Dear Friends,
I imagine that you, like me, have had good managers, bad managers, and mostly in-between managers.
I have no idea whether Elon Musk is a good manager, but strongly held opinions abound. In the midst of quiet quitting and union organizing, some CEOs confess their admiration for Musk’s demand for total loyalty and a “hardcore” work ethic. Others say Musk exemplifies the narcissistic and ruthless leadership style that violates employees' basic dignity and labor rights.
Most of what I have learned about leadership and management comes from Ruth Levine, who pens the weekly
newsletter and is the best manager I’ve ever had. Ruth is now the CEO of IDInsight, and was interviewed recently by Arnav Kapur on the Development Dilemma podcast about leading an international organization and addressing the inevitable inequities that surface from one country office to the next. I thought about Ruth this past weekend after reading the following in James Clear’s 3-2-1 newsletter:What’s more powerful? A manager or coach or teacher who tells you the right thing to do? Or one who shows you how to live and work by example?
People gravitate toward the standard you set, not the standard you request.
Ruth is a phenomenal leader not because she has any secret leadership advice you haven’t already heard, but rather because she puts it into practice. Every Single Day. Here are three practices I learned from Ruth that have made me a better manager:
She is crystal clear about what is ultimately her decision to make, what is your decision to make, and what needs more information from others before any decision can be made. Even if she disagrees with your decision, if it’s yours to make, then she will support you without second-guessing.
She takes a genuine interest in your interests. She detects what uniquely motivates each of her employees and she cultivates that motivation, sending along related articles that she has read or even just a funny New Yorker cartoon. By taking interest in each of her employees, she also encourages them to take a genuine interest in each other.
She is confident and transparent in her decision-making. Ruth never makes a decision “just because.” She shares the information and reasoning behind her decisions. Even when I disagreed with her decision, I always respected it.
Some leaders aim to inspire through charisma and storytelling. Others focus on how they make people feel. Ruth is one of the special few who excels at both.
Ruth is not a fear-based leader; her self-esteem is not rooted in bureaucratic power. By comparison, Liz Henry offers a list of the five characteristics of fear-based leadership, including this description:
They don't know who they are behind the business card. Their professional identity is their only source of personal power, and they more than anyone else in their sphere know how fragile that power is.
They don't feel whole and healthy. They don't have the self-esteem to build anyone else up and make the people who work for them feel strong and capable.
The false sense of bureaucratic power conferred on them by higher-level managers becomes a substitute for self-esteem. Fearful managers get their fake self-esteem by hitting the marks that other people tell them to hit.
Fear-based leadership can be effective in the short term. We are highly motivated by fear, especially when it is tied to financial rewards that satisfy our search for self-worth. But over the long term, it’s not sustainable. The foundation begins to crack. Leading by fear, as Ben Brearley describes:
stops teamwork
creates workplace gangs
stops people from speaking up
kills confidence in team members
My sense is that most fear-based leaders suffered fear-based parenting when they were young. I’m not sure whether fear-based leaders can change after decades of reinforcement, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt to adopt Amy Brown’s three recommendations to unlearn fear-based leadership.
📚 Remembering GoodReads
I’m rediscovering how much I enjoy GoodReads and the slowness of reading, reviewing, and discovering books. Last month, Jenny Odell described how she replaced Twitter and Instagram, which were warping her sense of time, with slower streams of media that update less frequently but stay with you for longer. Over the past few weeks, my phone tells me that I’ve spent about four hours per week on Twitter and Instagram. My goal for 2023 is to spend that time instead on GoodReads and Substack. Let me know if you’re on GoodReads — I would like to follow your reviews and recommendations. I read and reviewed two books over the holidays: Sally Rooney’s Conversation with Friends and Salvador Medina Ramírez’s El socialismo no llegará en bicicleta.
💆♂️ Status and Rest
I’m finishing up W. David Marx’s Status and Culture, which is a compelling “theory of everything,” although it would be twice as good if half as long. A few of my highlights:
“Taste is entirely a Middle Class concern. The Lower Class don’t have it and the Upper Class don’t need it.”
New Money signals with economic capital. Old Money, on the other hand, has an advantage in the longevity of their status superiority, which can be demonstrated through social capital (strong relationships with other rich families) and cultural capital (knowing how to behave at the very top of society). This quiet shabbiness among the very richest can appear illogical to the uninitiated, especially New Money individuals. But as we’ll learn, musty Old Money aesthetics are an equally rational signaling strategy as New Money’s money-drenched boasting.
The sociologist David Muggleton interviewed a young punk who claimed that “punk is basically being yourself, freedom, doing what you wanna do, looking like you wanna, like, look like”—all while sporting a stereotypical punk mohawk.
As Oscar Wilde put it: fashion is “a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”
I thought Marx’s book as I listened to Ezra Klein’s podcast interview with Judith Shulevitz about the Sabbath as a necessary collective ritual to unplug from work, productivity, and accomplishment. Ezra is upfront about the irony of producing a New York Times podcast about not working, but he doesn’t interrogate the motives beneath the contradiction.
Marx’s Status and Culture argues that both rest and status-seeking are fundamental to the human experience — and that they are frequently in tension. We seek status and we want to influence culture. (Ezra Klein excels at both.) But status-seeking and influence can be at odds with rest and solidarity.
Navigating that tension, I suppose, is part of the fun and anxiety of the human experience.
Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day and I hope you have a wonderful week!
David