Riff: I Am Not Us. I Am Them.
The exquisite phantasm of plausible deniability.
Hello subscribers! A quick note: this post is a “riff.” Riffs are shorter, more introspective (self-indulgent? navel-gazing?) pieces, compared to the regular Ars Pandemonium essays. This is the first one I’ve posted since I turned on subscriptions, but there are a couple others on the channel — “Riff: Frankenmentor” and “Riff: Who’s the Boss?”. If you like this one, check those out, too, and don’t forget to share! Enjoy.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, I led a small meeting — maybe a half-dozen folks from my team, talking through a particularly thorny issue with a current project.
I don’t remember the issue, and it doesn’t really matter. We were probably being told to do something we didn’t want to do, or being told we couldn’t do something that we did want to do. The usual.
We in the room were basically all on the same side; it wasn’t contentious between us. But no one was particularly happy. And as the leader of the team, I was trying to figure out how to get everybody to come together and work through this problem.
I did this…poorly. Or anyway, I got the results I was looking for. And some other results, too.
For some reason, one of the invitees for this meeting hadn’t shown up. We decided to proceed anyway, as there was some urgency to the matter, and we hoped they would join along the way. But the meeting wrapped and they had never appeared.
As we were breaking up, I grumbled something about how I was now going to have to go through the whole thing again for this team member who’d not bothered to grace us with their presence. “Oh, no worries,” said one of the participants, “I’ll just give them the recording.”
“The what?”
“The recording. I record all our meetings.”
<Record scratch.>
Cue a righteous rant to end all righteous rants: you can’t just go around surreptitiously recording meetings! You cannot record audio without explicit consent of everyone present! Besides being literally illegal, it’s a violation of confidentiality! We’re talking about privileged information in these meetings. What if that recording leaks out?1
I was hopping mad.
But…let’s be honest. I’m not the cops. I wasn’t upset because some law had been broken or whatever. I was maybe a little bit irked at the discourtesy — I mean, give a guy a head’s up that tape is rolling, right?
Really, though, I was furious with myself. I was embarrassed, humiliated. I felt shabby, and cheap.
Why? Because that recording featured fully thirty minutes of me ranting about recalcitrant cross-functional partners, myopic senior leadership, corporate fatuousness…who knows what else.
You see, the way I had gotten the group rallied around tackling this problem was by fully Us-vs-Them-ing the whole situation. And the instant that I learned all of that was on a recording, I had this crushing, almost paralyzing realization.
I’m not us. I’m them.
Good lesson, right?
It’s incredibly feeble leadership to say, “well, I’m in charge of this little group, but I have no power or influence over all those people out there, so I’m right here with you, my siblings-in-arms.” It might be specifically effective in the short term — it certainly got this group fired up. But it’s surely a no-win over time.
The approach is essentially the opposite of the Henry V at Agincourt “we few, we happy few” speech. It’s a credibility nightmare. It’s an authority black hole. You come off as small and weak at best; at worst, petulant and manipulative. Leadership erodes.
In this moment, I was the manager and I was also the leader. I owed the team more than grievance and blamecasting. I owed the team clarity, direction, and purpose. I let them down. I had taken the coward’s way, and I was ashamed of myself.
So! Good lesson, right? Mid-career manager experiences important realization about the responsibilities that come with leadership. Growth!
And, yeah. That’s exactly what happened. But we’re only halfway through this little essay.
That moment of insight had been painful but incredibly valuable, and I really did proceed to work on being better. But over time I got to wondering: why was I so devastated only upon learning of the recording?
It’s not like I had been talking to myself — there were several people in the room listening to me! Why had my lapse in judgment not occurred to me when I thought it was ephemeral? I could very well have had the same realization about the responsibilities of my role without a recording. Why did that in particular cause such dismay?
The subsequent introspection I did on this was…not very flattering.
Unfortunately, I think it comes down to this: I was (and, suppose, am) pretty confident in my ability to talk my way into — and out of — just about anything. If the folks in the room had repeated what I said, spread it around the larger team, well, maybe I unconsciously figured I’d just be able to…spin it.
“Oh, is that how it sounded? No, no, what I really said was…blah blah blah.” I didn’t have that in mind, it wasn’t a plan or anything, but it must have been in there.
That’s not good. It’s literally gaslighting. And a recording pretty well forestalls it — a fact which probably shouldn’t induce panic. But it did.
To be clear, that didn’t happen. I didn’t do that. The conversation ended in the meeting and I never found myself having to dance around it. But that sinking feeling must have come from somewhere!
All of this just reinforced the original insight: I am not us, I am them. If you’re a manager, you’re management. That’s how it works.
Having confidence that you can gaslight your way out of bad management behavior is hardly a laudatory achievement. If you’re going to be a leader, you’ve got to lead. The team’s going to blow off steam, they’re going to complain about management — that’s okay! Joining that chorus with some kind of “How do you do, fellow kids” crap is a recipe for failure.
I still don’t love being recorded. Not because I want the flexibility to soft shoe my way out of something, but much more because I just kind of hate the sound of my voice, and especially when I’m already feeling self-conscious. But it doesn’t make me panic anymore.
And I’d hardly claim that this little lesson made my behavior perfect. Um, no. My flaws are deep and persistent. But that shock of truly realizing the responsibilities — and limitations — of the position, and the resultant introspection, has really stuck with me through the years and at least helped me be more conscious of the behavior.
For what it’s worth, I demanded that this person stop recording meetings without the explicit knowledge and consent of everyone present (which I knew they would never get). I also demanded they figure out if or how they should retain or destroy whatever existing recordings there were. I have no idea what happened after that — this was a very long time ago, on a team that no longer exists.