Entrepreneurs: the Weight of Your Words
by Miki Saxon
“I sometimes say things — just stupid, little remarks — and expect people to just ignore them. They will not. They will not. Every little thing you say is something that will stick in people’s heads.” –Amazon CTO Werner Vogels
Livefyre CEO Jordan Kretchmer, said that he’s made a “benign comment that pissed off the whole sales team.”
Chief product officer of Interaxon, Trevor Coleman, said that once at a happy hour he joked about taking the company in a completely new direction. The following day, an employee asked him — quite seriously — what the next steps for that change would be.
LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said that every offhand comment he made would turn into a “massively disruptive fire drill…”
There is no such thing as a benign or casual comment, throwaway thought or product/strategy-related joke when you are a senior manager.
This is nothing new. I wrote about the same thing in 2006 and the event I described happened 20 years before that.
The question isn’t how to mitigate the damage; the real question is how do we change the thinking that fosters it in every new generation of leaders.
Image credit: Ben Beltran
April 3rd, 2015 at 1:16 am
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