‘Should America Go Down the Drain Because People Don’t Want to Go Back to Work?’
Give Martha Stewart credit for being honest and direct about her feelings when it comes to remote work. She pulled no punches with her attitude in a recent interview.
“Should America go down the drain because people don’t want to go back to work,” she rhetorically asked. Stewart, like many humans do, doesn’t understand why everyone isn’t wired the same emotionally and why their priorities and passions don’t align.
“Stewart went on to share how she called a new employee on Sunday, but he told her he couldn’t talk because he was taking a bath,” reported Meredith Clark for The Independent.
“I knew I couldn’t work with that person. I just couldn’t,” Stewart said. “If you can’t talk on a Sunday and you take umbrage that I’m calling you on a Sunday – you know, if you are a terribly religious person, I take that into consideration. But I knew this guy was not a terribly religious person.”
“Business is exciting,” she added. “I want people to feel that way about business.”
Does Stewart realize how she’s coming across? It’s not admirable.
She explains some of the reasoning behind her position.
“You can’t possibly get everything done working three days a week in the office and two days remotely,” she said.
Stewart could very well be accurate about that observation and assessment yet many people working remotely might disagree, maybe even vehemently. Some may even have sufficient, credible, overwhelming evidence to the contrary of Stewart’s claims.
The point being made here is that matters far less than how Stewart is coming across, not only to her employees but to the media and public and anyone that could affect her public perception (which seems mostly strong) and future well-being.
Oftentimes, people get away with high-risk bad decisions and selfish behavior for a good long while so they come to assume and believe it’s ok.
This is a vulnerable place in which to put oneself because usually, the tide eventually turns as reputation risk is constantly elevating with such people and one more incident can pop the balloon and result in a whole lot of other misbehavior and negative interactions being publicly revealed and scorned.
That ends up being a boisterous public spectacle accompanied by a battle cry of “Let the shaming and schadenfreude begin!”
Stewart is a highly-accomplished business person and loves what she does. She’s uber successful. Nothing wrong with her zest and drive for business. Yes, numerous male leaders and entrepreneurs feel similarly as Stewart and have also expressed themselves publicly — and taken arrows for it.
This business titan with a reported self worth of approximately $400 million can think and say as she pleases. In doing so she can simultaneously end up offending and alienating people with whom help run her empire. She can choose to invite media scrutiny and anger the public, some or many of which could be her customers or target market.
Will Stewart’s comments ruin her? No. Yet it will make reporters curious about her workplace culture and if we’ve learned anything, ugly things get revealed by skilled, deep-dive and far-and-wide reporting. Leaks happen. Whistleblowers emerge. The court of public opinion can be savage judges.
Stewart and other entrepreneurs and CEOs would be far better off strongly considering honestly, accurately and precisely how their annoyance and anger very well might be interpreted, felt and judged.
If they did, they would communicate less— how do I say this nicely — aggressively. This in turn would prevent a lot of negativity hitting the media and public and leading to a lot of unwanted attention or misery.
No need to purposefully set fires of conflict to your reputation, business and personal life.
There are a lot of lessons, a regular stream of them, to learn from in the news. Don’t follow their paths to shaming, consequences and punishment.
Michael Toebe is the founder and publisher at Communication Intelligence. He has written for newspapers, magazines and newsletters and also is a reputation specialist at Reputation Quality.
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