The facts may be in dispute, but the “optics,” as they say in Washington, are bad.
Amazon gets slammed over the weekend in the New York Times for, among other sins, making grown men cry and sidetracking working mothers. So who comes out Monday morning to answer the allegations? Not CEO Jeff Bezos, the self-described keeper of the culture, but a guy we kind of remember giving the typical partial answers at D.C. press conferences.
All of us who don’t read the Bezos-owned Washington Post front to back scratched our heads and wondered, “Hey, isn’t he the former White House spinmeister? What’s his name? Ya, Carney. Jay Carney!”
Is it that bad, one might reasonably have wondered. Did some senator introduce a bill to revoke Bezos’ citizenship? Did Ali Khamenei join Amazon Prime and order a gross of nuclear centrifuges with free two-day shipping? What is Jay-freaking-Carney doing commenting on Amazon’s workplace culture?
Former White House spokesman Jay Carney appears on "CBS This Morning" on August 17 to refute the... [+]
Turns out Carney went from public service to two-day service, from military options to stock options. He’s SVP of “corporate global affairs” for the world’s largest retailer, which is not a bad gig if ambassador to Jamaica is already spoken for.
Carney went on CBS This Morning to echo his new boss’s talking point that in the whole five months he, Carney, has been there, he did not recognize in the newspaper story the Amazon he knows. “We have zero tolerance for behavior by managers that is not empathetic,” he said.
To borrow a presidential phrase, it depends on what the definition of “empathetic” is.
In fairness to Amazon and the political, I mean, commercial spokesman, the Times story was long and TV time is short. Because the newspaper story, based on interviews with 100 current and former “Amazonians,” covered so much ground, it was sometimes hard to know which part of it the company was refuting.
What may have stuck most were the stories of individual workers, particularly those of female employees: A mother of three being told by her manager that she was unlikely to advance because of the time demands of the kids. A woman being told she was a “problem” after taking time off to care for her cancer-stricken father. Women who had cancer returning to find their jobs at risk. A woman who miscarried twins needing to get on a business flight two days after surgery.
Netflix, apparently, it ain't.
“We weren’t able to check out anonymous anecdotes or the anecdotes of people whose names were in the story. We just saw it yesterday when it came out or the day before when it was posted,” said Carney. But in a memo to employees, Bezos called these “shockingly callous management practices” and “if you know of any stories like those reported, I want you to escalate to HR.” No points for empathy there; it’s pretty much the law.
Also, to be fair, in a company of tens of thousands of employees, there will be horror stories, as there will be stories like the one Carney cited of “a woman I work with whose husband suffered from [a] rare [form of] cancer who got enormous support from the company.” The issue is not the existence of either type of circumstance, but their relative prevalence.
A couple of the assertions in the story – that “I’ll get back to you” is considered a lame answer at Amazon and that employees are encouraged to vigorously argue their ideas – were less than scathing. Both of those are basic expectations in most professions, including that of newspaper reporter.
The overriding issue is how empathetic a firm Bezos is running. Does Amazon demand not just professionalism, but near-perfection; work its people excessively long hours; convene conference calls on holidays; rank and yank like the discredited tactics of Jack Welch; have a real basis for 40-somethings worrying they will be replaced by 30-somethings, who are in turn fearful they will be replaced by 20-somethings; and foster ulcer-inducing stress?
Amazon is not “a soulless, dystopian workplace where no fun is had and no laughter heard,” wrote Bezos, coming dangerously close to unintentionally penning mock lyrics for “Home on the Range.” “I don’t recognize this Amazon and I very much hope you don’t, either.”
Such a firm would not only lack empathy; it would lack sound strategy.
One need look no further than a story published last October in Bezos’s newspaper. “The evidence is clear that the leadership qualities of ‘bad’ bosses over time exert a heavy toll on employees’ health,” Harvard Medical School instructor Jonathan D. Quick, a coauthor of the book Preventive Stress Management in Organizations, told the Post. “The evidence is also clear that despite the rationalizations some leaders may use to defend their stress-inducing, unsupportive style, such behavior by leaders does not contribute to improved individual performance or organizational productivity.”
Using the kind of fear the Times described is always a temptation for leaders, because in limited ways, it works. Of course an executive can scare someone into doing what he wants. The research my colleagues and I did for the book Widgets found people work harder on both ends of the intimidation scale than they do in the middle. But there is a vast difference between working hard out of enthusiasm and doing so because one is freaking out. It’s a J-shaped pattern. Fearful and overly pressured employees scramble to find ways to improve the way they work, to cover their butts, but the drive is not as strong, as effective, or as honest as it is among those who are not so stressed.
One set of experiments found that people experiencing anxiety are more likely to engage in “self-interested unethical behaviors” and to rationalize their misconduct as not as serious as similar acts by others. Companies that unleash these forces should not be surprised, as Carney said he was, that the term “Darwinism” bubbles out.
Grinding down employees or driving them out with long hours is increasingly considered backward leadership, which is why the Times story got the reaction it did. The rules are changing. “I want the company I’m dealing with to treat the human beings who work there with respect, not force them into a climate of fear,” wrote USA Today technology columnist Jefferson Graham.
Bezos’s and Carney’s protestations that the firm could not have gotten this far if it were that rough a place are not true. People are, unfortunately, remarkably reluctant to quit a job once they get enveloped within the group, even when it costs them precious time with family or friends or just recharging their batteries. And some people willingly trade those extra hours for stock options or accomplishments they can claim to get a better job elsewhere. Some of them get a heart attack in the bargain.
Because it all but invented online shopping and is, indeed, customer-obsessed, Amazon can get away longer with employment tactics that would put other firms in a tailspin. Its approach should not be held out as an example of how to manage people.
The most damning facts may be that Bezos’s publicly known comments on how much an employee should work slant toward the extremes. He is known for remarks such as, “You can work long, hard or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three.” If he really wanted to rid the company of the dystopian reputation, the company would need leaked emails of Bezos throwing a fit against 85-hour workweeks. “These are people with lives here and, just as important, lives outside of work! It’s short-sighted and foolish,” said no Bezos memo of which we know. He'd need his hallmark slogan to be more like that of SAS Institute CEO Dr. Jim Goodnight: “After eight hours, you’re probably just adding bugs."
And when The New York Times or CBS This Morning calls, that kind of a chief executive, who like all CEOs is ultimately responsible for the organization’s culture, would make himself available and field whatever questions he must to make it clear he is empathetic and truly has “zero tolerance” for leaders who are not. Otherwise, the “optics” of leaking an internal denial while sending a former political spin man out to face the cameras gives the impression that the Times described an Amazon that may not be the experience of all employees, but one that is, unfortunately, far too common and not that far afield of what the boss intended.
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