What Happens When Someone With Power Won't Change

Christopher McCormick, Founder & CEO, Visionary Consulting

The Reformation | Week 5 of 5 | Wisdom Wednesday

Rachel opened the folder on a Thursday.

There were four exit interviews in it now. The newest came from the rep on Jeff's team everyone had assumed would be the next manager. Different name at the top, same story underneath: a manager who never asked, never noticed, and learned about the resignation the same day everyone else did. Rachel laid all four on the table in the chief executive officer's (CEO's) office and waited.

"How many conversations has he had about this?" the CEO asked.

"Four," Rachel said. "One from me, two from his vice president, one from the coach we paid for. Every one ended with Jeff agreeing and nothing changing."

Jeff's number was still the best in the region. It was the only fact in the room that wasn't in the folder, and it was doing all the talking.

"If we move on this," the CEO said, "we take the hit next quarter."

"Yes," Rachel said. "That's why nobody has."

Every reform this series has asked for works right up until it has to be applied to someone the organization is afraid to lose. A promotion criterion that means something. A metric that measures what matters. A bench built before the crisis. The right name on the slide. Then it quietly stops. Nobody announces the exception. The exception just becomes the standard. A reformation that never reaches that person is not a reformation. It is a rebrand.

The quiet word

The Reckoning closed last month on a short list of moments people use to decide what their organization actually believes. One of them: "Did the highest performer with the worst reputation ever actually face a consequence, or just a quiet word that changed nothing?"

The quiet word is the most common consequence in corporate life, and the most corrosive, because it lets everyone believe something happened. The leader who delivers it checks a box. The powerful person learns exactly where the ceiling is. Everyone watching learns it too.

Here's a question worth sitting with: for the person on your leadership team with the worst reputation and the best number, how many quiet words have there been, and what changed after any of them?

“High performer.” “First offense.”

In February 2017, a former Uber site reliability engineer named Susan Fowler published a blog post about her year at the company. By her account, her new manager propositioned her over company chat. She took screenshots and reported it. She was told it was clearly harassment, but it was his first offense, and upper management wasn't comfortable doing more than a warning because he "was a high performer." She later met other women who said they had reported the same manager.

Within four months, an outside law firm had reviewed 215 human resources (HR) complaints going back to 2012, about 20 people had been fired, and CEO Travis Kalanick had resigned after five major investors demanded it in writing.

Almost none of that was new information to the company. The complaints had been filed. HR had them. What changed was not what anyone knew. What changed was who held power over the decision. Inside the building, "high performer" had been a complete answer. It took a blog post, two law firms, and the investors to make it an incomplete one.

If your HR records were handed to an outside firm tomorrow, how many of the cases marked “resolved” would still read that way?

The other salesman

In 1949, Arthur Miller put a very different salesman on stage. Willy Loman has carried a sample case for the same firm for more than three decades. In the second act of Death of a Salesman, worn out and no longer selling, he goes to his boss, Howard, the son of the man who hired him, to ask for a job off the road. Howard, more interested in his new wire recorder than in the man in front of him, lets him go.

Most audiences read that scene as the portrait of a man destroyed by a culture that measures his worth in sales figures. It is also a portrait of how an organization applies that measurement. When Willy's numbers fall, the standard arrives immediately. No quiet word. No coach. No four conversations. Nobody in that office worries about taking a hit next quarter.

Put Willy next to Jeff and the double standard is hard to miss. The logic that let Howard dismiss Willy in a single scene is the same logic that has kept Jeff in place through four conversations: the number decides. When the number is low, the standard lands on the person with no leverage. When the number is high, the standard is suspended for the person with plenty. Most organizations don't have a lenient culture or a strict one. They have both, sorted by leverage.

Earlier in the play, in the first act, Willy's wife, Linda, turns on their two sons for the way they've stopped seeing their father:

Attention is the one thing Jeff has never been short of. Four conversations, a vice president, a coach the company paid for. Willy got a single scene with a man more interested in his wire recorder. Linda never asked for Willy to be excused. She asked for him to be seen. Most organizations get that exactly backwards. They excuse the Jeffs and stop seeing the Willys.

Do you know who in your organization got the Willy treatment in the last two years, and who got the Jeff treatment? Could you explain the difference out loud?

Every culture deck has this slide

Netflix's 2009 culture deck, one of the most widely shared leadership documents in Silicon Valley, handled this week's problem in about a dozen words: "Brilliant Jerks. Some companies tolerate them. For us, cost to effective teamwork is too high."

The sentence is right. It is also just a slide. Nearly every organization has some version of it. None of those sentences get tested when they're written. They get tested the first time they have to be applied to someone whose departure would show up on the next quarter's dashboard.

The people inside already know how that test usually goes. The Ethics and Compliance Initiative's 2023 Global Business Ethics Survey found that 72 percent of employees who saw misconduct reported it, a record for the study. It also found that 46 percent of those who reported said they experienced retaliation afterward. Nearly one in two. That's the math Inez was running in Week 4. It was never cowardice. It was an accurate read of the odds.

Have you ever checked what happened, eighteen months later, to the last person who reported someone senior in your organization?

What enforcement actually requires

Sincerity was never the missing ingredient. Structure is, and this week it has to hold up against someone who can push back.

Decide the consequence before anyone knows whose name is attached. A consequence designed after the name is known will always be designed around the name.

Take the decision away from anyone whose results depend on the offender. Jeff's vice president carries a regional number that Jeff carries for him. That vice president cannot be the one deciding what happens to Jeff.

Count the quiet words. After a set number of conversations that produced agreement and no change, the next step is not another conversation. Writing that number down in advance is uncomfortable. Not writing it down is how a manager gets to four.

Decide, before acting, that the decision will hold when the number dips. A consequence reversed the first quarter it costs something teaches the whole organization the standard was negotiable all along.

None of this has to mean a firing. A consequence can be removing someone from managing people while they keep the work they're genuinely good at. What it cannot be is invisible, temporary, or quietly undone the moment the dashboard turns red.

Try this before your next leadership meeting: write down what your organization would do if its single highest performer were found doing what Fowler described. If you can't write it down without first knowing who the person is, you don't have a standard. You have a list of people it applies to.

Three months, one gap

This closes the Q3 arc. In July, the Revolutionary Leadership Series showed that leading by conviction instead of convenience is possible, and that people have done it at far higher cost than a bad quarter. In August, The Reckoning named the gap between what organizations say and what they reward. In September, The Reformation tried to close it, one system at a time.

Four of those five weeks could be fixed with a better process. This one can't. It takes someone with authority deciding that the standard applies to someone with leverage, and then not blinking when it costs something. Revolutionary proved it's possible. Reckoning named the gap. Reformation is where the gap either closes or gets exposed as permanent.

The CEO moved Jeff out of managing people the following week. He kept his accounts. He lost his team. The next quarter, the region came in six percent under plan, and the vice president asked in the leadership meeting whether the decision could be revisited. The CEO said no, in front of everyone. Two weeks later, a rep on Jeff's old team stopped Rachel in the hallway and asked whether the story was true. Rachel told her it was. The rep didn't say anything else. She had just found out what the organization actually believed.

October opens a new question: once the standard holds, what does it take to build leaders with the capacity to carry it? That starts next Wednesday.

One question closes this series: If the person you can least afford to lose broke your standard tomorrow, would the standard survive the week?