Managers' toxic positivity, the legacy of Steve Jobs' leadership style, and a 2025 quitting spree?

This week I'm joined by Vijay Pendakur, an author and HR advisor and consultant, to dive into toxic positivity, toxic leadership and more. First, we chat about managers glossing over bad news, creating an atmosphere of toxic positivity, and losing employee trust. Next, we talk about the leadership style of Steve Jobs, and how many too often misattribute his bullying behaviors for good leadership. And we wrap up by chatting about the potential for a 2025 quitting spree due to declining employee satisfaction - do we think a quitting spree is likely or just hype?


Connect with Vijay Pendakur
Dr. Vijay Pendakur is the author of the highly anticipated book, “The Alchemy of Talent: Leading Teams to Peak Performance.” A true multi-sector organizational leader, Vijay has held senior roles at four companies: Zynga, VMware, Dropbox and Salesforce. He has also served as the Dean of Students at Cornell University. In his time at Cornell, he was named Presidential Advisor for Diversity and Equity, as part of a new approach to campus-wide transformation at the largest Ivy League institution. A widely recognized thought leader, Dr. Pendakur’s writing has been featured in Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, Forbes,  and Time. Vijay is a board advisor with Ezra Coaching, Enterprise Ireland, and Wisq. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, Katie, a psychotherapist and yoga teacher, and his two young daughters, Mira and Savi.

Visit his website https://www.vijaypendakur.com/
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Articles
Managers Are ‘Glossing’ Over Workplace Issues And Pushing Toxic Positivity, According To Report
I worked with Steve Jobs. Here’s what he’d say about today’s leadership style
Brewing worker resentment could fuel a 2025 quitting spree

Chapters

• 1:56 Managers Are ‘Glossing’ Over Workplace Issues And Pushing Toxic Positivity, According To Report
• 10:01 Steve Jobs' leadership style
• 18:13 Brewing worker resentment could fuel a 2025 quitting spree

Transcript

Stacey (00:00):
Welcome to Toot or Boot where each week we talk about news related to HR and the world of work. We toot the news we like and we boot the news we don't like. I'm your host, Stacey Nordwall, a serial joiner of early stage tech companies as their first in or only HR person. And joining us today we have Vijay Pendakur. Vijay, tell us about yourself.

Vijay (00:23):
Stacey, it's such a pleasure to be here. I'm so excited to be part of the toot or boot viral movement of evaluating articles for their relevance and worthiness. My name is Vijay, as you said. I have a few different hats that I wear as I think many of your guests do. I'm an author, we'll probably talk a little bit more about that over the course of this. I have a new book coming out December 3rd. I am a HR and employee experience fractional advisor and consultants, so I work with many different kinds of organizations on their employee experience, inclusion and engagement strategies. Then I'm a high performing teams consultant. I go in and I look at the culture that serves as a catalyst for teams that win consist consistently in the face of disruptive change. And so I work with generally the executive layer of companies to rethink their team culture playbook to set teams up to thrive in the new normal of endless volatility and uncertainty.

Stacey (01:28):
Yeah, I feel that and that's really cool. I'm excited and I'm excited about the articles that you picked today because I feel like this is going to dig into some real things that I've been feeling and I'm really interested to get your take on it given your background. So we're going to go ahead and dive in. The first article we're going to talk about is "Managers are glossing over workplace issues and pushing toxic positivity." According to report. This is a Forbes article. What they talk about is they report that a leadership IQ poll showed that only 15% of employees feel their org consistently communicates the challenges it faces, and only 24% say their leaders encourage suggestions for improvements. They point out that this tendency to put a positive spin can create a disconnect with employees and undermine trust as well as lead to more stress and anxiety. They also give some options on how to create a more balanced approach. Tell me what you thought of this article.

Vijay (02:28):
Okay, I know your guests. I oftentimes start right away with the summary evaluation, right? The toot or the boot, and I told you I was bringing props to this episode.

Stacey (02:37):
Okay, love it.

Vijay (02:38):
So as a musician, instead of just saying the word toot, I thought I would actually, it's a toot. This article's a toot. You're going to have to wait and see what the boot is for later in the episode foreshadowing. So I'm tooting this one for several reasons. One, I think that, and I'll frequently comment on this as a writer and an author, and as somebody who publishes regularly in various journals and magazines, I appreciated the form of this article. It's got a headline that grabs some attention, but then it shares relevant significant data to define the scope of the problem. Then it digs in and it does some synthesis and analysis of the problem, and then it offers practical advice for people in case they read the article and they go, oh gosh, I think I'm glossing. What do I do? It doesn't leave you with just a so what moment. And so as sad as it is and as low as the bar is for me to already be enamored with an article for having a good headline, some relevant data, and then practical guidance, how much of what doesn't, right? I mean,

(03:53):
Not to be too harsh, but gosh, the ad driven internet has really sort of cycled down the quality control in some of the publishing out there. So love the form of the article, but I think that I see this as being very valid. I work across dozens of organizations every year because of my fractional and speaking and consulting business, Stacey, and managers frequently will disclose - I feel like I have bad news to share and I'm avoiding it because I don't want the team to lose trust in me.

(04:30):
I know trust is important for my team to succeed, and I don't want to lose that trust. So I'm punting. I'm leaving this one on the side of my desk and hoping it goes away. And so I have so much empathy for how hard it is to break bad news to your team or to name the elephant in the room. Bad news, right? Because you're worried about your team's trust in you. And this is what some of what the article digs into, and I see this all the time with my clients. I think that the part of the article that I feel is a little bit harsh is labeling glossing very closely with toxic positivity. And where I think some nuance is helpful in the ex space and the employee experience space is that glossing is a human tendency. Toxic positivity is a label we've put on something that may be happening at scale that's about the impact that that has on people. So glossing in aggregate can land as toxic positivity on your workforce,

(05:32):
But as somebody who believes in the human potential for change, I don't come at people with like, dude, avoid toxic positivity. It just sort of shuts you down because it's like, oh my gosh, the label toxic positivity, I don't think gets people to lean in and try and understand the very real human flywheel that is leading to this. A ton of managers gloss why? And that's, I like the term glossing. I actually think it's descriptive of the idea of glossing over the bump in the road or the elephant in the room, but it's not as pathologizing to the manager because if you've ever worked in l and d or training or facilitation, if somebody's feeling defensive or attacked, they're not open to learning. And so I do think language matters and I try and find language that's very invitational and I like glossing a lot more than toxic positivity. I think you can write about toxic positivity in the aggregate, but if I'm talking to a group of managers and I want to point out that there's a better way to manage tough moments and cyclical downturn or supply chain disruption or whatever bad news you're managing right now, then glossing, then I think that I would start with glossing and then go into recommendations for practice and skills and behaviors.

Stacey (06:52):
That's really interesting. I had not thought about it that way. I think because toxic positivity is the term is so much in the vernacular at this point of just people reach to that. And I appreciate what you're saying that it's also something that's maybe a bit more in the aggregate, a bit more the culture of the organization as opposed to individuals and their behavior or their actions. I think for me, this article was also a toot. It resonated for me. Yeah, it is a toot because for me, if you can't acknowledge an issue exists, if you are glossing over it, you can't address it, you can't fix it. And I think as an org, if senior leaders can't acknowledge that a problem exists, employees start to feel dismissed and they lose trust, as you mentioned, they feel like they can't engage. And if you and I are both, I feel like this is my example for it.

(07:51):
If you and I are both looking at a flat tire and I'm talking about the flat tire and that this is a problem and you refuse to say that there is a flat tire, to me I'm thinking, I don't know if I can trust you. I don't know if I can trust your judgment and if I'm in this environment where I don't know if I can trust you, do I feel like I can experiment? Do I feel like I can fail? Do I feel like I can bring up challenges that I'm seeing? And the answer is no. So for me, this all really, really resonated.

Vijay (08:26):
Double toot, what a great way to start. I think that when I talk about trust, I try and decode some of the language to make it more relevant and useful for managers. And I talk about there's really two vectors to deliver and sustain trust with your team, and one is vulnerability trust. You are safe to take healthy risks and even fail or challenge with me, and that's oftentimes reframed as psychological safety. But I actually think it helps to think of it as a driver of trust because the other side of this is reliability trust, and that is I will consistently do what I say and you can count on me and the manager who avoids telling you there's a flat tire. One of the things I always say to the group when someone, particularly I lead a lot of work around navigating m and a, and I'm like, your team already knows there's a problem. Your team already knows that at the end of the integration process that there are going to be some redundancies. So your unwillingness to see the R word is only making them question some of the vulnerability trust and the reliability trust that you've worked so hard to build. And so if there was a flat tire, your team probably already knows.

Stacey (09:44):
Exactly. Exactly right. A hundred percent. All right, great. So speaking of trust and leadership, I want to take us into the next article, which is an article from Fortune. "I worked with Steve Jobs, here's what he'd say about today's leadership style." This article appears to be in response to the discussion earlier this year when Paul Graham wrote a blog that made waves through Silicon Valley where he was discussing this founder mode versus manager mode with founder mode being a mode that entailed a founder or leader being deeply entrenched in all aspects of the business, whereas manager mode was more about empowering others to do what they needed to do within the business. And the author says he felt that Steve Jobs is being held up as a model of good leadership for good reasons, but that folks have embraced the more dangerous traits, just the more dangerous traits, which he said lead to a toxic style of leadership that destroys morale, decreases productivity and declines stakeholder value. So what did you think?

Vijay (10:56):
Enter my second prop. I'm actually going to give this article a boot. Oh,

Stacey (11:02):
Intriguing. Okay. Tell me all about it

Vijay (11:04):
And maybe I can tell you why. So as a Texan, I had to hold up my cowboy boot.

Stacey (11:09):
I love it. Fabulous.

Vijay (11:14):
I appreciate one of the points the article makes to start with something that landed well for me, which is this thing around people latching on aspects of Steve Jobs' leadership that are actually quite harmful. He's widely well understood to be very harsh, open to tantrums and yelling and expletives at work behavior that I think nowadays many people would label workplace bullying because of the way it can truly cause a cascade in someone who's treated that way. I had a couple and I said I would talk about the form of the article, so as a writer, this article is 70% headline, 30% substance in my opinion. The article's got a very sticky headline, and then you look at it and it, it's sort of throwing very, very zeitgeisty spaghetti at a dartboard. It can't even see, and I know this sounds so harsh, this is not a call out of the author. I don't know the author. They may be fantastic, but this is what I'm reading in the article, right?

Stacey (12:25):
Yeah.

Vijay (12:27):
Let's mention founder mode and let's mention Steve Jobs in order to make some kind of a point is the way I read this article, and it's like because from an SEO perspective that you're going to get more clicks if you mention founder mode right now, and if you mention Steve Jobs, the article didn't do much with the concept of founder mode and it didn't do much with Steve Jobs that we don't already know. And so I felt like it was frank. One of my fastest boots is if I feel manipulated

Stacey (12:56):
Yeah

Vijay (12:57):
As a smart reader, I felt like this was clickbait. Beyond that, though, I'm not trying to just trash on surface. I think that beyond that, the person is speaking out of both sides of their mouth. The author is critiquing Steve Jobs as a frequently bullying and toxic leader, but the conclusion of the article is actually that there was so much to get from Steve because after he turned and screamed in your face and yelled at you and swore at you, he calmed down and said, okay, I'm going to go into founder mode now and work really closely with you so you can be successful.

(13:37):
Boot Stacey boot. I was 25 years old when I had my first, one of my first, I had two wonderful supervisors early in my career, and one of 'em when I was 25 or 26 said, I think I was having a bad day at work, and she pulled me into her office and she said, it seems like you're having a bad day. I'm like, yeah, I'm having a terrible day. And she was like, great. That's why we have PTO because the way you're behaving right now is outside the bounds. So you have to learn when to take yourself out of play because you can't show up to work like this. You're human, so you can have a bad day. You can't get mad at the people around you. You can be direct, but that level of intensity is unproductive. I think that creating excuses for someone to yell at their employees and swear at them because afterwards they went into founder mode, which I have a lot of questions about it anyway. Yeah, hard boot. Hard boot. It's pointy toed cowboy boot.

Stacey (14:42):
Oh, I'm glad you took this perspective. I think when I first read it, I was just so glad that someone said that this was a toxic style of leadership at all. It just made my heart sing. I was like, oh, finally someone is just saying that this is not okay, that this isn't the kind of thing that we should, everybody stop talking about founder mode and all of the things that you're saying that are so terrible when it comes to being a leader, stop putting that on a pedestal and think about how to get people to work together, listen to the people enable them. For me, leadership and being a good leader is all about enabling and supporting other people to do things well, and recognizing that you're not an expert at every single thing, and that's how you make a successful company. So the fact that any of that was said within an article that I thought Silicon Valley folks might read, I was like, toot, this is great.

Vijay (15:55):
I love it. But that's such a great, our context and where we're currently situated, what we're reacting to determines so much of the flavor palette. And I agree. I mean, I do feel like we're in a particularly dystopian landscape around everything from leadership to employee experience writ large right now. And so to read even something mildly critical of Steve Jobs and maybe critical of one aspect of founder mode felt a smidge refreshing. But in the end, the conclusion was so exonerating of the behavior that I was like, someone could easily read this and go, Okay,

(16:33):
Well it's all right if I flip out on my staff as long as I turn back around and work really closely with them on projects. And I'm like, I don't know how much your staff wants you to be in founder mode if you behave that way, right?

Stacey (16:47):
Yeah.

Vijay (16:48):
Can you go back to your corner office? You bully.

Stacey (16:52):
Yeah, and that is kind of my last sentence was like, okay, these things seem pretty good. I'm glad somebody said this, but I still don't want to be advocating for an autocratic leader.

Vijay (17:03):
That's right.

Stacey (17:04):
That doesn't seem like the way that we're going to build successful businesses. To your point, I think with the context of the founder mode and what feels in some ways like a devolving of Silicon Valley back to some of its worst habits 10 years ago that I saw any article, acknowledging that some of these things are unacceptable was a toot for me. But to your point, it probably overall wasn't a very great article.

Vijay (17:37):
Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, and it's great for you to have a toot and for me to have a boot. That's the nuance. And I think that's value we can bring to our audience is for them to think about where's their barometer right now and how does the article land for them? And when you said the devolving of Silicon Valley, I want to grab onto that phrase for the next article because I think it's so relevant.

Stacey (18:02):
Alright, fabulous. So the next article comes to us from CNBC and it says, brewing worker resentment could fuel a 2025 quitting spree. The recap here is that according to Glassdoor, employee satisfaction has been on the decline since 2022, and nearly two in three are feeling stuck in their careers. They say folks feel a desire to quit, but the job market has been too tough for them to do. So they also say that hiring pipelines are opening back up, which will lead to folks shuffling around and making lateral moves or possibly even revenge quitting. What did you think

Vijay (18:41):
It was the revenge quitting was like, woo, that was so this was a tough one for me because I agreed with the core analysis of the article, but I was skeptical of the conclusion. And so

Stacey (18:59):
Yes

Vijay (18:59):
I'm going to go, can we do a part of the boot in the frame? Here we go. Half boot and then one sad little note on the horn. I'm undecided, I know I'm undecided voter, I'm infuriating everyone around me right now. So here's what landed for me with the article. There's plenty of data that confirms that employee satisfaction is down since 2022.

(19:33):
The headline of quitting spree was very clickbaity because I think where I struggle is even though the analysis that people are less happy now is right, I'm not seeing trends in the job market that point anywhere in the direction of quitting spree or another great reshuffling. If you think about the precipice we're at right now in terms of major movers in the labor market, we've got a lot of TBDs to be decided in terms of a change in the White House, a change in fiscal policy, a change in moving away from neoliberal trade norms, all kinds of things, tariffs,

(20:16):
Maybe a different approach to regulation if Lena Khan doesn't maintain her seat. There's so many big things that affect the labor market that are still up for grabs that any prediction about, oh, employees might go on a quitting spree feels a bit hyperbolic. What I see is if you follow a trend line and you assume that unless something changes the slope of the line, then the trend will continue, which is generally the way things go. What I think 2025 is the continued, and I'm quoting the Great Stacey Nordwall here, the continued devolution of company culture, particularly in tech back to what I would call third gen Silicon Valley. When I think about the Valley, I am thinking about the structure and the historical moments and how those produced EX, employee experience. EX is a cultural phenomenon that sits on top of much bigger forces. And when people, if you don't look at the history of these tech companies and you've started working in tech around 2012 or 2013, then you might think that these are very benevolent entities where things like human dignity and work-life balance had an increasing amount of conversational time at work.

(21:38):
And that CEOs were having town halls and thoughtfully listening to their workforce and making major changes to the benefits stack. And you were getting more and more generous RSU new hire grants all the way down to coordinator level in some companies, because everyone should be an owner, and that is actually a break from the norm. That 10 year trend from 2012 to 2022 really was some kind of exception to the norm of corporate America and Silicon Valley based on a bunch of market fundamentals not being in place. And when companies just got more and more money flooded into them, and a lot of SaaS companies just were sitting in a level of liquidity that is kind of mind boggling. Then you got this shift around a company saying, fine, if this is what it takes to make employees happy, let's just get a little looser with our opex.

(22:38):
And that's done. And I honestly don't know when that's coming back. One of the drivers of that is near zero interest rates, and I don't think we're getting back to that until I'm in a different era of my life. And so back in sort of normal grind set capitalism, I think that employees don't have nearly as much power. And the great reshuffling that this article is sort of hinting back to was tied to a very unique moment where employees had a huge amount of labor power that completely, it was a point on the scatterplot way outside the norm. And so as we devolve back to our normal, labor has a lot less power, capital has a lot more power, and it is very, very difficult to vote with your feet because there isn't as much choice. And that's where I kind of ended. I know there was a long answer to your question. I'm sort of thinking through it here, but that's where I think the core analysis is, right? People are unhappy at work, very true. But the conclusion that somehow we're going to see this, what is that revenge quitting, Please?

Stacey (23:50):
Yeah, I think I had the same thought as at the beginning of the article. I'm into it. I'm intrigued. Yes, I am feeling the same thing. I'm seeing the same things that people aren't satisfied, that engagement is low, that people would like to move, that they would like to lateral move. They don't want to be managers anymore. They realize that's more work and not giving them the balance or the compensation that they want. So they want to make a change. I was waiting for that - What do they think is going to happen in the job market that it would enable people to do that? And I don't think that really was there for me. So the quitting spree didn't really seem to make sense. And I think also anytime where employees decisions to move roles are categorized or labeled in this kind of way, like revenge quitting, it made me think of the Half Baked scene where it's like, F you, F you F you. You're cool. I'm out. And he just quits and leaves.

Vijay (24:56):
That is such an amazing reference to a classic. I love it. I love that you know Half Baked. See, Stacey's Street credit is just climbing in my,

Stacey (25:09):
But nobody's doing that, right? That's not what's happening. And if people are leaving their jobs, if the job market does loosen up, or if any of those things happen, people, they're going to leave because the job that they have, the compensation, whatever, wasn't suiting them, and then they're going to something that they think suits them better. It's not some revenge seeking thing.

Vijay (25:37):
That's right

Stacey (25:37):
Just people trying to do what serves them best. So that always immediately kind of loses me because I think it's speeding into that trendy term thing more than anything that's actually really,

Vijay (25:51):
 it's not helpful,

Stacey (25:51):
substantive and it's not useful. It's not useful to think about employees in that way or what they're doing in that way. And yeah, to your point, was there any indication that the job market is going to fundamentally change over the next year to enable this quitting spree? I don't think so.

Vijay (26:12):
Sadly. I wish it would. I mean, 2020 and 2021 were pretty amazing to be an employee. But for a lot of folks in the macro, and I mean I think a really nice full circle here is around language and how helpful it is. Is it creating noise or is it establishing clean signal and revenge quitting establishes a level of motive and targeted behavior that a lot of people, you've been in HR a long time. Same here. That's not the majority of, I actually think the language revenge quitting creates some risk of the C-suite looking at their intent to leave data and their regrettable attrition data and misunderstanding as simply vengeful individual choice rather than as an index of cultural problems in their organization. And so again, there's risk with all these things. And the full circle is, my thing about toxic positivity that we opened the podcast with is, yeah, it's very zeitgeisty language, just like revenge quitting. And what the overlap I see here is you're ascribing some kind of personal mal-intent to behaviors that oftentimes are complex, unconscious, very human, but what a great way to make your language stickier and grab people's attention.

Stacey (27:47):
Yeah. I often think I just need to get better at coining terms and then I'll, I'll be rolling in the dough.

Vijay (27:55):
Make it rain when you coin the terms. Just remember to make it right on me too.

Stacey (28:01):
Oh, awesome. Well, Vijay, it was so great to have you join me. I want to make sure to give you a chance to let people know how to connect with you and talk about your book or any other things you want to promote.

Vijay (28:12):
Fantastic. Well, thank you for the chance to toot my own horn. Yes, dad, I know painful, but I am a dad, so it's on brand. So couple of things. One, I have a book coming out December 3rd is the formal launch. Anybody who's been following me is like, isn't this book out? But it's because there's a soft launch, and then there's the Amazon, Barnes and Nobles books, A Million Walmart kind of Go live, and that's December 3rd. So the book is called The Alchemy of Talent Leading Teams to Peak Performance. And it's a radically simplified behavioral science toolkit for leaders to help their team win consistently in periods of disruptive change. And that's a specialty area for me and my business is helping teams thrive when you feel like you're working in a slow motion earthquake. And so the other ways to connect with me are just to go to my website and I've got tons of information about the things that I do and the services I provide at www.vijaypendakur.com, where you can just put my first and last name into Google. That'll get you there too. And I'm excited to engage with the listenership. What I'm speaking to our listeners here. What'd you think about our three articles and Stacey's, toots and Boots, and my Toots and Boots, and let's chop it up in the chats and the dms.

Stacey (29:39):
Heck yeah. All right. Awesome. Thank you so much. And everything that Vijay just mentioned will also be in the show notes. Thanks so much for joining me.