David Fano: Well I would say there was kind of like three phases. There was the time when you would tell people, "Hey, I work at WeWork" and nobody would know what that was. And then very quickly it became pretty commonplace. People knew what WeWork was, and it was on the cover of magazines, it had a great mission, it had this rebranding, it had these, like, very grandiose ambitions. And then from one day to the next, it flipped completely. And I think that was really, really intense for people to process. That so much of their identity and who they were was somewhat scaffolded by the identity of the place that they worked, that now it became like an existential discussion. And then you've got your grandparents who didn't even know where you worked are calling you now being, like, "Hey, that's the place you work?" And you almost go to, like, a place of shame.
Adam Grant: I'm Adam Grant, and this is a special bonus episode of WorkLife, my podcast with TED, sponsored by Accenture, BetterUp, Hilton and SAP. I'm an organizational psychologist. I study how to make work not suck.
In the past year, one of the biggest work stories, and just one of the bigger stories, period, has been the implosion of WeWork. The company started as a single coworking space in Soho, and in just a few years, WeWork exploded to more than 100 cities in dozens of countries, employing more than 12,000 people. They weren't just selling leases, they were selling a new vision for work. And Dave Fano was on board.
DF: For me it meant making going to work awesome for people. You know, with an initial focus on the physical environment, and making that environment comfortable and exciting and feeling good, and then also the technological side of how we brought people together, how we could get people to commune and work together, small companies helping each other I thought was really exciting, and helping people do work that mattered to them, and being able to strip away the muck, the things that matter a little less.
AG: For many business owners, part of that muck was the perceived hassle of renting office space, and then creating a welcoming, energizing environment. That's where Dave came in. WeWork recruited him to design all of their spaces and become one of their top executives. It was a job for someone with both technical and creative skills.
DF: I was trained as an architect.
AG: Were you aspiring to be someone like Frank Lloyd Wright, or did you have a different vision in mind?
DF: Sadly I really, probably didn't know who many of those people were. I was really determined to be a comic book artist. So you could have asked me any comic book artist, and I would have known them all. I was a kid that drew the cover to the yearbooks and high school T-shirts and things and wanted to be an artist, and my dad told me that wasn't a real job, so architecture seemed to fall somewhere in the middle.
AG: He ended up starting a consulting business to help architects, engineers, contractors and building owners improve their work spaces. Soon WeWork was a client. In 2015, WeWork acquired Dave's company. He became WeWork's chief product officer, and then chief growth officer. He oversaw all of real estate, design, construction, sales and marketing. In the spring of 2019 he left. Six months later, after WeWork filed for an IPO, a series of investigative reports exposed their huge financial losses. The media was in an uproar over the self-dealing behavior of the cofounder and CEO, Adam Neumann.
Woman 1: Adam Neumann pays a direct family member to be the director of wellness at the company.
Man: There's credible reports in the business press that he traveled with illegal drugs across international boundaries.
Woman 2: Expenses at WeWork more than quadrupled.
Man 2: Adam Neumann is stepping down as CEO.
AG: Plenty of people are still dissecting what happened on the business side of WeWork. I wanted to explore something different, the leadership and culture. We know visions and values have a real impact on whether a company succeed or fail, and WeWork was an extreme example of doing both. What could we learn from WeWork's rise and demise about how culture is built and sustained? When is a strong culture actually helpful? And when do you trust your sense that something is off? I can't think of a better person to ask than Dave. He had a front row seat to the company's evolution, expansion and peak. This is his first time speaking publicly about WeWork.
DF: I think we tried to do a lot as a company. you know, what's the saying, start-ups don't die of starvation, they die of indigestion. I think we did a lot, I think we tried to do a lot of things, which probably led to over-committing and not following through with things at times. But I don't think that there was ill intent.
AG: I want to dig more into that, but first let me tell you actually about my first introduction to WeWork. So summer 2017, I had been talking to the TED team about starting this WorkLife podcast, and I mentioned it to a few friends of mine and a couple of colleagues, and one of them said, "Oh, you've got to talk to WeWork, because they're all about trying to make work better." And before I knew it, I was being introduced to Adam, and I reached out to a colleague I knew had worked with the company a bunch, and she said, "Listen, they are obviously growing really fast, they're accomplishing a lot, but if I were you I wouldn't trust them because they're gangsters." I didn't know what that meant at first, I'm curious about whether you heard that description and what you took from it?
DF: Actually it's the first time I've heard the company described that way. I don't feel like that was the case, I think actually more often than not we did the right thing, we tried to do right by vendors, we tried to do right by the people. When you get bigger those things get complicated and there's always two sides to every story.
AG: There are. Well, I certainly want to hear more of your side. So let's begin with, what was the mission when you joined?
DF: To create a world where people make a life and not just a living. Or enable a world, where, you now, there's -- the main punchline being that you create a world where people make a life and not just a living.
AG: That is both incredibly lofty and extraordinarily vague. What did it mean to you?
DF: I always really connected with the aspects of work. Not as much the sort of, non-work side, however we define that. So I thought that was very exciting, you know, if I'm an embroidery designer sending invoices and billing is not so exciting, or signing a lease, so I was really excited about the idea of stripping away all the stuff that was not their core activity, and I was pretty charged up with that and that's how I interpreted the mission.
AG: Got it. That could almost be the slogan for this podcast that I host.
(Laughter)
So that, if you frame the mission that way, I could even imagine myself getting excited about it. I'm curious about how the mission got communicated. What were the major ways that the mission was brought to life?
DF: I think it changed over time, I think very early on, it was about the entrepreneur, the small business, the founder, and enabling them to do what they love and start the companies that mattered to them, and all these companies that were going to go change the world. I think as the company got a little bigger and there was excitement around the reach of the idea, and building more of a lifestyle brand, it started to become a little more consumer centric and tried to speak to a broader audience, and then you saw the evolution of the company trying to do more things. We live, we grow, and then it goes really about serving everybody and enabling everyone to, you know, live their best lives. It became incredibly broad, but I think a lot of people suited up every day to go do that, I think people jumped out of bed excited to try to help people. It was a powerful mission. And I think as a workforce and as a team, people got really excited about it, and it motivated them and the closer proximity you had to the customers and the more you can see that you are affecting these people and helping them day in and day out, whether they were the owner of the company or an employee of the company, people were really charged up to help them.
AG: Is there a story, Dave, that illustrates a moment when you really felt fired up by the mission, wondering was there a company retreat where a speech resonated with you, or, you know, just any defining experience where it clicked and you said, "Yeah, this is why I'm here."
DF: There was a story that the community manager told one day of someone who was working at one of the companies in the building and he had become really good friends with them and they'd see them every day and he came, I think, crying to the main community desk and he had lost his job. And the community team mobilized incredibly quickly, started to talk to all the other members in the building, and I think within 48 hours they found him a new job. And I thought that was amazing, that this person, you know, we associate so much of our identity and our being to our work, and the work we do and the company that we do it at, and especially I like to think of it through the lens of the employee, because I think the founders and CEOs have a bit more agency in those things, and that wasn't the person paying the bills, this was someone who worked in the building and that the community team took such good care of this person, and they didn't need to, again, this person wasn't, like, the direct customer. And that by being part of that community, that person was taken care of. That really meant a lot to me, and I thought that that was really beautiful. A group of people that could be looking out for each other. And this thing is mostly individualistic, managing my career, looking out for myself, making my money. For me that really highlighted the benefits of what we were doing. And I got even more excited to figure out how to scale that out to more people.
AG: It sounds like you were far from the only one to feel fired up about the mission. What would you say was the dominant emotion that people felt at WeWork?
DF: Excited. High growth is pretty exciting. You hit those milestones, you hit those achievements that you didn't even think were possible. It's a combination of excited and exhausted. And I think people -- I think struggle is kind of important to really love your work. I think you may not realize it at the time, but I think it's one of those things in retrospect, when you think about some of the most fulfilling times at work, they involve some amount of struggle, and I think people felt really fulfilled by their work. Again, I think there was plenty of peaks of exhaustion, but I think they were getting to do really good work with really good people. And I think they felt that sense of community and excitement.
AG: The juxtaposition of excitement and exhaustion is fascinating to me, it reminds me of some research on what's called the passion tax, where Aaron Kay and his colleagues have found that people who love their jobs are more likely to get asked to do extra work unpaid, even if it's not part of their role, even if it's demeaning. And they end up sacrificing sleep, family time and health because of it. Do you feel like there was a passion tax imposed at WeWork?
DF: I think people loved what they did. And I think they worked hard. You know, I think if you asked most people that worked there they'll tell you about how amazing the team was, and that it was some of the most incredible people they ever got to work with. And I really think people liked being at work. And yeah, so I think they may have put a little bit more of themselves out there that led to a little bit more of that draining and exhaustion, but I think people were pretty stoked for the work they were doing and the people they were doing it with.
AG: So it sounds like then you don't feel that they were getting exploited, so much as they were making voluntary sacrifices out of passion?
DF: I don't think so. Look, that's a tricky one, because I had a very particular view of the business, given my scope and my domain. There were a lot of different roles. I didn't work in the buildings. Most of the folks that I lead and managed and interacted with on a regular basis were within the office, and they had a bit more control of, sort of, managing their time. I could imagine if you were working in the buildings and you had a bit more of a direct obligation to the members and their needs that it may not have felt like you had as much agency, so I can't speak to that as much.
AG: When I sat down with Adam, I was asking him what WeWork was all about, what are his goals, what's he hoping to accomplish, and he said, "We're selling culture." And you know, my reaction, as an organizational psychologist was, "I'm pretty sure you're leasing buildings." It seemed like there was a big, you know, a little bit of a leap from what the actual work was to the mission that it was serving, and of course, sometimes those leaps are aspirational. Sometimes they're part of creating a meaningful and compelling vision. But the disconnect felt a little bit more significant to me than I see in a lot of workplaces. What's your take on that?
DF: I think we were selling cultural intervention. I think a culture is ultimately the aggregates of the micro-actions that an organization takes, and we couldn't entirely control those. But I think we were trying to help shape culture. The big learning for me was that space and the physical environment helped, but at the end of the day it was the core and how the organization behaved that would ultimately shape the culture. And companies who are looking to try to bring cultural lightning rods to the organization would bring a whole group into a WeWork, because it was so different from whatever their corporate environment was. So we would be used as a bit of a lever for cultural change. So I think we were helping inform culture. I think companies were looking to us to think about culture in a different way. I would say the unfortunate part is I think they gave too much emphasis to the space itself. And that, you know, what one of my colleagues at WeWork at the time called cultural confetti, and much more of the appliqué of culture than, like, the deep internals of culture. So I think we were trying to have those conversations and it was a tricky thing to navigate, understanding that our product in the market was space, and flexibility in space, while still trying to have a meaningful impact on the employee experience.
AG: Cultural confetti, I think in that sense, it sounds like just a surface layer, as opposed to dealing with the underlying values and norms that define what a culture is. But the other image that confetti paints for me, at least in my mind, is it almost sounds like it's a weak culture, that it's kind of dispersed and there's not anything consistent or strong about it. And that to me is a big part of the difference between weak and strong cultures. So in my world we normally define a weak culture as existing when you go around to different people and you ask what the values are and they all name different values, and nobody really cares about them. In a strong culture, the values are widely shared, so everybody believes the values are the same. And they're intensely held, so people are extremely passionate about them. My sense was that WeWork had a very strong culture. First question is do you agree or disagree, and then secondly, how would you describe the culture?
DF: I think WeWork had an incredibly strong culture. I think people felt very connected to the mission, I think they felt very connected to the values. So in that sense the culture was incredibly strong. It was about relentlessness, entrepreneurialism, respect, tenaciousness, togetherness and community. It was really about achieving a lot as a collective, I think that was kind of the essence of the values, and bringing an entrepreneurial approach to everything we did. And I think the organization, you know, for the most part operated that way. I think people felt very emboldened to do what they thought was right for the customer. If you were the community manager of a building and it wasn't part of the standard operating procedures to have, you know, nondairy milk, but you had a member who needed it, they would go do it. That's kind of a silly little example, but there are places where you could find yourself caught in bureaucracy for weeks to be able to do something like that. And they felt, you know, I think, a tremendous amount of agency and ownership around -- And then again, everyone felt this way to do the things you needed to do to move the business forward. At least what we thought was moving the business forward at the time.
AG: That goes to a lot of the research on strong cultures, which, there's a long list of benefits. We know that when organizations have strong cultures they're better at attracting and retaining people, because they stand for something unique and it draws talented employees, and once they're there, why would I want to go anywhere else? It's also helpful for motivating and connecting and coordinating people, because they feel like they're in a place that has distinctive values, and they start to identify with those values. I worry a lot about the dark side of strong cultures though, which is that they tend to breed homogeneity, that can cause groupthink, in a lot of cases they have trouble changing and adapting because people are so committed to the way we have always done things or the values we've always held. Did you see any of those sharper edges?
DF: Yeah, I think that feels right, you know, from having lived inside a strong culture, is that some things start to just happen because. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the pot roast story, but it's one of these work-fables of just doing things.
AG: The what? DF: The pot roast story?
AG: Not described that way.
DF: OK, I'll give it real quick, it's a parent and a child cooking a pot roast, and the first thing the parent does when they take the pot roast out is they cut the ends off. And the child says, "Why do you do that?" They say, "Well it's in the recipe. So let's call a grandparent and see." They call the grandparent and they say, "I've just always done it, that's what's in the recipe." And the family was very lucky that the great grandparent was still around, so they called the great grandparent that wrote the recipe. And they say, "Oh well my pan was just too small so I always cut the ends off."
(Laughter)
So the idea being that we just do things because we thought that's what was right. And when you have these strong cultures with a bit of a lore about them, it becomes incredibly difficult to trace back like, why certain things are the way they are and the strong culture just keeps them going. So I think that that's absolutely a side effect, a potentially negative side effect of a really strong culture, especially as you scale. Those things might be fine if you stay at the same scale for a very long time, but when every three to six months the business is fundamentally different and the scale and infrastructure is different, those things can start to be of an issue, because you start to have these cohorts of culture, especially when you're onboarding a lot of people, you've got the folks that have been there for five years, five and a half years, four years, and they've got the snapshot of what the most current version was at that time. And it becomes, like, cemented in, and so you find yourself with people debating what the right way is, not even, again, knowing what the source of that thing was. And so I think the combination of a strong culture, high growth and high speed make for some really interesting times.
AG: What's a WeWork example of the pot roast?
DF: This foggy vinyl on the glass. You know, a lot of members would want privacy, and they would want to put some translucency on the glass in the buildings so that their office would have a little bit more privacy. Like, if people want privacy, no problem, we just put up the vinyl, and so you would just see different things, where it's like, "Oh, that's not allowed at all," which was not true. That was one that I always found myself being pulled into a meeting, like, we're not allowed to do that, and I'd be like, "You're absolutely allowed to do that, that's what the member wants, give it to them, it's not a big deal."
AG: This definitely captures the double-edged sword of strong cultures in a compelling way. I think about one of the benefits of strong cultures being that leaders don't have to use incentives or controls or punishments because people have internalized what the values and norms are, and that means if they see something that is not being done right, or a rule that's being broken, or a principle that's being violated, they will enforce it themselves. And that's the upside. The downside is, people will enforce it themselves, and they might not be enforcing the right principles.
DF: Yeah, I found myself in just way too many meetings being the person that was willing and seeming to the others empowered enough to change the norm. But they would just be spinning and spinning, it's like, "We can't, but we should, but we can't." Where did that come from? I was like, "Guys, it's totally OK, just do it, if it's not OK I'll take the heat." And it was always OK. And I feel like, when things got stuck, that's a lot of the stuff that was happening, it was these cultural norms, and you couldn't even ask somebody, "Hey, where did you see this written?" And more often than not you couldn't find it.
AG: I want to ask you a little bit about leadership, which obviously is a core driver of culture. Adam seemed to do a lot of preaching about what WeWork was going to accomplish, what the values were, what the mission was. Do you think he believed all of what he was saying, or was he hoping other people would drink the Kool-Aid?
DF: I think he believed it. You know, I like to believe he believed it. I know that the team believed it. And that as a workforce, and as a team, and as a culture we believed it. The question I'm kind of curious about, and curious on your take on is like, how much does a belief system matter to a culture, and how important is it that the leader can either embody or present the belief system in a way that can get people behind it? So I think he believed it and I definitely believe he got people to believe it. I'm kind of curious for myself on how much that mattered for the incredible things that we were able to achieve. I think they mattered a lot, but I'm curious from your surveying of companies and founders and CEOs, if you've seen that as a common trait?
AG: Yeah, I think so. There's evidence that charismatic leaders are more successful at pitching their companies and fundraising. It's not surprising, I think, to anyone that that would be true. There is also evidence that the cultural blueprints that founders have in their minds when they first launched their companies, they cast a real shadow on the future of the company, even if founders rotate out of leadership. There's a study of a couple a hundred Silicon Valley start-ups where Jim Baron and his colleagues identified the cultural blueprints, and they found that if you, as a founder, had a blueprint where you were going to convince people that you had an important mission and everyone was going to be passionate about that mission and the culture was organized around commitment, that your start-up was less likely to fail, and it was also significantly more likely to have an IPO. But then post-IPO, those start-ups that were strong cultures of commitment, they grew at slower rates, if you track metrics like annual market capitalization. And I think that's where you start to see some of the rigidity and groupthink problems come in, where you begin to weed out diversity of thought, you end up with more homogeneity. And I guess where that's left me is wondering whether the kind of charisma and conviction that you are describing in Adam is helpful for a company to grow at an exorbitant rate early, and then over time, sort of, shoots the company in the foot?
DF: Well, this will definitely make for an interesting case study, because we've kind of got the full cycle. Look, I really -- Coming back to the question on belief, I believe he believed it. I think he had other things that drove that belief system and his ambitions of things he wanted to achieve, which, honestly, he achieved a lot of them. And so I'm not sure like, sort of, chicken and egg -- which one was driving which, at a certain point the belief can only push you so far. And so maybe that's what we felt there at the end.
AG: Yeah, I think that's fair. It reminds me a little bit of some research by Sandra Cha and Amy Edmondson, who studied values-driven organizations and found that the more emphasis leaders put on values, the more risk they end up taking of being accused of hypocrisy. Where you get people convinced that you stand for higher principles and moral ideals, and then the moment that you deviate from those, there's a giant gap and people are very quick to point out that you are not practicing what you preach. I'm curious to hear your perspective on that and do you feel like some of what happened at WeWork was hypocrisy because the values and aspirations were preached in such an aspirational way? Or do you have a different analysis of where it started to unfold?
DF: I definitely think that that is the source of a lot of the disappointment. That what was presented as what the organization stood for, as more and more commercial pressure mounted, you know, being public and things like that, some of those things were harder to live. I don't think there's necessarily a one to one. I am not sure a company can be altruistic, not that we were pretending to be altruistic. And so I could imagine, that since the company had really built an existence of caring about people and the community so much, that if you did anything that looked anything like not that, that you run the risk. And I think these mission-led companies and companies with great aspirations, that is the challenge, I think it's part of what gets your customers to buy into what you do, it's part of what get your team to buy into what you do and to grow. But you set the bar for yourself incredibly high. And I think some companies have been, like, very clear and pragmatic about what they do, and are able to live that. I think Amazon does that pretty well. I think that's tricky. You know, being able to manage this aspirational, very human-centric brand, you know, you've got to really operate tightly and I think the world is becoming less tolerant of a deviation from your actions and your words. And so I think that's something companies are going to have to be very thoughtful about as they establish these brands and what they stand for and their values and they better be prepared to really live by them.
AG: Yeah, I guess that goes to the question of narcissistic leadership. And I know you know I've spent a lot of my career studying the dynamics of giving and taking, and in the IPO there's just an unusual number of "Is" and "mes", and we know from evidence that narcissistic taker CEOs are more likely to use "I" and "me" when talking about their companies. There's one article calling Adam the most talented grifter of our time. I'm just curious to hear your reaction to that set of observations.
DF: I have described him before as, like, the best personal trainer you never had. He could get people to push themselves to deliver and to achieve in ways that they didn't think they could, which I think is -- I think for a lot of us that's kind of uncomfortable, we actually feel bad. I think he was able to do it. And I think he really believed he was helping people get the most out of their potential. He was a force, or is a force.
AG: When I think about a personal trainer, my first reaction is, OK, this is somebody who is going to pump me up. My second thought is, when I bring in a personal trainer, it's somebody who's trying to help me achieve my own goals. So I'm trying to get in shape or get faster or stronger, or lose weight, whatever the target may be, that person is there to help me. And I wonder if that analogy breaks down when you start to think of a founder and CEO who may not be there to try to help the people around him?
DF: Yeah, that's a really interesting callout. I think, you know, for companies in general, and this starts to tug at the relationship between the folks that work at a company and the company itself. And what is really best for the individual, so I can kind of make the case that what's good for the collective is good for the individual. And I think that a lot of people convince themselves of that.
AG: You know, I'm not asking you to criticize a particular leader, but when you think about the culture it seems like there are aspects of the culture that fit more with taking than giving and that there was some selfish as opposed to servant leadership at the top.
DF: Yeah look, I think he was superfocused on delivering what he set out to do. I think he worked harder than probably most people I've met. He didn't leave the office, he worked all the time, and so I think that there was this maniacal focus on winning. You know, what winning means is different to different people, but I think he wanted to do incredibly big things, I think the definition of "big" changed for him over time. I think we would set out to do these fairly audacious things, we would achieve them, and then it would open up a whole new world of what was possible, you know, be it fundraising numbers or opening X number of buildings in a month, or selling so many seats to new members on a certain month. We would consistently set out fairly audacious goals and hit them.
AG: Stretch goals. Sometimes those kinds of moonshots are just the fuel we need. There's a wealth of evidence that extremely difficult specific goals motivate us to aim higher. And work harder, longer and smarter. But they can also lead us to cut corners, especially if we're about to fall just short of the goal. Sometimes our creative strategies for hitting bold targets stretch beyond the bounds of what's ethical.
DF: So I think he was increasingly emboldened by what we could do as a company, and when we really focused on trying to tackle something, and so, yeah, I think he wanted to win, I think he wanted to win everything.
AG: I've always bristled at the language of winning and losing in business, because it's not like a soccer match, or a baseball game where there's a score and everybody has agreed on the rules and at the end of the game you know what metric you are counting on. It seems like the moment you define success in terms of winning, it means that everybody else has to lose.
DF: Yeah, I totally agree with you, and I think it's a complicated topic, but you see it in, like, the business discourse of, "We've got to win, we're going to win." And you even see recommendations that I also always bristled at, it's like, we need to identify an enemy, or an opponent. People will rally around that. But I agree with you, I much more subscribe to the idea of, don't worry about who the competitors are, get customer-obsessed and just focus on solving for the customer. And the notion of what winning is and competitiveness, you know, maybe that gets into personality, but I think you see it, I think there are certain founders who exude a bit more of a competitiveness in the way that they -- it's a bit more of a combative approach to business, and they're able to rally people behind it and get people to do amazing things, and there's others that maybe that's not as much a part of the way that they engage and that they talk about it. But it was definitely part of our language.
I think people are very capable of convincing themselves that actions that most would recognize as taking are in the service of giving. And I think it's a really fine line and slippery slope. But I would say that that's what was believed. That the things that were being done were best for the collective, and kind of the rising tide lifts all ships, and they can be a little bit more conscious of the language. It still shows up as the "Is" and "mes," but I think it's -- it's easy to see in retrospect I guess.
AG: Yeah. There's a spectrum of self-awareness when it comes to the most selfish takers among us. And on one end you have people for whom it's a very deliberate strategy, right? They'll say, "Look, I believe the world is a dog-eat-dog competitive place, and I have to put myself first because no one else will, and that's how I get ahead, that's how I win." And on the other end of the spectrum, you have people who, it's almost like they're in the movie "The Sixth Sense." Everybody else knows they're a taker, but they have no idea. And I think the Richard Feynman quote always stands out here, that, "You have to be careful not to fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."
DF: Yeah, that makes sense, and I do have a belief that we have a more natural disposition towards a self or other orientation. And then you sort of, combine that with people's EQ. And so if you have a high self-orientation and a high EQ, that makes you kind of dangerous. And I think some people are, I don't know if the right word is gifted, but it's a gift that some people can use for good, some people can use for bad, but some people are clearly capable. And sort of --
(Laughter)
I'm just saying through history, we've seen these very magnanimous characters and figures that have done remarkable things, and then some that seemed like they were doing remarkable things until they weren't. And unfortunately, many of us are susceptible to it.
AG: Yeah. Well, I think this is one of the ways that emotional intelligence gets weaponized. There are a lot of people who associate care and empathy with emotional intelligence, but by definition, emotional intelligence is a set of abilities, not a set of motivations or values. And that means that how emotionally intelligent you are, how good you are at recognizing and using and managing emotions in yourself and others, that's completely independent of whether you are more of a giver or a taker. And sure enough there is some research by Stéphane Côté and his colleagues, showing that the most dangerous colleagues are emotionally intelligent takers, because they're very good at manipulating you for their own gain, but convincing you that it's for your benefit, and maybe to your point they've even convinced themselves it is for your benefit.
DF: Yeah, it's really easy for folks of that profile to fake empathy. Because they can intellectually understand, but I don't think they really feel it.
AG: Yeah, so that would be, well in some language cognitive empathy, but not emotional empathy.
DF: Right.
AG: Very interesting. They can take your perspective, they know what you're feeling, and that makes it very easy to get you to do what they want you to do.
DF: Yeah.
AG: Let me ask you this then, when this all came crashing down during the IPO, what was your emotional reaction?
DF: I was really sad. I was sad, because a lot of my friends and people I really care deeply about and have a ton of respect for were very directly affected by it. I was sad, because a lot of what the company stood for and the way that it treated its customers and members were still very much true. None of the media was about that. Like the product was good. The achievements that we were able to accomplish were amazing, and people did really incredible work and people went from one day being very proud and excited to say they worked at the company when they were at a party, to the next day maybe not so much. And I think that was really sad, because I think so much of our personal identity and our personal brand, which ultimately shapes our career, is connected to where we work, and I think a lot of people had made a huge investment in that connection. And for me that was really sad that without their doing that just changed so drastically for them. Like, by association, you just get painted with that. And I think that's what was really sad for me, is that the sequence of events that really had very little to do with the people working there and the effort and energy that they put into building something amazing, now affected them all.
AG: That's such an -- well I don't want to call it interesting because it's painful, but from a psychological perspective, it's a challenging situation. Because in a way it feels like somebody's house just burned down, only, number one, you don't have any insurance when it comes to your company having gone up in flames. Number two, you can't just move to a new house without talking about the old one. You have to account for where you spent those three or four years, and so it's almost like you are forced to wear a badge with a bunch of stigma attached to it.
DF: Yeah, absolutely. You know, if you were in the middle of a job hunt in that process you went from being highly coveted one day to needing to explain why that happened the next, and were you involved? You almost had to defend your career decisions in this way that was completely unexpected, and you had zero input or effect on that being the case. So I think that was really tricky, and that is part of why, I think, career decisions and job decisions are so heavy for people, because there is this aspect of the unknown that's out of your control. You don't know how well the company is going to do. You don't really know how much money it has, you don't really know the things that the executives are talking about. And I think that there is a tremendous amount of trust that people put into organizations, in that they're going to take care of them and take care of their career.
AG: What advice do you have, Dave, for people who go through that kind of stigmatization experience?
DF: Focus on what you learned, and the people that you met. Because what no one can take from you is your knowledge and your relationships. And if you invest in those, and you manage those correctly, you'll be able to cash them in later. So whether the brand becomes tarnished or the company doesn't do well, if you've built person-to-person relationship rather than person-to-brand relationship, then you'll be able to leverage that later. And not in, like, a capitalistic, opportunistic way, like, work together, because those things transcend companies. Whether it was a truly work relationship, perform, do well. I think too many people really feel like the work that they're doing is, like, for the company. "I worked for the company." No, I think what most people need to recognize is that you work for yourself, and your best investment is you, and what you leave behind is the reputation of the work you did while you were there. So you might be angry and you might be sort of, mailing it in, but people aren't going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you were mailing it in because the company wasn't doing great, they're just going to remember that you mailed it in. And so I think always remember that you are managing your identity and your reputation and that travels with you. And so when things get bad, do right by people. Even if that's not what the company is doing, stand your ground for the things that matter to you, because that will travel with you.
(Music)
AG: As WeWork's IPO was collapsing last fall and several thousand people were being laid off, Dave stood his ground for something that mattered to him. He tweeted that he was willing to serve as a personal reference for anyone at the company. The post-mortem on WeWork has only just begun, but my biggest takeaway is that we should all be a little skeptical when companies claim to be changing the world. Even if their intentions are good, sometimes they'll fall short of their lofty ambitions. But the bigger danger is that they'll reach those ambitions. They may well end up changing the world but that doesn't mean they'll change it for the better.
(Music)
Next time on WorkLife.
Arthur Brooks: It was a wreck, it was a slow moving wreck in my career itself. I was in decline.
AG: Is career decline inevitable?
WorkLife is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by TED with Transmitter Media. Our team includes Colin Helms, Gretta Cohn, Jessica Glazer, Constanza Gallardo, Grace Rubenstein, Michelle Quint, Angela Cheng and Anna Phelan. Our show is mixed by Rick Kwan. Original music by Hahnsdale Hsu and Allison Leyton-Brown. Ad stories produced by Pineapple Street Studios. This episode was produced by Dan O'Donnell.
Special thanks to our sponsors. Accenture, BetterUp, Hilton and SAP.
For their research, thanks to Aaron Kay and colleagues on the passion tax. Jenny Chatman, Charles O'Reilly and Jesper Sørensen on strong cultures. Frank Flynn and Barry Staw on charismatic leadership. Jim Baron and colleagues on founder blueprints. Sandra Cha and Amy Edmondson on hypocrisy. Arijit Chatterjee and Don Hambrick on CEO narcissism. Ed Locke and Gary Latham on goal setting, Maurice Schweitzer and colleagues on the dark side of goals, and Stéphane Côté and colleagues on the dark side of emotional intelligence.
And thanks to Dave Fano for joining. His new company is called Teal. It's focused on helping people build fulfilling careers.
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DF: How was the sound, everything, no crazy background sound? I tried to make, like, a makeshift sound booth here.
AG: Of course you did.
(Laughter)
I'm thinking, OK, this is the guy who designed all those cool spaces, he better have a great studio setup at home.
DF: Well, if that includes a blanket hanging from a rafter and my daughter's purple headphones as my headset, then yes.
(Laughter)
