I thought I was working with idiots

There was a period of about two years when I came into the office and shouted. I pointed fingers. I stamped my feet in front of people who worked for me. I thought this was my job — that somebody had to tell people when something was not good enough, and who else was going to do it?

I was the worst boss I have ever encountered, and I did not know it.

What a frightened office actually does

Here is what I could see at the time: people made mistakes and did not tell me. They would get something wrong, say nothing, and it would sit there quietly getting worse until a client rang and the whole thing came apart at once.

Here is what I could not see: that this was a completely rational response to me.

If the cost of bringing your boss a problem is being shouted at in front of your colleagues, and the cost of hiding it is that it might surface later and might be traceable to you, hiding it is the better bet every single time. They were not being cowardly. They were doing the arithmetic, and the arithmetic was one I had set up.

So I concluded I was working with idiots. An entire office of them. In a major city, across several years of hiring, somehow only I could find them.

The question

At some point — and I cannot tell you what prompted it — I asked myself whether the common factor in all of this was them or whether it was me.

I did not answer it. I brought somebody in to talk to the team, properly, without me in the room, and let them tell someone else what it was actually like.

What came back was hard to listen to. It was also completely fair.

The mistake underneath it

I had been treating everybody as though they were me.

I assumed they had my appetite for starting from nothing, my tolerance for pain, my willingness to work through a weekend because something interesting was happening. And when they did not, I read it as a deficiency.

But think about who that describes. Someone with all of those traits does not work for another person. They go and build their own thing — that is what the traits are for. I would never have worked for a man like me. I would not have put up with it for a month.

So I was hiring people to be employees and then being disappointed in them for not being founders. There is no version of that where anyone wins.

What I had no right to expect

At six o’clock, the people who worked for me had lives. A partner, a flat, a holiday to think about, a parent to ring.

They did not owe me their shower thoughts. They had no stake in the thing. If the business did well, I was the one who bought a house. That was my upside and my risk, and I had quietly been expecting them to carry a founder’s preoccupation for an employee’s share of the outcome.

You do not get owner-thinking from people who do not own anything. That is not a flaw in them. It is arithmetic, again, and I was on the wrong side of it.

Two years

It took about two years to rebuild how I led. Not a decision — a long, unglamorous sequence of catching myself and doing the other thing.

What I eventually understood is that the job runs the other way round from how I had been doing it. The people who work for you are not there to deliver your vision. You are there to make it possible for them to do good work and to be visibly credited for it, and if that stops being true for someone, the right ending is a good one rather than a loud one.

That idea is not mine. It has been written down by better people for fifty years and I was not the one who thought of it. What is mine is the two years of being its exact opposite, and what that cost the people who were there for it.

The part I did not expect

The culture work attracted people who were far better than the business deserved. Not because we paid more — we did not. Because the alternative employers were, frankly, no better than I had been, and being the one decent option in a field of bad ones turns out to be an enormous advantage that costs almost nothing to acquire.

Those people are still there. They run it now. I left and it kept going and it is doing well, which is the only outcome that makes the first half of this story worth telling.

If you are reading this and quietly certain that your problem is everyone else, I am not going to tell you that you are wrong. I am going to tell you that I was certain too, for two years, with an entire office as my evidence.

Ask the other question. Get someone else to ask it for you, because they will not tell you honestly.