As the CEO your role is to set a baseline for behaviour. You have created a culture of gossip by talking about other people rather than to them. You have created a culture of gossip by allowing employees to come to you and speak about other employees poorly rather than encouraging them to speak to each other and resolve the issue themselves like adults.
There were a series of events that changed my opinion of this company and leader in mid-2019. After a meeting you instructed employees to close their eyes and raise their hands if they were “out” on another employee. Or in other words, if they thought that employee should be fired. This is unbelievably inappropriate, unprofessional, and puts your employees in a terrible position.
Another instance involved withholding an employee’s pay cheque because they were not following processes. This is not only grossly inappropriate, but illegal. If you are that displeased with an employee’s performance, place them on an Improvement Plan or terminate employment. Those are 2 far more ethical options than what was done.
As the CEO it is your role to support those that you employ. This includes educating yourself on issues that you may not have a personal experience with or understanding of. Specifically, mental health issues. As a tech product company, you are used to fixing bugs and looking for “gaps” to be fixed. Mental health issues are not something that you can engineer out. The belief that emotions and feelings should be eliminated from the workplace is very outdated and a dangerous viewpoint to hold. You will never be able to accomplish this. Yes, it is a business. But what do you think your business is run by? People. People that have emotions, mental health issues and all sorts of complexities. Attempting to terminate an employee taking a mental health leave was by far one of the most disappointing actions I saw you take and resulted in a great loss of confidence in you as a leader of people. An employee that was once performing well and then begins to have a decrease in performance is often an indication that there are deeper things at play. Let people take their leave without the fear of termination. Give them the chance to come back in a better state of mental health and prove they can perform.
Sharing the personal financial information of an employee is unbelievably unprofessional and not what I would expect from a leader. And yet, that was the case. Yes, OneLocal is transparent about salaries, but what you shared with a group of employees around beers on a Friday afternoon was how much money that employee had in their personal finances. That would be equivalent to an employee running around announcing how much money you have in your bank account. Boundaries are important and this is often lacking in your interactions with employees. After this incident, I lost all respect and trust in you.
You cannot be everyone’s friend. No matter how hard you try. You are the CEO and there is a power dynamic that will always exist there, whether you want it to or not. These are not your friends, they are your employees. In order to be a good and unbiased leader – the way that you instruct HR and Managers to be - you must take your own advice. It is glaringly apparent to everyone who you have stronger relationships with on the team and who you do not. I hope that this is just a blind spot that you are unaware of and become more mindful of.
Don’t come to people with your narrative or opinion of them or another employee and try to convince them of it. You tend to listen in order to reply, but not to understand. Keep an open mind to others’ opinions and points, rather than writing them off as “not being objective” because they disagree with you. By not taking the time to try to understand someone else’s viewpoint and other sets of facts, in turn you become the one that is not being objective. Approach people with an open mind. Be open to the fact that your opinion, although it may be based on “data points” can still be entirely biased because in reality how you interpret “data points” is influenced by your perspective. Especially when your “data” is merely the opinions of other employees and their version of a story. Data may be clean, but how you choose to draw conclusions from it creates a confirmation bias.
If you have concerns of inter-employee relationships, no matter how unfounded these concerns may be, I suggest speaking to both parties that you believe are involved. Not just the female party. Again, this is an outdated and dangerous way to think and approach things. I encourage you to educate yourself on this.
Take a step back and evaluate the validity of your “data points” and opinions. Because at the end of the day that’s all they are – opinions. And maybe that’s all this letter is. But it’s one that is shared by past and current employees. We can’t all be wrong.