Narcissism and conformism seem, at first glance, to be somewhat opposite of each other. A narcissistic person believes deeply in his own superiority: others are inferior, detestable, and exist to be used toward his own ends. Narcissists demand attention and adoration, and a continual recognition by the group in which they reside that they’re a cut above. If they can’t lead a group, because it won’t let them, they’ll sabotage it to prove (to themselves, if nothing else) that they were smarter all along. When in a leadership position, they’re typically bad at it, much more focused on “managing up”– that is, appealing to the higher-ranking and more successful narcissists above them– than truly leading the team. It’s not surprising that peoples’ narcissistic colors break out in the corporate world, in which invisible differences between people can produce order-of-magnitude differences is remuneration, division of labor, and respect. Most white collar workers secretly believe, like the narcissist but for different reasons, “I’m better than this job.”
Advocatus Diaboli wrote beautifully on this topic:
The most important difference between blue-collar and white-collar workers is not about differences in levels of formal education, artistic tastes or social attitudes. [It is about] how they see their peers. Blue-collar types tend see their peers as colleagues (good or bad) who are in the same boat they are in. White-collar types see their peers as life-long adversaries who do not belong in the same boat they are in. Some also believe that they “really” belong to a much more exclusive boat and were just plain unlucky to land in their one they are in. (Emphasis mine.)
I’ll get back to that contention, held by many, and (arguably) true for many. Most institutionalized working people are stuck in roles far below their capability. The “I’m too good for these people” contention is pure narcissism, devoid of value or truth. Most people, by definition, are average relative to the groups in which they reside. On the other hand, “I’m too good for this job” is, for many, an accurate reflection of reality. They’re being asked to do things that could be done with far less training, skill, and natural ability. That is, also, an uneasy place to be. People who are overqualified for their jobs can be replaced by (or, worse, surrounded by and eventually answering to) sloppier, less skilled, and cheaper workers. They’re more likely to see their conditions decline (as their positions are eliminated, commoditized, and consolidated) than ever to be recognized (unless they change companies) as built for better things.
Corporate conformity, on the other hand, appears superficially to be a denial of that narcissism. The corporate conformist’s modus operandi is to eliminate even the slightest suspicion of narcissistic stirrings. To distinguish oneself in any way is detrimental. Being the laziest person on the team is deadly, but so is being the hardest worker. Being the office liberal or office conservative or office Christian or office atheist is yet another way to ensure that promotion never happens. It’s not about what one’s political views are. Even when many people agree with him, the office liberal showed arrogance by thinking that his views matter and should be heard. Differentiating oneself should only be done in the blandest way. Even travel can be off-limits: going on more interesting vacations than one’s colleagues or superiors should not be talked about. Many young people attempt to cover gaps in employment with “world travel” and that’s a terrible strategy. If you’re going to lie to cover a work gap, use a painful, trying experience like a failed startup or a resolved health problem instead of travel, which induces resentment. No one envies mononucleosis.
Teamism
Corporate conformity doesn’t demand self-effacing retreat. In fact, the people who never speak up are just as likely to be sidelined as those who speak up in the wrong way. What it does require is adherence to a certain cult: teamism. One might notice that “team” is an overused and abused word in business. Executives call themselves “the leadership team” (gag!) in a public denial of what they actually are: an unprogrammed assortment of the most successful social climbers, still prone to (un-”team”-like) in-fighting.
Furthermore, the terminology of being “on” a team has its own interesting double-speak. At the bottom, team membership is discussed as factual organizational placement: which double-digit-numbered page of the org chart one’s name is written on. “Oh yeah, I’m on Tom’s team.” Executives and upper-tier managers use “on a team” to mean something different– undistinguished, mediocre, unproven, or just unlucky. As in, “if I fuck up this presentation, I might end up on a team in my next job”. The hideous, irrelevant truism, “there is no I in ‘team’” shows an understanding of how the business world actually operates. There are high-flying fighter pilots (I’s) with established personal brands. Recruiters know them by name, and great jobs come to them. Then there are teams which house the mediocre, commoditized losers who sit at the bottom and justify their petty salaries by picking up work that no one else wants to do.
Why teamism? Why is it so ubiquitous? Is it effective? (Yes, but to what end?) The answer is that American corporate life has experienced three fundamental phases of development, each corresponding to a position in the fundamental “What is human nature?” debate. The first, which peaked in the Gilded Age, is what we call the “Theory X” view of management. Theory X holds that people (in particular, employees) are fundamentally dishonest, lazy, and selfish. This is the Hobbesian “human nature is evil” stance. A Theory X manager must intimidate his workers, lest they steal from him or slack. Beginning around 1925, the more progressive industrialists (such as Henry Ford) began to realize that this wasn’t entirely true. Theory X indicates that it’s most efficient to dominate people totally. But, empirically, shortening work hours increased productivity, and increasing wages resulted in both higher morale and more commercial success (because people could afford what was produced). At least relative to the frank indecency of Gilded Age management, human decency was proven to be good business.
From the late 1940s to the 1970s, Theory Y (“human nature is good”) dominated. Under Theory Y, workers are naturally self-motivated and creative, unless corrupted by bad management or intimidated into mediocrity. The Theory Y manager’s job is to remove obstacles and let the people below her create. People who are trusted, for the most part, will end up deserving it. Theory Y sounds wonderful; every workplace should be like that, no? So what killed it off? The culprit was the “elitism is sexy again” mentality that re-emerged in the Reagan Era (1980s). Theory Y was true enough when socioeconomic inequality was at an all-time low. For most workers, there wasn’t enough at stake to justify harming their employers. Doing something harmful, that would damage others’ careers or harm business operations, wasn’t worth it just to get a promotion that brought a 20% raise. People were probably just as narcissistic in the Theory Y heyday as they are now, but a 20% pay bump doesn’t give enough social distance for one to get away from the long-term reputation risks involved in harmful behavior. Change that raise to 500 percent, and it’s a different story. The narcissist is more empowered by the new calculus (“if I succeed, I’ll get away from these losers forever”). In 1965, there wasn’t as much to gain through bad behavior at work in 1985, when selling out an employer’s secrets to the nearest private equity firm got a person a job that paid in one month what the previous job paid out over a year.
The Theory Y workplace was trusting, open, and mutually altruistic and it could be, because external social inequality was at an all-time low. Selfish and bad behavior certainly has always been with us, and so it certainly happened even in the Theory-Y heyday, but there wasn’t the epidemic of it that could threaten a company’s existence. That changed in the 1980s, because the external stakes were so much higher. Workplaces had to become secretive, distrusting, and somewhat ruthless again. Bosses who weren’t feared had their careers ruined by a rising cohort of Boomer yuppies, and ceased to be bosses.
Theory X was driven by simple human greed, but its moral support came from an “original sin” mentality, one that the secularism of the mid-20th century discarded. Calvinism held that work was, literally, a punishment for The Fall. That went out of style, and good riddance. Theory Y, however, proved itself to be too optimistic about human nature and what people are. By 1985, we’d seen as a society that people can be highly creative, industrious, and even altruistic with only moderate reward. The successful moon landing was executed not by billionaires, but by men and women who loved the work. So we’d seen some impressive Theory-Y victories. You simply wouldn’t be able to get something like the Apollo program with Theory-X management. We’d also seen that Theory Y’s optimism (echoes of which still exist in the culture of Silicon Valley, despite extreme Theory-X behavior at the top) didn’t have the whole picture. Given a sweet enough carrot, some people would do the wrong thing, and while it might not be that most people would, we’d seen that there are enough such people to present an existential threat to a business– or, at least, to a too-trusting executive’s career. We had to invent something new. If Theory X was the original-sin thesis, Theory Y was its antithesis; the synthesis became what I call “Theory Z”, or the cult of teamism.
Is human nature good, or evil? For a simplification, let’s identify “good” with altruism and “evil” with militant selfishness (egoism). Few people are degenerately egoistic, but even fewer are universally altruistic. Most people are localistic. They do care about people and things beyond themselves: their families, their physical neighborhoods, their companies and nations, and so on. People view themselves at the center of a nested collection of neighborhoods and care about the closest and smallest ones the most. The greater the distance (social, tribal, or physical), the less they care. None of this is surprising, and what it tells us is that human nature isn’t prevailingly “good” or “evil”. It’s somewhere in between, for most of us. In the corporate context, this predicts that peoples’ “corporate altruism” should be strong in a small company and weaker in a large one, and we see that to be true. It tells us that people would rather delegate undesirable work to a remote office (especially in a foreign country) than burden their officemates. That, we also see. The social and emotional bonds that are relevant tend to be formed over time through shared experience and physical co-presence. While Theory X motivates by intimidation, and Theory Y believes people are intrinsically rightly motivated so long as management doesn’t corrupt them, Theory Z attempts to harness team cohesion: bonds formed by physical closeness as well as shared experience (and suffering). Theory X was obsessed with the egoistic human, and Theory Y believed in a fundamental altruist; Theory Z is a practical (but intensely manipulative) approach focused on localism. The Theory Z manager recognizes that the individual worker doesn’t give a damn about the company as a whole (and, since Theory Z is closer to X than Y, most companies aren’t worth caring about, from a worker’s perspective) but is willing to bet that he won’t fuck over his buddies.
Mike Cohn explains it well in the software context, with this short blog post, “Sssh… Agile Is All About Micromanaging.” Those blessed enough not to be familiar with the cult that has been made of “Agile” can still learn much from this revelation.
[T]he deep, dark secret of agile: It’s all about micromanagement. Almost every principle and practice of agile is there to support micromangagement.
- The daily scrum is about micro-managing the team’s daily work plans and making sure that everyone is doing what they say they’ll do. [...]
- Pair programming is about making sure that programmers don’t lose focus, don’t goldplate, don’t work on only the fun stuff, and that they clean things up.
Ah, but who is it that is doing this micromanagement? It’s the team.
The purpose of the Theory Z teamism is to replace one boss five hundred feet away with ten bosses twenty feet away. It’s to diffuse responsibility when people are rejected (fired). The official manager can deflect responsibility by claiming “the team” discarded the unwanted employee. It also makes it easier for people to play political games while remaining vague in whom they are attacking. Instead of discussing specific people, they can say “the tech team is weak” and (in truth) target specific people (possibly the CTO, possibly the specific person on that team related to a matter) with plausible deniability. The purpose of Theory Z teamism is to make Theory X (micromanagement, prevailing distrust, executive greed) look like Theory Y (commitments and “consensus”). In a world that has outgrown top-down religion (Theory X) but found secular humanism (Theory Y) toothless, local microcults are the new rage. Theory Z encourages management to tailor microcults to specific corners of the company. The cloying, common theme within and between these microcults is team. The executive suite is “the leadership team”. HR won’t let you call a disliked employee a “shithead”, so you call him “not a team player”. It enables the upper management (still inclined to Theory X thinking) to hide the true dynamic of the relationship between (exploited) employee and (rent-seeking) organization by redirecting the focus to employee and “team”. You wouldn’t drop the ball on your team, Mac?
If my negativity about teamism makes it sound like I’m “anti-team”, that’s not the impression that I’m trying to convey. When an actual team synergy exists, it’s great for everyone. It’s more fun to be on a winning team than to win alone. All that said, the truth of most organizations is that there are no winning teams. The winners are executives, ace fighter pilots, and proteges who get to move about the company as themselves. It’s the rest, the non-Elect losers, who are “on a team”. The corporate world is one in which the winners interoperate with multiple teams as they choose, rather than being stuck at one table in an assigned seat. Of course, the executives still call themselves “the leadership team”, but that’s just how they market themselves internally within the organization. They aren’t a team in any meaningful sense. They’re out for themselves, and they wouldn’t be executives if they were any other way. Those who are “on a team” are the ones who don’t have any independent credibility, but who serve at the mercy of parochial “team leaders” (middle managers). Theory Z isn’t about teamwork. It’s about corralling the disaffected losers that a company still needs and saying, “be a team, now!”
My issue, then, isn’t with teamwork or genuine team formation, because those aren’t what Theory-Z teamism is. Teamism is forced team identity. Its seed mythology is that those who have been slotted by fortune (or misfortune) to answer to the same middle manager constitute a “team” in any meaningful sense. It lends false objectivity (“not a team player”) to the language used to denigrate and discard those who awaken and realize that the corporate gods don’t exist. Finally, it glorifies mediocrity and slave mentality, by applying terminology with positive associations (such as genuine teams that achieve things that would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for an individual) to the unfortunate, miserable state of being at the bottom of an organization.
Counter-narcissism
Teamism (“team unity”) is the justification for the extreme conformity that the corporate environment demands. When a person has multiple bosses, with new dotted lines forming at all times, there isn’t room for self-expression, and the optimal strategy is to be as bland and average as one can be, except in short bursts of targeted activity intended toward a specific promotion. (Failure often results in termination, so one must be prepared for that.) To stand out is taken, implicitly, to be a personal statement of, “I don’t have to follow your rules”, which is interpreted as “I’m too good to follow your rules”. While narcissism is tacitly accepted in the executive ranks– at a high enough level, they’re all narcissists or they wouldn’t be there– even a whiff of narcissism is viewed as toxic when it appears “on the team”. Teamism, then, is a militant anti-narcissism. It seeks out and punishes those who think they’re too good for their jobs, or who just seem to think so. As a side effect, this also punishes excellence, because people who do their jobs uncannily well are going to appear to be up to something (Theory X). Teamism is great at inducing uniformity and reliable mediocrity, and quite successful on its own terms, but it does a terrible job of encouraging people to perform beyond the Socially Acceptable Middling Effort, or the SAME.
In the short term, teamism does a fantastic job of getting what the executives want, which is for people to work hard under an assumed “social contract” with the team. The thing is that “the team” has no power. The organization can break the social contract at any time, and argue that it never existed. Over the long term, this leads inexorably to corporate degeneration. (Executives know this, but tolerate it because they’ll be promoted away from their posts before it’s a personal issue for them.) Teamism encourages people to target their effort levels toward the SAME. People who are talented can usually achieve the SAME and have energy to spare, and will find their way to better places. (This may have them promoted into upper management, or moved to better teams, or externally promoted into another company; or, it might get them isolated, rejected, and fired. Either way, the result is the same: they leave.) This has an “evaporative” effect: the more competent people leave, and the less able stay. Underperformers gradually push the SAME downward, it being safer to slightly underperform than overperform in most organizations. The SAME drifts, slowly but inevitably, toward zero. After a while, upper management will take note, but by this time, it’s often too late to do anything about it, and the remedies that do exist are toxic ones that don’t work. Executives might attempt to institute stack ranking, for example, to scare people back into working. This, however, re-awakens the narcissism and political machination that the teamism was invented to tamp down.
What is the corporate value of teamism? Why do contemporary corporate executives favor it over the management-by-fear Theory-X style, or the permissive altruism of the Theory-Y school? The short answer is that Theory Z teamism is Theory X with Theory Y trappings. It allows organizations to behave in a Theory X way (rent-seeking, throwing loyal employees overboard for any cause) while encouraging the worker to focus locally, on people in the same boat, whom one is inclined to empathize with. The longer answer is that teamism is better at exploiting cognitive dissonance as well as guilt. Teamism is aggressive counter-narcissism, its purpose being to inculcate people with the belief that they aren’t too good for their shitty jobs. If they sit on teams, and they see similarly talented people underutilized on low-quality work, it strengthens the executive case. Abstractly, most white-collar workers think (or, I would argue, know) that they’re good for what they’re asked to do. When they go into an office and see others suffering just as much as they are, it’s much harder to hold that view, because (although I disagree with this reasoning) it equates the thought, “I am too good for this job”, with “I am better than him, that guy doing an equivalently crappy job”. Some people think that way about those they sit next to on a daily basis, but most people don’t like thinking that way. Hence, cognitive dissonance sets in. If people become used to the sight of highly qualified people in humiliating, subordinate roles doing menial work, they’re likely to accept that situation for themselves.
The business view
What, pray tell, do executives gain from this? After all, isn’t it a business loss to underemploy people? On paper, it might be. Potential revenue (opportunity cost) is squandered when highly-qualified people are assigned to low-quality work. However, the profit-maximizing organization is a fictitious person. It doesn’t really exist, insofar as it cannot implement its will. For that, it relies on executives, individuals who’d rather hold a high degree of control in a malfunctioning organization than risk that control to improve it. The executive doesn’t give a damn about the organization’s profitability or long-term health. He only cares about the effect of those variables on his career, and he realizes that his needs are best served by keeping the people around him loyal. Knowing this, he often benefits more by hoarding control than anything else. A false scarcity in the allocation of important or desirable work is a powerful tool. Giving some of that power up (say, by implementing open allocation) might make the organization better and more successful, but it won’t make it easily controllable.
There is, at root, a fundamental conflict of interest between “the business” (and its desire to maximize profit, revenue, or subjective health) and the executives who actually control it. It is best for the business that all employees have the chance to contribute as usefully as their talents allow, but it’s best for executives to keep important work assigned only to proven loyalists who, even should they outperform their executive patrons, will never challenge the position of the ones who lifted them.
False scarcity
The reality, for most white-collar workers, is that their narcissistic impulse isn’t entirely wrong. Most of them are too qualified for their positions. To understand why I can assert this as if it were an objective fact, let’s examine the nature of a subordinate organizational role. To say that someone is “too good” for a specific task is a bit offensive and not especially defensible. I have cats, I clean their litter box, and I’m not “too good” for that job because someone has to do it. From first principles, the fact that work is unpleasant and menial doesn’t mean that a talented person should be “too good” for it. (People who think otherwise are likely to be actual narcissists.) So the positive definitions of a role (i.e. the things one is expected to do) don’t make a job “beneath” a talented person. So I won’t focus on unpleasant duties. Rather, I’ll focus on the negative definitions associated with a subordinate role, or the do-nots. Don’t attempt cultivate a relationship with anyone above your manager. Don’t work on things you weren’t explicitly assigned to do. Don’t speak “off script” in the presence of important people. These prohibitions (and not specific undesired tasks) are the causes that give a person of even moderate talent the justification in believing that he’s simply too good for the role.
I’d argue that most people are, factually, too good for their jobs. As I’ve said above, I don’t think anyone is too good to do an unpleasant task if it must be done. The truth is, however, that most of white-collar work isn’t about performing necessary tasks or about producing anything. It’s about managing perceptions, helping one parochial warlord beat out another, and appearing subordinate enough to (a) please one’s immediate manager, and (b) present a positive image of that manager to his superiors. Most white-collar office workers have to be present for 8 (or more) hours each day not because there’s that much work (there usually isn’t) but because working fewer hours would present the image that their bosses can’t control their charges. For the white-collar worker, most of one’s “work” time is spent supporting authority through sacrifice (most visibly, of time) rather than producing anything real. Most of the stress doesn’t come from the tasks to be performed, but from the chronic job of presenting oneself in a way that one can acquire and maintain permission to do meaningful work, which is kept in short supply by the parasites (executives) who define and allocate it. Most of the work that is done is just there to keep up appearances in an organization that could do just fine without half its people, but (luckily for them) is constitutionally incapable of figuring out which half.
When talented people realize their real jobs aren’t to produce but to subordinate, they conclude (accurately): I’m too good for this bullshit. And they’re right, all of them. They deserve better. That’s not narcissism. It’s accurate self-perception within an institutional prison that shouldn’t exist.
If people awakened to this at once, and collectively, it could spell the end of the current corporate system. What has to happen, to prevent that, is to single out those who awaken and shame them as narcissists. Closed allocation systems work exactly to that purpose. One who puts himself out there by (usually unwisely) suggesting he’d be more useful to the company doing something else can then be interpreted as acting as if he’s too good for his team and immediate manager. This makes him disliked and will have him rejected by the team (and fired) in time, intimidating those who remain. Toward the executives’ goal of maintaining control at all costs (even when it harms or may destroy the company) it is brilliant, because even the slightest internal assertions are penalized automatically. Theory Z teamism is perfect from a parasitic executive’s perspective. Most people are intelligent enough to distrust and dislike corporate executives, even within their own companies. Few people are stupid enough to overlook the fact that at least 80 percent of these high priests called “executives” are overpaid, pampered, worthless parasites. The result is that anti-executive sentiment (possibly leading to unionization, which would threaten management’s power and profits) would spread quickly if people weren’t inculcated into a sort of cultish, corporate religion. The brilliance of Theory Z is that it has people convinced they are working not for upper management (which they, rationally and rightly, couldn’t give a damn about) but their immediate team.
The result is a punitive, miserable system in which even the slightest self-assertions– even normal human impulses– are treated as arrogant narcissism. (Many religions and most cults use the same dynamic; not to believe certain improbable claims is made into rejecting one’s community.) Few people will take that social risk, and the result is an extreme conformism.
The twist
If a sort of militant anti-individualism, presented as anti-narcissism, takes hold in an organization, extreme conformity will result. Perhaps surprisingly, most people are unaware that it has happened. “My company isn’t like that.” Sorry, but it probably is. Unless you have direct on-the-spot responsibilities to important customers, showing up at specific times, regardless of whether there is work to do, is conformity. Working only on assigned projects, or only on projects assigned to a specific subcorner (sorry, I mean “team”) of the company, is conformity. Spending 8 hours per day in a state of low-level social anxiety (the long-term health risks of which are poorly publicized) not because it produces useful work, but to uphold a power relationship, is conformity. I think, sadly, that I’m accurate in arguing that over 90 percent of American workplaces are conformist hellholes that destroy creativity and squander (abuse, even) talent. Some may think that technology companies or VC-funded startups might provide a way out but, empirically, those are some of the worst in this regard.
So what about narcissism and its purported antithesis of “being a team player”? Ultraconformist workplaces might be undesirable, but shouldn’t one agree that narcissism is a bad (and, to a business, dangerous) thing? Might it be worth it to suffer a bit of conformity if the negative effects of the true narcissist are curtailed? Don’t the people at the bottom need to learn, anyway, that they aren’t special snowflakes?
Reality intrudes. Here’s the thing about conformity: it might seem like an antidote for narcissism, but it needs to be enforced. By whom? Who wants the role of conformity’s Enforcer? Generally, such people turn out to be narcissists, those who arrogate the role of speaking for a large group (as large can they can get) because of the power it commands. Narcissists, of course, love power, and have the deepest understanding of the impulses (narcissistic and otherwise) that impel others to compete with them for it. The result is that, the more conformist an organization’s culture is, the more power that organization has already given away to true narcissists.
This gets to the heart of what I’ve taken to calling the Organizational Problem. Simply put, organizations cannot be stable because they rely on people to keep them up, and because the power associated with upkeep often attracts the worst kinds. Organizations have a justified fear and dislike of the true narcissist, because such people are truly toxic when in positions of power. What they are unable to prevent, seemingly without exception, is the ability of the toxic narcissist to gain entry into whatever suborganization (be it management or an official “culture police”, as some startups have) it relies on to spot and kick out narcissists. Psychopaths truly are the cancer cells of the human organization, the fittest ones not only able to elude the immune system, but often capable of redirecting it against healthy cells.
The case for corporate conformity is that it blocks the advancement of narcissists, who supposedly can’t thrive in a conformist environment. The (completely wrong) assumption is that, because the conformist environment denies individual expression (much less admiration) the psychopath or narcissist will be unable to function in it. The reality is that narcissists (and especially psychopaths) love conformist environments. The slightly-narcissistic normal person sees the corporate conformity– the rules and expectations it imposes on people– as restraint; but the psychopath sees them as weapons. It’s no surprise that psychopaths like weapons. (Non-psychopathic narcissists do, too, but for different reasons. In general, they prefer to wear but not use the sword.)
The Organizational Problem is so convoluted and deep that I cannot offer a general solution. I wish I could. I’ve tried to find one and, honestly, haven’t been able to come up with anything simple enough to impart in a few thousand words. I don’t think there is a “closed-form” answer. I think the best that we can do, on the ground, is to remove the obstacles that don’t work, on the grounds that they generate social complexity that will, in general, benefit the narcissist and the psychopath. The first step for us, all of us, might be to accept our basic humanity and reject the toxic conformity that seems to settle, if unopposed, in the corporate world.
