It’s 2000, during the decadent late days of the dot.com boom, just weeks before the inevitable crash.
It’s a Friday afternoon and no one’s doing much work in the office. I’m sitting there with our 33 year old CEO, who’s feeling pretty good because we’ve grown 50% quarter over quarter for three quarters since we went public. His crackerjack assistant, a hipster who has a stack of Christmas cards on her desk that say “Jesus is coming. Look busy!” is there, as is the sweetest and most earnest of our product managers. We’re all laughing and joking until our CEO says, “Yeah, you’re gonna get laid off!” to the product manager, who blanches and looks like he’s going to cry.
Sure, the CEO was joking. Sure, he thought it was fine to joke with a colleague who was the same age as he. Sure, it’s a Friday afternoon and we’re all just having fun. But none of that matters. Because a CEO is always a CEO. It doesn’t matter how old he is, or how close he is to his team, or how funny what he says is. Because employees always take what CEOs say seriously – even jokes. They hunt for subtext. They analyze. They worry. This product manager’s wife was pregnant with their first baby. The prospect of being unemployed was not funny to him at all.
Words are the main thing that humans use to understand what other humans are thinking and feeling. When you’re in a leadership position, your team will parse your words – what you said in the elevator, what you said in the all hands meeting, what you said in the email. It’s all they have. Your words are their map. Use your words wisely.
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