“You can visit Pity City, but you can’t live there,” is pretty good advice in the context of, say, a one-on-one mentoring meeting with a promising-but-entitled young employee who’s just suffered a setback. But it’s exactly the wrong thing to say as the CEO of an 11,000-person company trying to encourage employees to meet the challenges of selling office furniture in a work-from-home economy.
Footage of MillerKnoll Chief Executive Andi Owen dispensing this advice via videoconference has leaked online, causing a social media firestorm. The company — formed after the merger of Herman Miller and rival Knoll — has emphasized that the video clip is just 90 seconds of a 75-minute town hall, and says that it has been taken out of context.
Owen faced quick condemnation in the court of social media opinion, perhaps because the version of a CEO on display in the clip fits perfectly into post-pandemic worker anxiety. Do our bosses think we’re whiners?
Paranoia thrives in the polite inauthenticity that workplaces so often require. The version of Owen portrayed in the video appears to offer confirmation that executives who seem reasonable and gracious in public are secretly fed up with us in private.
The now-viral snippet begins with the empathetic blandishments we’ve come to expect from corporate leaders in hard times. “The most important thing we can do right now is focus on the things we can control,” Owen begins. And that’s to “provide the best customer service we can, get our orders out our door, treat each other well, be kind, be respectful, focus on the future because it will be bright.” Namaste.
But then the dam bursts, her anger and frustration spilling out. “Don’t ask, ‘what are we going to do if we don’t get a bonus?’” she says, going on to recap the advice she got from a former boss — the “Pity City” comment. She concludes with “Thank you, have a great day,” before miming a mic drop and mouthing the word “Boom.”
Boom, indeed.
Headline writers immediately picked up on the hypocrisy of an executive telling workers not to worry about their bonuses. Understandably. It’s tone-deaf, especially considering that in the three-quarters of companies that dispense bonuses, the word “bonus” describes not an unexpected windfall, but a core portion of employee compensation. A failure to pay suggests financial trouble. (Bonus decisions at HermanKnoll have reportedly not yet been made, including for the CEO, as their fiscal year has not ended.)
But the sudden shift into quit-your-whining mode is what really gives the video its emotional impact. Humans crave a certain amount of validation from authority figures. But what if our bosses are all secretly this exasperated?
A degree of employee fear has driven similar moments of managerial candor to the top of most-read lists. When JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon says remote work “doesn’t work” and calls managing directors back to the office five days a week, it prompts other workers to wonder if their bosses will follow his example. When a manager is caught on camera saying she’s “tired of babying people” it goes viral on TikTok because viewers worry their supervisors, too, think that way.
The concern is somewhat grounded in reality. After all, it isn’t because leaders trust their staff that so many firms have installed behavior-monitoring software.
And executives recently admitted to the Wall Street Journal that they are “tired of all the whining” from employees and that they admire — and secretly wished they could emulate — the abrasive style of Twitter CEO Elon Musk. Instead, only the most powerful can routinely get away with letting their unfiltered id take charge.
Female CEOs in particular face pressure to hide their frustration with employees behind a mask of empathy. Decades of research has shown that women leaders are expected to exude warmth in a way their male peers aren’t. At the same time, women can’t seem “too nice” or they will be dismissed as incompetent. It’s a double bind that takes enormous skill to navigate.
In the first part of the video, Owen gives a master class in walking this tightrope. It’s consistent with the version of herself on display in a candid 2021 interview with the New York Times about her leadership roles Herman Miller and The Gap, where she worked her way up from the retail floor.
But it isn’t the version of Owen viewers see in the video’s conclusion, where the sudden revelation of a tougher, more judgmental boss comes as a shock. To an employee, it’s alarming. But to an executive? Perhaps the emotion it stirs is envy.
Sarah Green Carmichael is a Bloomberg Opinion editor. Previously, she was managing editor of ideas and commentary at Barron’s and an executive editor at Harvard Business Review, where she hosted “HBR IdeaCast.”
