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CHAPTER 1
THE DIGITAL FLIP |
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Souls live at the intersection between our wills, hearts and physical selves. When one is out of harmony with the others, we disintegrate.
āJane E. Stevenson
Itās 3 oāclock in the morning, and Iāve been at work since 7:00 a.m. yesterday. For the past 20 hours, Iāve been hyper-focused on running my teamās annual general meetings. Our remotely operated international staff has gathered together in Western Europe from more than five different countries to spend a week planning out the next yearās projects.
My weary crew members are dropping laptops into backpacks with eyes glazed. We arenāt even halfway through the week, and everyone is ready to collapse. We all desperately need sleep, some time off, and a chance to wander cobblestone streets and find inspiration again. Iām about to follow my guys out the door when the boss beckons me into his office.
āSit down and go over these script concepts with me. I want to add some new projects to the production calendar.ā He means the calendar we already finished. The one that got voted yesterday, before he tweaked the minutes from the meeting since he didnāt like the vote.
Iām exhausted. Iām in a country five time zones away from home and havenāt gotten past the jet lag yet. Iām starving because we worked straight through dinner. It takes every remaining ounce of energy to focus my brain out of the fog creeping up on the edges of my vision. At this point, itās all I can do to respond in full sentences.
Oh yes. And yesterday at 5:00 a.m., two little blue lines announced that Iām pregnant. I havenāt even told my husband yet. I feel nauseated, but Iām not sure if itās from pregnancy or sheer exhaustion.
Oblivious, my boss isnāt even talking about his latest plans to triple the production schedule. I already know it doesnāt matter to him that the project lineup was voted. Heāll mix it around however he likes, without regard for logic or productivity. He drones on about imaginary insubordination he thinks he has sensed from one or two of our team members. Every couple of days heās convinced that a different person is out to get him. Or to get me. Or somebody else.
I. Could. Not. Care. Less.
My first thought is to protect the current target of his interpersonal paranoia: Why are you slandering the team member who is likely the smartest creative person on our crew (and one of my best friends)? Why are you saying sheās after my job? Is it because she and I both stood up to you when you rewrote the voted committee minutes yesterday before sending them out to the team? Is this just malicious payback? His rambling shifts to how he thinks some of the young female team members should take wardrobe lessons from his fashionable and sexy daughter. Then his monologue drifts to daydreaming about exotic vacation plans heās making with his wife.
My next thought is pure self-preservation. Is there any sane reason that this canāt wait a mere four hours until 7:00 a.m. when Iām expected to be back at my desk? All I want to do is sleep.
My boss is a narcissistic manipulator, and Iām gradually realizing that Iāve been enabling him for years. Despite the fact that Iād probably describe myself as someone who reads people well, Iām really only starting to see it for what it is. Iāve been so busy pandering to his ego, managing his paranoia, and offering myself as a buffer to protect my team from his toxicity that I canāt even pinpoint where things went off track.
Heās the epitome of a man living different personas to different people. When heās speaking to large crowds around the world, he pontificates ivory tower theories on how to engage in meaningful relationships with people. Off the stage, he rules his support team with an iron dictatorship, keeping us constantly off balance and groveling to please his unpredictable whims. He does not live with one face. He cannot be trusted to do what is right nor to keep his own word, and the entire team knows it. Iāve stayed this many years because I believe passionately in the work we do, because the reality has crept upon me, because thought I could somehow make it better.
And I donāt have a clue how I let things spiral so out of control.
THE WAY THINGS WERE
There was a time when society was made up almost solely of small, intimate social groups. People lived on farms, in villages, in small towns. Even in the big cities, distinct social classes forced narrow circles of interaction. Everybody knew everybody elseās story because they grew up alongside each other and then grew old in the same place. If you beat your wife or lied compulsively or cheated customers at your market stall, people knew. They might ignore it, but they still knew. People kept each otherās secrets as a matter of survival.
There was a great deal of openness and transparency in this social face-to-face world, but, in contrast, the corporate business world of the industrial age offered consumers little opportunity for fact-checking. The only information you had was the data the company put on paper for you to see. Corporations could essentially tell any story they wanted because it was almost impossible for anyone to uncover the skeletons in their closets, the multiple identities behind closed doors, or their schizophrenic values. This created a very real, opaque corporate veil.
If an organization had a schizophrenic past or a fraudulent present, all you had to do was bury the paper trail, and there was a good chance nobody would ever find the evidence. Even information technically considered āin the public domainā required a time-consuming trip to the county courthouse or an archives building. Then you had to sit in a file room and sneeze your way through a hundred mildewy boxes until you found that one elusive sheet of paper. You had to possess an intense investigative driveāor a search warrantāto ever hope to unveil corporate secrets.
Those large corporations also controlled the media, which meant they controlled the story. A select few at the top determined the message, the morals, and the mindset they wished to instill among the public. The corporate veil protected big companies and shielded the shenanigans of their leadership from public view. It was fairly easy to hide the skeletons in your corporate closet in the analog world.
That was then.
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Those large corporations also controlled the media, which meant they controlled the story. A select few at the top determined the message, the morals, and the mindset they wished to instill among the public. The corporate veil protected big companies and shielded the shenanigans of their leadership from public view. It was fairly easy to hide the skeletons in your corporate closet in the analog world.
That was then.
THE DIGITAL FLIP
Now we have the reverse.
You might naturally think this means that the opaque veil has been pulled back, since so much information is out in the open. But instead of vanishing, the veil has simply repositioned itself. Now, rather than keeping corporate secrets hidden away, weāve allowed it to separate us individually through a constant faƧade of digital media.
In real life, we now tend to exist in isolated, compartmentalized worlds where we rarely speak to neighbors, and where anybody can pose as anybody else on the Internet. The digital world gives every person with a WiFi connection the platform to pretend to be anyone they wish, for any purpose, a luxury once available only to wealthy businesses. Identity reinvention awaits, available at the stroke of our fingertips. Any teenage kid in a chat room knows itās challenging to resist the lure of presenting ourselves as someone weāre not, simply because digital media makes it so easy for us to do so. And those on the other side of the screen have no way of knowing if youāre the 13-year-old girl you say you are or a dangerous criminal. Thereās no way to know the difference.
If youāre a jerk, or a narcissist, or a fraud, or a pedophile, the digital veil can allow you to successfully conceal your true self for a very long time. Interestingly, since the veil has flipped, it also allows the average person to more successfully navigate around what was once such an opaque corporate protection. Three dozen keystrokes on Google can reveal anything that is a matter of public record anywhere, and can often expose a significant amount of so-called private data as well. Corporate skeletons are no longer so easily closeted away.
Weāre living in the center of this digital flip. Unless we make a focused, intentional effort to seek transparency, while simultaneously rejecting the temptation to compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone elseās social media highlight reel, we donāt stand a chance at authenticity.
Whether you are a corporate leader, a brand manager, a non-profit visionary, or simply a caring individual, youāre telling a story with your life and through your organization. All relationships are based on trust. That trust is either strengthened or destroyed by the values people observe you acting out on a day-to-day basis. When there is a breakdown between what happens in a leaderās private life and the message they present to their public, or between a companyās published philosophy and the experience someone has with an employee or productātrust is broken.
Nothing kills brand engagement and violates trust faster than feeling betrayed, believing youād bought into a relationship that offered one particular set of values, and then discovering that the reality is something different. Examples such as Enron and Bill Cosby come to mind.
In personal life, in public leadership, and in corporate identity and brand experience, it is absolutely vital to choose a set of core values, clearly articulate them, and then consistently and intentionally implement them across all platforms.
If all facets of your individual leadership or your organization are not governed by the same set of values, you will end up dividing your effectiveness by spending at least some of your energy putting a positive spin on the skeletons in your closet and investing the rest of that energy into making sure no one opens the closet door.
The looming challenge we all face in both corporate and individual identity is our deep and rooted human need to live with one face.
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CHAPTER 2 I NEVER MEANT TO END UP HERE | |
It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, youāll do things differently.
āWarren Buffett
The years I spent working for that particularly narcissistic manipulator were some of the best of my life. It sounds counter-intuitive, but Iām grateful for the experience. That job allowed me to travel the world, producing events and directing media projects Iād never imagined possible. I was privileged to work with amazing team membersāoutstanding, talented, passionate individuals who were also conscientious professionals.
For a 20-something fresh out of graduate school, I was given a remarkable amount of freedom, at first. Freedom to be creative, to hone my skills, to manage a creative team, to partner with people who inspired positive and tangible change within our target demographic. I got to explore my natural leadership strengths and taste the satisfaction of making massive social impact by creating resources for international community development agencies, producing short films for global broadcast that taught positive messages for families, and mentoring younger media professionals into fulfilling careers.
It was a dream job. The satisfaction was there; the fulfillment was there. I had constant opportunities to indulge my wanderlust, traveling to exotic places like Australia, Russia, the Netherlandsādirecting video productions, developing training resources, speaking to crowds of hundreds and sometimes thousands. Everything was amazingāexcept for the situation with my boss.
So why did I put up with him for so long?
I truly believed in the work our team was doing. That was one of the good reasons. One of the not-so-great reasons was that I was far too trusting. Of course, it wasnāt so bad at first. You rarely leap directly into a toxic relationship or an abusive environment. Rather, it creeps upon you by degrees. All the little opportunities where you silenced the warning in your gut and went along with something that didnāt quite feel rightāthose add up over time. Little choices that seemed neutral but werenātāyet you couldnāt see reality for what it was until you got enough puzzle pieces in place.
THE COST OF MISPLACED TRUST
I was too young, trusting, and completely under his charismatic spell, in the beginning, to realize that this work I loved so much was permanently throttled by the reality that the top leader did not live with transparent authenticity behind closed doors. After all, I was in my late 20s and already the associate director of an international non-profit. Wasnāt that worth putting up with some frustrations? So what if I have a pesky boss. Doesnāt everyone?
For a long time, I dismissed his power-hungry behavior as merely the reality of having a grown-up job in a grownup world, where the top brass are naturally expected to be capricious, demanding, paranoid, and petty. I spent years excusing and enabling him, buffering the abuse from my team, until that exhausted encounter in the wee hours when it dawned on me just how precarious everything had become.
Not long after, my crew was ready to quit, the overseeing board began investigating my boss on multiple allegations of sexual harassment, and the entire organization was in danger of crumbling because the guy at t...
