Yes-Men/Women and Corporate Citizenship: Why Loyal Dissent Is Real Loyalty
This reflection is the first in a series I wrote on corporate culture originally published Oct.–Nov. 2013 and has been slightly modified.
And, by “corporate,” I don’t just mean business. I mean community culture, what happens anywhere people work together toward a common purpose, whether that’s a boardroom, a university, a sanctuary or a statehouse. I come back to this point repeatedly: public confidence isn’t rebuilt through messaging; it’s rebuilt through mission clarity, transparency and integrity. And none of those survive long in a culture where people are rewarded for telling the boss what the boss wants to hear. Loyal dissent is the highest form of assistance to an organization, while going along mindlessly is a debilitating form of treachery, made more so when consciously engaged in for personal gain.
“Here in America, we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels – men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion,” quipped Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Here’s the hard truth: loyal dissent is one of the greatest gifts a person can offer an organization. It is not a threat; it is a form of stewardship. The opposite, mindless agreement, can become a quiet form of betrayal, especially when it’s done for personal advantage. I’ve written before that one of leadership’s greatest challenges is simply getting people to tell the truth about how things are. Not because they are habitual liars, but because “no one loves the messenger who brings bad news.” When leaders “shoot messengers,” they get exactly what they demand: pandering, soft-soaping and eventually outright deception. And then, as surely as night follows day, the organization begins to rattle, “nuts and bolts” start falling off, until the whole thing shakes itself apart.
Every organization has “yes-men” and “yes-women.” The label is outdated, but the behavior isn’t. Call them apple-polishers, toadies, brownnosers; the vocabulary doesn’t matter. The moral failure is the same: they trade truth for comfort and conviction for proximity. In that kind of environment, discussion becomes performance and leadership becomes self-amusement. I once worked around a fellow where, if you wanted to know what he thought, the common advice was: “Ask the last person he talked to.” That’s not leadership; that’s a weathervane wearing a title and high heels or a three-piece suit.
Healthy institutions, especially universities, must resist what I’ve called the internal tendency toward sameness of thought. The best campuses show what could be called institutional courage, a willingness to defend the conditions that make open inquiry possible. Every leader must have a “Challenger in Chief”; yes-men need not apply. Noreena Hertz writes in the Harvard Business Review that leaders need a person who is willing to argue with them. There is absolutely no downside to this perspective. Progress-crippling issues might be exposed before they attain corporate culture as “best practice.” That takes humility from the dissenting voice and backbone from the leader. As I’ve argued, truth-seeking requires room for quiet, rigorous disagreement, not sanctimony, not slogans and not intimidation. The antidote to bad ideas is not silence; it is better arguments, more well-reasoned arguments, civil friction and a shared pursuit of what is true.
Of course, argument for its own sake isn’t virtue. Constant contrarianism can become its own kind of sabotage, ego dressed up as principle. But mission-guided dissent is different. It is organizational citizenship. It says, “I care enough about this place to risk being inconvenient.” In a university, that moral obligation is even heavier, because students are watching. The yes-men at Amazon have their own corporate identifier based on the nature of Chief Jeff Bezos, according to Dan McGinn in HBR, “How Jeff Bezos Makes Decisions.” They are called “Jeff-Bots.” Brownnoser sounds like a compliment in comparison. McGinn says Bezos’s leadership style is “infectious.” Maybe the approach works in the corporate world where a single vision guides all, but I doubt it. It falters in a shared governance environment, such as a university, where the vision must well up from a thousand voices and be glued together by the ringing call of leadership. They are learning what integrity looks like, not only from lectures, but from what the institution rewards and what it punishes. If we teach students to prize comfort over candor, we have failed them, even if our brochures look splendid.
In Forbes almost a decade ago, Alex Knapp revealed a series of leadership principles professed by James T. Kirk, Captain of the Starship Enterprise. “One of the advantages of being a captain, Doctor, is being able to ask for advice without necessarily having to take it.” He confided this to Bones, you know the compassionate human being, in reference to a conflicting opinion offered by Spock, you know the relentlessly logical Vulcan, seemingly devoid of any feelings at all.
In the end, imitation may be flattery, but honest, sincere, mission-guided dissent may be the highest form of loyalty in any complex organization. Good leaders welcome it, build structures that protect it and treat truth-tellers with respect, even when the truth stings. Weak leaders run from it.
And sooner or later, reality collects its debt.
Walter V. Wendler is the President of West Texas A&M University. His weekly columns are available at https://walterwendler.com/.
