LogFAQs > #969502249

One job for thee, many for me

But there's nowhere that more clearly shows the distorted reality of the modern CEO than the hypocrisy of how they are treated compared with the frontline worker.

Take the ginned-up "overemployment" controversy: a fake scare campaign around people having "two jobs while working remote." The most viral of these complaints came from the CEO of a midsize tech company who fired two employees holding down multiple jobs. In a LinkedIn post about the firing he complained that people taking on two full-time roles was a scourge on businesses: "It's a new form of theft and deception, and not something in which an ethical, honest person would participate." While it's unclear exactly how many average people are "overemployed," many CEOs constantly juggle businesses, board seats, and other ventures. And instead of facing criticism or termination, they're greeted as world conquerors and paid more than 300 times what their average employee makes.

This hypocrisy also popped up as part of the "quiet quitting" meme. The guilt-trip around quiet quitting focused on someone doing "the bare minimum to get by," but that accurately describes many CEOs. Executives are extremely quick to judge and enumerate the work of those below them, but it's fair to say that the actual job expectations and deliverables of the chief executive are specious at best.

And even when executives do make strategic or product-based decisions, they often dodge significant consequences for their failures. The CEO of the online mortgage platform Better drove the company into a terrible financial situation and then fired 900 people in a Zoom call (after referring to his employees in an email as a "bunch of dumb dolphins") yet remains on top there. Mark Zuckerberg's unprofitable metaverse push might wreck Facebook and was a big reason behind Meta's decision to slash 11,000 people's jobs, and yet he will see no meaningful consequences. Even when a CEO offers a sincere apology for mass layoffs, as was the case with the payments startup Stripe, the failure to properly scale the company is proof positive that the CEO has failed in their most important responsibility. If an average worker failed to anticipate future needs of their team, mishandled company resources, and negatively affected the employment of their colleagues, they would summarily be fired, but for CEOs there is little accountability. This is the one thing these CEOs are supposed to be doing making high-level decisions on the direction of the company they're clearly failing.

And when they do get involved in the nitty-gritty details, it's usually on some flight of fancy like Zuckerberg's obsession with adding legs to his metaverse avatar or Elon Musk's fascination with what "verified" means. The irony is that despite the extremely visible ways in which executives get involved in these minor details, they betray a lack of understanding of the company, focusing on a single tree in a forest that's on fire.

Make CEOs valuable again

I am, however, not arguing that every executive is useless. Specifically within technology, there are a great deal of working technical executives who dedicate themselves to coding or closing significant partnerships, and I work with many of them every day. At my own company, I've always tried to work more than the people below me as a measure of respect. As CEO, I must lead by example and am ultimately responsible for the majority of the work. I have always seen the concept of having the company in my hands not as a power but as a responsibility that I must be aware of at all times because if I fail, everybody else does.

The problem comes when companies become too large and the executives in question become too distanced from their product. Elon Musk doesn't really "get" Twitter: He uses it from the perspective of someone with over 100 million followers. The result is an executive who is focused on solving nonexistent problems to please nobody. Twitter, Tesla, and SpaceX would be better off with a CEO who has a clear vision for the respective products, active engagement with the creation of those products, and the willingness to collaborate with frontline employees to achieve those goals. And Musk isn't the only executive who would be better served focusing on one task.

There are some signs that a return to a more responsible CEO could happen. For one thing, more companies are restricting the number of outside boards that their CEOs can serve on or barring them from doing so entirely. But there can be other steps too: Force the CEO to log how much time they are devoting to outside projects, appoint employees to the board to directly weigh in on executive pay and performance, and demand that CEOs prove their value beyond cherry-picked share-price metrics.

While it's tempting to fall for the alluring stories of the workaholic executive, one must question whether it's really possible to work that many hours and lead that many initiatives. It may seem impressive on the surface that someone can run a company, sit on outside boards, and also have several philanthropic efforts, but it's also fair to ask whether one person can contribute meaningfully to so many things at once. That's the core of what's truly missing from our modern executives: a deep, meaningful connection to the work and the employees who enrich them.