Workplace Envy - What’s That?
I have spent the last few weeks in self-reflection following my latest departure from a “big corporate job” and mostly how I should have better used my entrepreneurial wiles to promote an environment for explosive ideas and not accepted the same corporate line. Instead what comes to mind in my reflections is once you achieve these high-ranking roles why does ENVY become a villain among your peers? I have had a more than 15 years as a constant promoter of change and the journey has been across many organizations and with each team I have lead, exciting, fresh and modern ways to think of business are always at the centerpiece. I am prideful on this! I recognize that many yearn to advance to the levels of executive leadership roles that I have warmly achieved. I am not ungrateful and I worked really hard. But, it is difficult to watch the infliction of pain I see among the executive ranks in their peer groups. During this self-appointed “personal reflection” I had to figure out exactly what the latest ‘death to the corporate job’ catapulted me personally from a role I initially thought was amazing? My astonishment, there is a significant amount of research and a name provided and that is ENVY. I regret that #METOO was so heavily weighted to sexual assault or sexual harassment - #METOO should absolutely include workplace issues. For edification, this tiny little human characteristic called EVNY is something we all have but jealousy has become the output and the pain is heavy.
What is envy and what do I even know about envy? My knowledge is limited and grounded in my own experiences but it create a lot of conversations among my HR leadership determining why I feel so alienated when my ideation lead organizations further than they had every thought. I have been the direct target of someone’s envious meltdown or in my own performance have silenced and withdrawn so much that I absolutely stopped performing due to other’s creating cripling situational experiences. Envy drives leaders to take ownership of ideas that were not theirs and promotes unwillingness to share and be passionate about what YOU have to give to the organization. I gave up but that’s NOT how I show up! I’ve been told many times the “entrepreneurial spirit” doesn’t fit into the confines of corporate environments - which I celebrate loudly. Or, that I think too far outside the box. Let’s set the record strategy, companies can learn to disrupt themselves with people like me or become the next failed Blockbuster and miss the opportunity? Envy among peers eliminates the spreadable ideas that the “creators” can drive across your teams and organizations and those “creators” are what disruption is born of! It is shameful that envy is so relative in the workplace that Harvard Business Review wrote a great article on this in 2010 [https://hbr.org/2010/04/envy-at-work] where the author outlines the tale of two executives and clearly one was the “brains” while the other was the “brawn”. Guess who wins out? The brawn sounded like such a loud nag that their leadership teams probably cried “uncle” just to silence the noise. I always wonder in those situations if leadership every get to the truth when it’s so loud? The brains behind all the great ideas felt rejected, dismissed and silenced. Squeaky wheel and all of that…
This idea of envy catapulted me to research this phenomenon among female leaders. In organizations so desperate to tilt the scale on promotable women diversifying their executive teams, once you reach a certain level, it creates envy. A friend told me recently that when she moved into the higher roles that “sabotage” was expected. WHAT? This made me think deeper and I began wondering if what we refer to as “healthy competition” promotes the bad behavior that is really ENVY? This, by no means, is healthy competition. Further, if you read this and think I am a weak competitor or that I am showing poor sportsmanship somehow - absolutely incorrect. But, If you have experienced an odd demise in your pecking order or were misinformed that somehow you didn’t compete enough - it’s not you - it’s them and the experience is not limited to women. The visibility that senior executives and boards take to promoting the wrong leaders really shows a lack of engagement and true identification of “great minds”. Envy creates a lack of balance, a lack of team value and silences those who [and most often not money motivated] are motivated by the change, creation and innovation. Don’t silence these creators because you have a leader yelling louder - this immediately changes the internal feeling of organizations to disdain, scorn & fear. Publicly, if you embrace the envy behavior, you are silencing ideation, accomplishments of the team and establishing an organization which allows resentment and pure office politics to work abundantly and I warn that these attributes are not ones that make the “good to great” checklist. Some of the most successful companies in the world who were at the top of their game had bad leaders and failed to find their footing in today’s world and much of that is due to the arrogance and elevated envy across leadership teams who were blind to the problems.
How do we work beyond this? Workplace envy actually creates a brand and message throughout your leadership teams - that each person’s voice does NOT matter. We, as busy leaders, tend to face the person screaming the loudest and many times to the loss of the most effective solution. In observance in teams and within client scenarios, I have often fallen into the trap of pure exhaustion by the continued loudness so I myself become desperate to get to a resolution. Those that just continue to complain loudly are truly not leaders to begin with. Sadly, promoting this lesser idea to remove the stress of the louder yelling direct report created poor decision making even on my behalf. Philosophically there is something deeper in workplace envy; something hurtful that I begin to feel pity for because when I experience leaders who are envious, I see constant requests for validation or self-doubt [hey, we all have this in some manner] which is ironic considering they often belittle & dilute others as they think this makes them “shine bright like a diamond”. This is totally on the contrary to what eventually occurs. It’s not an attribute I want to promote.
In recent years, a video on YouTube surfaced on a TedTalk around “Radical Candor”. I used to think was such an amazing conversation as a leader until I began to see the utter misuse of this in conversations. For those of you who have not watched the “Radical Candor” talk on TedTalks then you should. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yODalLQ2lM] But, this conversation was intended to point people in the right direction, challenge their role and not tip-toe in a politically correct way around things that should be said about their strengths. But that is far from the experience I have perceived lately as this has generated the thought that “insults” are excusable but terming it “radical candor”. This expression is not an excuse to insult I shutter to consider that that would even be the intention of the TedTalk. Radical Candor has become widely used for all the wrong and inaccurate reasons.
Innovation in organizations suffer because those true creators and peer groups aren’t balanced with brains and brawn and envy certainly is a driver. My personal situations across companies I have seen it drive to an employee’s complete silence & cessation of ideation [which would be taken and sold as someone else’s], successes [which were grown from ideas] and delight [the feeling I had of achievement] that they are destined to create. It was all due to simply bad behavior which we can begin to recognize and immediately rectify if we recognize it’s occurring and call it what it is: workplace envy. I compare this to “organizational gaslighting”. I recently had such a magnificent conversation about my decision to depart a role and I was offered opportunities to do something “more” and “where we need you” but as the chatter and discomfort and pain I was experiencing among peers lead me to discussions about a better strategy - exit with my ideas and creations. Shortly, the conversation shifted to “everything was wrong to begin with and the entire organization needed to be repaired” and of course, no strategy for the future was born. Envy also creates short-term results.
Is this how innovation is grown?
Let me share a personal issue I have, I believe as a modern mammal, I default to “flight or flight” because I run away from danger. Call it instinct but these envious characters are scary lions chasing me through the tundra and if that is how your organization feels to you - the last thing you want to do is sit still. I’m a cheetah, I run faster than anyone on that tundra. I LOVE creating and driving aspiration in teams, formulating ideas and moving them into action, true envy has no place in a healthy organization. I believe envy is the demise of many failed projects, missed deliverables and failure to launch in innovation and people looking for ways to blame one another. Workplace envy is a real thing and is a “hostile workplace” as defined by human resource teams. But we allow it because we live by old styles of hierarchical organizations versus driving the succession of the ideas and innovation. Another blog but, should we kill the org chart?
I enjoyed a great read by the University of Cincinnati in a 2016 paper by Melanie Schefft titled, “Why Do They Treat Me Like That? Taking the Mask Off of Envy”. [https://www.uc.edu/news/NR.aspx?id=23778], I would highly recommend. Further, when you promote this behavior it becomes the standard - Schefft defines that during a recent academic meeting they studied both the person who created the envious situation and there person who is the receiver of the envious behavior. Fascinating.
Anyway, why do we care? IDEAS feel SO GOOD! We are not all that different and in a world of discovery it is difficult to drive teams if you debilitate their spirit. This is an employee job market - the gig economy is a reality meaning these high potentials do not have to stay and are looking for the environment which gives them more purpose and rocks their brain. Envious environments are a retention nightmare. Aren’t we worried about retaining our most valuable employees?
Every leader should be aware and be able to recognize [even in yourself] and open ways on how to remove the manufactured behavior. It’s human! We want to be the fastest cheetah but if you want better output and performance of the organization, hostility and envy impacts everyone. Or, you can keep doing the same: same people, same hierarchies and forget about business improvement altogether! THINK LOUDLY and GO BOLDLY!
