A Toxic Culture Is Not a Broken One

 

 

The fisherman

In 2014 I read a small book, one of those pocket-sized management fables in the same family as Who Moved My Cheese? I no longer have it, and I cannot remember its title. I remember one story from it, because I wrote about it on this blog that year.

A man is fishing from his boat when he sees a snake with a frog in its mouth. He feels sorry for the frog, so he reaches down, takes it from the snake and lets it go. Then he feels sorry for the snake, which has lost its meal. He has no food on board, only a bottle of bourbon, so he pours a few drops into the snake's mouth. The snake swims away happy. A few minutes later, something knocks against the side of the boat. The fisherman looks down. The snake is back, with two frogs.

The story is most often credited to the management writer Michael LeBoeuf, whose book rested on a single principle: the things that get rewarded get done.

When I first read it, I took the lesson most people take. The fisherman meant well, and his kindness backfired. Rereading my 2014 post this week, I think his kindness is the least important thing in the story. The snake never knew why it was given bourbon. It did not know the fisherman felt sorry for anyone. It knew one thing: a frog had been followed by bourbon.

Institutions work the same way. Nobody inside one experiences its intentions. An institution does not have good or bad intentions. It has interests and agendas, and the people inside it read them through a single channel: what happens to them after they act. What gets paid, what gets punished, what gets ignored.

The parable also leaves something out. The snake did not come back with two frogs out of gratitude. It came back to negotiate. Two frogs is a question: does the bourbon double? If it does, the next visit brings three. If it does not, the next visit brings one.

I learned this long before I read the book, in a building on the edge of Beirut, at the end of 2005.

A building at the crossroads

The company was a large security firm, and its Lebanese branch was about a year and a half old. A friend put my name forward, and I was hired after one interview. I was a university student with classes in the late afternoon. I still played music. I had just left an audit firm and was still carrying the pressure of it. I wanted many things at that age, and a nine-to-five job was not one of them.

The building stood in one of the most crowded neighbourhoods on the road where Beirut runs into Mount Lebanon, new and clean against everything around it. Inside, it looked like nothing I had worked in before: white furniture, black equipment, hydraulic chairs. Every door between sections opened only to a card, and each card opened only the doors its holder was assigned. The company had investigators who handled misconduct among the security officers, teams that moved cash, people trained to protect public figures, and a whole department doing due diligence for international clients. By then I had seen many companies, through audits and through work. I had never seen professionalism on that scale.

I had to wear a suit every day, which at that age I could barely stand. I drove to work in a 1979 Golf that held rainwater in its doors after a storm. I asked to start at seven in the morning so I could leave in time for my classes, which meant the first pot of coffee was always mine. That is where I learned to like American filter coffee, and where I learned to like mornings: arrive, make the coffee, plan the day, start.

My title was payroll officer. The finance department was three people: a financial manager, a financial officer and me. In nearly three months I met the financial manager twice. I reported to her on paper and to nobody in practice, which in a company that size should not have been possible, and which nobody ever explained to me, though I asked more than once. My card opened most of the floor.

The job was paying four hundred and fifty security officers posted across the country. There was a system before me, but it was hard to navigate and it ate days every month. I built a new one, first in Excel and then in Microsoft Access, the tools of that era. It tracked each officer's days off, social security contributions, taxes and transport allowance, and the deductions: for misconduct, for not showing up, for leaving a post early. Management welcomed every improvement almost as soon as I made it. The work took me less than half the day. I spent the other half watching.

Two documents

Every morning, a security officer opened the elevator for me. I never once pressed the button myself. It was a security measure and a mark of respect, and it was not optional for him.

I knew what he earned. Every officer's salary passed through my spreadsheets. During my probation, he earned about one and a half times what I did.

The door told me I outranked him. The payroll said the company valued him at half as much again as me. I was one of the few people in that building who could read both documents, and only one of them was honest about money. The door cost the company nothing. It was paying me in the one currency it could print for free: the feeling of being important. It paid him in money.

At the time it just felt absurd: a student in a 1979 Golf being treated like a director by a man who earned more than he did. Twenty years later, I think it was the most accurate thing about the place. The company was always paying people. It did not always pay them in money, and it did not pay everyone in the same currency.

What the company poured

By the third week I could see that almost everyone in the building who was not a security officer carried three things at once: fear, bitterness and caution.

The fear came from the exits. The branch was young, turnover was high, and who left and who stayed seemed to depend on management's preferences more than on any criteria anyone could name. When nobody can tell what keeps them in their job, they stop concentrating on the work and start concentrating on the people who decide. The snake stops hunting frogs and starts watching the fisherman.

The bitterness came from the pay. Salaries sat below the market while the job requirements sat at the top of it. The HR manager once told a group of us, with real pride, about a warehouse hire: a highly capable man, recruited at half the budgeted salary, because she made him an offer and he did not negotiate. She told it as a win, and in that company it was one, because saving was what got rewarded. But think about what it teaches everyone else: never trust the first number. The man who took the job in good faith paid for it every month he stayed.

The caution came from the first two. If your place depends on preferences and your pay depends on what you failed to negotiate, you learn to measure every word. In nearly three months I found a couple of people I could talk to without doing that. A couple.

Then there was the line between the people who sold the service and the people who delivered it. The sales department made extraordinary money. The people who delivered what sales sold, the officers, the cash teams, the protection details and the line managers who ran them, were paid a fraction of that, and the officers among them were managed through deductions. I calculated those deductions. To borrow the parable, the company poured five shots for the snake that pointed at the frog and one for the snake that went into the water and brought it back. The bitterness between operations and sales ran exactly along the line where the bourbon changed.

There is a saying here: whoever brings you a whole chicken, do not deny him the wing. It is a fair philosophy for sales, and the company lived by it, for the people who brought the chicken to the table. Nobody was saving a wing for the people who raised it.

None of this was hidden. It was the most visible thing about the place once you knew where to look, and the place to look was the payroll.

Why it worked

What I could not understand at the time was how the place functioned at all. I had worked in and audited many companies by then. None was as toxic as this one, and yet it worked.

The first answer that comes to me is fear: everyone working their own strategy to keep the upper hand, which in a young company can look a lot like drive. I think that answer is half right. Fear is a reward too. The reward is that you get to stay. A company that pays mainly in staying will get people who work very hard to stay, and that buys a great deal: effort, long hours, compliance, a young branch that grows. What it cannot buy is the truth. People who are paid in staying tell you what keeps them there. They do not tell you what is wrong.

So the toxicity was not a malfunction. Every behaviour I disliked was being paid for, in money, in status or in survival, and the company was getting exactly what it paid for. That is the uncomfortable part of the parable. The snake is not misbehaving when it brings two frogs. It is doing precisely what it was taught.

I was outside that market, and only because I wanted nothing it paid in. I had no fear of losing the job, because I had already decided to leave it. That is also why people talked to me. Nobody could buy me with staying, so nobody needed to measure their words with me, and more than one colleague used me as a bridge to someone else. I had not earned that position. I simply was not bidding.

My bourbon

I was one of the snakes, of course. The company rewarded my improvements almost as soon as I made them, and I kept making them. That is the parable in a sentence: I was fed for frogs, so I brought more frogs.

But the company was pouring the wrong drink for me. It paid in status: the door, the suit, the card that opened the floor. It promised money: my salary would at least double once probation ended. Neither was what I came for. What I wanted, and did not yet have a word for, was the sense that what I did meant something. That company had none of it to pour.

So I resigned before my probation ended. The HR manager could not believe it. In her view, thousands of people would pray for that job, and she was probably right. That was her model of the world: everyone drinks what the company pours. I was not in that model, which is why my resignation made no sense to her.

Before I left, one of the investigators, a manager who handled the officers' cases, asked me for help with something. I told him I would gladly help, but that I would not be staying. He asked why, and I told him. He asked me to stay, and promised to help me personally with anything I needed. I said I would think about it. I had already decided. I think now he wanted someone in payroll he could bring the officers' cases to, and had I stayed, I might have had some say over what they were paid. I will never know. But I notice what he was able to offer: personal help. Not a different rule, not a clearer criterion, not a better rate. In a company where rewards follow preferences, even a good manager can only offer patronage.

I left before Christmas, and they did not pay me my last month. It felt like a punishment, and I suppose it was the system working as designed. I had built the deductions for officers who left their posts early. On my way out, the same logic was applied to me. I cared about that money for one reason only: I wanted a new guitar. I bought it eventually.

I found my bourbon later, in the nonprofit sector, and I have been bringing frogs for it ever since.

Write the exchange rate down

If an institution has no intentions, only interests, then the most useful thing a leader can do is stop explaining what the institution means and start writing down what it pays for. People will read the exchange rate anyway. They read it from who gets promoted, who gets protected, who gets the bigger pour and who gets docked. The only choice a leader has is whether they read it from a clear rule or from guesses about preferences.

Three tests any leader can run this week.

Ask five people at different levels what earns a reward in your institution, whether money, promotion or protection, and compare the answers. If they differ, you do not have an exchange rate. You have a market in guesses, and your people are spending their time on it instead of on the work.

Put your payroll next to your mission statement. Who is paid for pointing at the frog, and who for going into the water to bring it back? If the gap is large and nobody can explain it, the bitterness is already there, whether or not anyone has said it out loud.

Find someone who brought you two frogs last year. What did they get? If the answer is the same pour as everyone else, do not expect two frogs again.

In the nonprofit sector this matters more, not less. A nonprofit cannot pay commission on impact, and it should not try. The whole-chicken philosophy belongs to sales. When the reward cannot be tied to the frog, the rules are all you have, which means they have to be written down, clear, and the same for everyone, including the people who write them.

The third visit

The parable ends at the second visit, with two frogs knocking against the boat. That is where most people stop telling it, because it is a good punchline.

The third visit is the one that matters, and it is not up to the snake. It depends entirely on what the fisherman pours. Double the bourbon and he will see three frogs. Pour the same and he will see one. Pour it for the wrong snake, and the snakes that hunt will learn to point instead. Pour it by mood, and they will stop hunting altogether and spend their days watching him.

Every institution is that fisherman, every month, whether it knows it or not. It is not judged by what it meant. It is judged by what it poured.