Our correspondent relates the story of one of the highest-performance business developer at the startup, who always cringes when it comes time to introduce clients to the CEO—which is essentially what her job is all about:
I’m always totally on edge because I’m waiting for Lawrence to come up with some fresh way of making me look like a complete jerk. Just last week I brought reps from a new online learning service in Scandinavia in for a demo of one of our coolest tools. They were loving it when Lawrence piped up, “And here Cassie was convinced you wouldn’t understand this technology!”
Finally, cultivate surprise.
This works best in combination with confusing people about what’s actually going on and what the firm’s priorities are. In Law Land, it typically involves the relative priority of various documents—what needs to be redrafted or finalized when and who needs to see it to ensure it’s indeed in presentable form.
Ideally, you can synchronize this with weekends or, better yet, major holidays: Set the target off on a faux emergency exercise in completely redoing a lengthy and complicated document, to be ready for others’ eyes on the morning of the first business day after the break, then berate them (see #2, above) for having focused on the wrong document, or the wrong issues in the document.
Make sure your advance instructions are always sufficiently conditional, contradictory, or confusing to give you plenty of plausible leeway in denouncing whatever decision the target came to in prioritizing their work.
Compound the pressure brought to bear on the target by citing the very urgency of the work as magnifying the consequences of their erroneous judgment.
The IT director of our anonymized tech firm related that he had:
more than once invited a client to meet to discuss a strategy, only to find that Lawrence has already talked to them without letting him know.
As with many demotivators, Lawrence has a ready explanation for his behavior: “We’re moving at warp speed, we don’t have time to worry about who gets credit or who talks to who.”
Brilliant, you have to admit.
Now, the particular genius of these behavior patterns, for present company, is how naturally lawyers gravitate towards them: They fit us, frankly, like gloves.
Consider:
- We love telling other people what to do and how to do it because, you know what?, we actually do know better than they how to do it. Truth be told, we know better than virtually everyone how to do virtually everything. Even if it would be beneath us to actually do any of it ourselves.
- Firm subscribers to the principle that the most effective process is always open, transparent, and widely attended, we not only celebrate public humiliations, we view private dressing-down’s as irretrievably lost opportunities. That, we are confident, will teach them.
- Finally, since we are past masters at the art of the English language, it is inconceivable to us that our instructions could have been unclear or our intentions misperceived. Clearly, the responsibility—and the blame—can only be laid at the feet of our benighted minions.
These high tech folks have nothing on us. We bear within us the native potential to be the high priests of demotivation, the board-certified masters of disheartenment, the unerring marksmen of talent killing.
Recognize anyone you know? You know what to do.
Happy holidays.
