Unfair, Unprofessional, and a lot of people know who I'm writing about.

Why am I like this?

On this substack, I am going to tell stories, stories of things that happened. I do not write about former clients, but I will gladly write about former employers.

I wish my stories were about the positive outcomes of excellent leadership demonstrated by all the fantastic, empathetic, competent executive leaders. I wish I had such stories, but I mostly do not.

I don’t want to work for the people I’ve worked for so far anymore, and I feel like not telling our stories of ubiquitous executive psychopathy makes me feel better.

If you think I’m writing about you and feel I’ve written something untruthful, please reach out and correct me.

Likewise, if you think you know who I’m writing about and have an opinion, feel free to reach out.

I recently posted the following story and was informed it was unprofessional, unfair, and apparently about someone many people know on LinkedIn.

—————-here’s the post one critic referred to as “unfair, unprofessional, and about someone a lot of people on LinkedIn know————-

I once worked with a new VP who was inexperienced in the domain he was hired to lead, his leadership level, and the scale complexity of the highly interdependent systems for which he'd just taken responsibility.

He took advice from nobody. He misunderstood both technical and business challenges at the most fundamental level.

In a way, he was in a perfect L. David Marquet scenario. One in which he could have leveraged the expertise that surrounded him to help him lead effectively.

Unfortunately for him, well for everyone, he had been selected by his friends to dismantle the organization and convinced that he was the sole competent party.

One day, he didn't know I was at my desk within earshot of him when he gave himself a pep talk.

"It's going to be okay; you got this. You got this!"

As someone on his leadership team who'd been asked to help him, I wanted to stand up and say

"You don't ‘got this.' For the love of all things, please understand how out of your depth you are and accept help from the many capable experts surrounding you. We're all invested in your success; accept help."

In truth, few people in history had "got this" less than this struggling new executive. But I also had to accept that his mandate was impossible. If he were seen accepting the counsel of the 'losers' he'd been sent to "set straight" or terminate, that would be a catastrophic look for him.

I've said it before. Much executive leadership is optics, essentially political roles. This man would never have qualified for his role if he'd been required to interview with experts in any domain of business or technology. Everything a person in that role could be expected to know to qualify for the job was well out of his depth.

He succeeded in presiding over a nearly 100% leadership attrition rate; he didn't fire all of them, just me ;-)

To be fair though the reason he gave was that he was unsuccessful in his extensive efforts to promote me. :-D

I had no paper trail, no performance plan, and not even a single email reprimand for whatever behavior drove an angry firing of me. But that’s part of why I’m writing. He at least would have had to pretend to have attempted to reform me in most other countries and even many other states. Instead, he tried desperately to fire me over the phone, and when he failed at that and was forced to be face-to-face with me, he chose to lie about trying to promote me.

I don't fault him for any of that; I feel bad for him that he had so much stress and no grasp whatsoever on what he was doing.

I'll never work for him again; for his own sake, he doesn’t enjoy people asking him questions.

I hope he finds peace and something to do professionally that will be less harmful to his mental health and those around him.