If you’re looking for leadership case studies in real life situations, you won’t find many richer than what played out at Basecamp this week. If you’re not familiar, I’d encourage you to read Jason Fried’s announcement and Casey Newton’s article about the behind-the-scenes perspective. As of my writing this, the situation has continued to fracture, culminating on Friday with at least 1/3 of Basecamp’s employees accepting a buyout offer to leave the company, ending their tenure immediately.
Aside from trying to imagine the experience of replacing 1/3 of one’s workforce overnight, I’ve found myself reflecting on how the founders (Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson) approached this situation, the impact they thought it would have on employees, and the larger question of how leaders handle accountability from their employees.
I have no idea how this situation will resolve itself and wouldn’t want to guess, but however things turn out long-term, today there are lessons worth gleaning for any leader seeking to learn from outside events. Specifically how we should think about changes to company culture, employee push-back, and keeping harmony in the workplace.
Distractions
In his public post about the company’s changes, Fried asserted how distracting political discussions could be when they became a normal part of workplace dialogue. He’s not wrong. No one wants to feel bombarded by divisive debates at work. However, it doesn’t appear that Basecamp had a problem with contentious current events discussions at work, or certainly not to the level of inviting a sweeping new policy change.
In this instance, the only people distracted by the light seasoning of social commentary seemed to be Fried and Hansson. In turn, their response escalated the very distraction they claimed to be circumventing and introduced additional tension into the workplace.
Should we be careful about engaging in controversial discussions in the workplace? Yes. Should we enact new policies that many of our employees consider draconian and excessive in response to relatively timid steps towards social initiatives? ¯\(ツ)/¯
As leaders, it’s important that we don’t respond with ten pounds of force when we feel one pound of pressure. If you see one ant, you don’t fumigate your entire house. If we responded to one incident of employees showing inappropriate affection by banning all physical contact between employees, we become the ones introducing “major distractions” into the workplace.
What might be the best way to address a situation where you’re worried things are getting too “political” at work? Maybe a couple of conversations with the core contributors. Maybe an open discussion about what seems to be going on. But before resorting to the most extreme response, be sure you have a good read on whether or not you actually have a problem.
Accountability
One of the most valuable traits in any employee is their willingness to tell you you’re wrong. Yes, they should do so tactfully and in the right setting, but you’re better off surrounded by people who care enough about you and the company to step in when they think you’re making mistakes. This dynamic is hard for many leaders. Yes, we want to be told when we’re messing up – but it’s hard to be told directly and can feel like employee insubordination in certain instances. This puts you at a crossroads. Do I own up to my mistakes and take this chance for self-reflection? Or, do I double-down, get defensive, and bristle at being challenged by my employee?
Amongst all the difficult things coming to light from Basecamp, the thing that made me cringe the most was how Hansson handled a challenge from an employee regarding taking accountability for a company circulated list of “funny customer names”. From Casey Newton’s article:
Hansson’s response to this employee took aback many of the workers I spoke with. He dug through old chat logs to find a time when the employee in question participated in a discussion about a customer with a funny-sounding name. Hansson posted the message — visible to the entire company — and dismissed the substance of the employee’s complaint.
Being in a higher position in the organizational chart doesn’t give you a free pass on bad behaviors (despite all the disappointing evidence to the contrary). In whatever ways you’re modeling holding others accountable, you shouldn’t be surprised if your team opts to hold you to that same standard.
One of the few things employees at small companies have to rely on is that the senior leaders will put appropriate checks on themselves. No one can fire the founders and there’s no one to complain to if they’re jerks. So these employees, above all else, depend on your ability to keep yourself in check and show a willingness to take accountability and show grace under pressure. And if you lose that trust, it’s almost impossible to earn it back.
Keeping the peace
I’m a big believer in the stakeholder theory of leadership. I appreciate the idea that one of our core jobs as leaders is as keepers of the peace. If you want a healthy, happy workplace, you have to find harmony between your various stakeholders: employees, managers, executives, customers, vendors – all serving as part of an ecosystem that requires balance. In today’s challenging world, some employees are choosing to advocate that society should be a stakeholder in our model – that certain companies are meant to stand for something larger. And when there are pains in society and injustices that capture the public’s attention, it’s natural for these employees to seek opportunities for their place of work to help counteract these societal imbalances.
Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with your employees, if enough of them choose to advocate for changes in your company culture, you’re going to have a problem if you don’t come up with an appropriate response to their concerns.
We’ve talked about this with Black Lives Matter and other social movements; these aren’t moments where you need to agree or disagree. It’s not about your endorsement or your opinion, it’s about your willingness to give the floor to the people that are upset and hurting in your organization and to the people that want to find a way for the organization to do better.
If one of your stakeholder groups is out of balance, your responsibility in that moment is to seek to bring them back into balance, not to cast judgment on how they choose to react to feeling off-footed. Too many leaders completely miss the point in situations like this and think that silence is compliance. That’s what Fried and Hannson opted for: if we silence these people, then we won’t have these problems. What they also did by opting for silence is invalidated the concerns of the people who cared enough about the organization to advocate for change.
Leaders get the organizations they deserve. Fried and Hansson have been outspoken in what they feel is right vs wrong in how businesses are run. They’ve published multiple books, spoken publicly, and have a company-sponsored podcast about rethinking how organizations function. They’ve tacitly endorsed the idea of thinking differently about how organizations try to relate to the larger world around them.
In turn, they’ve attracted the sort of people to their company who believe them and what they’re saying, who are interested in being part of a movement around thinking differently about what it means to work at a company that’s a flag bearer for certain ideas and values. It shouldn’t have surprised the founders that some of their employees might have had ideas and perspectives that would challenge them, that would push them to be more reflective and engage with their employees more directly.
As leaders, it’s easy to blur the line between what’s best for us and what’s best for our team. This comes to a head when the team bring you ideas or suggestions that challenge your comfort and feeling of mental or emotional safety. And it’s these moments that ask you to evolve as a leader and continuously earn the trust and benefit of the doubt from your people.
People choose to be led by their leaders. And the moment we stop working to earn their loyalty and their faith in our vision and in the values we espouse, we should not be surprised if they choose to be led by someone else.
Good luck out there.
-Patrick