be a YouTube video for that. I think what I'm learning is that power doesn't, corrupt power reveals, and if you don't like what it's revealing, you can change the channel.

That's right.

Just keep that resume updated.

Yes, definitely do that

okay, I can't believe we got through that whole podcast. I mean, that was, I thought we were recording for nine days. Sorry. if I'm gonna have a takeaway in this podcast it's that any position of power needs to have accountability that goes along with it. Like, if the accountability that goes along with it is formal or informal, I don't know if that matters. I mean, that probably is another podcast, right? The formal and informal methods of doing this. But some things we wrote is like, identify two or three people. These are probably your mentors, maybe your sponsors, maybe they're just people in the community, you need to identify two or three people out there that will tell you the truth. especially when it's uncomfortable, right? I guess it could be investors. I'd be very cautious about someone who wants multiple things from you. Someone who just wants the best from you. That, that's who I would go to. And then the second one is write down your values now before they change or change again, right? And then create a red line list, which is behaviors that which are lines that you won't cross. You know, behaviors that you won't engage in.

Yeah, those values that you write down before you're steeped into this other side come back to those once in a while and size yourself up against those and say, am I staying true to myself, basically?

So let us know what you think about this podcast and what practices have you seen leaders in your organization use to keep them grounded. If you've seen any.

Yeah, and if you've seen the opposite still let us know. We'd love to know. Let us know about other topics too that you'd like us to delve into. And don't forget, like, and subscribe.