As a manager, I was able to observe firsthand the CEO’s approach to leadership and culture. In my opinion, his approach promotes profits over value, results over people, and encourages shame and humiliation as tools for management and feedback.
- I have observed a lot of shame be used by leaders by giving unnecessarily harsh feedback such as: "“I don’t understand the value you provide”, “I can do your job better than you”, "why can't you use your brain", and "I could have done this in two minutes, why is it taking you so long?".
- During my tenure, I witnessed more than a dozen senior leaders leave the organization, some of them having only worked at Directive for a couple months. This is probably due to the CEO regularly downplaying their contributions and belittling their input.
- The CEO leads and feeds the company culture of fear and shame. When the CEO speaks it is laced with shame that communicates to employees that they aren’t good enough, that their contribution doesn’t matter, or that they don’t deserve to work at Directive.
- It seems that the CEO is frequently sidetracked by competing objectives, and he swings his and the company's energy from one priority to the next like a pendulum. Some of his ideas are good, but they rarely gain traction before he moves on to another, potentially contradictory, objective. This behavior explains why Directive has frequent layoffs and hiring pushes, often simultaneously.
