I used to say that the secret to success is not wanting it. A wise older colleague at my first “real” job shared this insight with me and I lived by for almost two decades. I feel that it was actually a big part of achieving the success I achieved in the corporate world. It’s not that I didn’t want to be successful in the general sense (that is, I didn’t want to be a failure), but I didn’t aspire to any particular position or achievement. I simply tried to “add value” and (lucky for me) my efforts were generally recognized, acknowledged, and rewarded (I realize this doesn’t happen for everyone who brings value to their organizations). I trusted that if I did what I thought was a good job that everything else would take care of itself. I never thought about leaving my company to pursue a higher level position or a higher salary, which is a common strategy among corporate career ladder climbers, even when others advised me to do so and even when I didn’t see a “next step” clearly in front of me. I just found things to do that I thought would be interesting and add value, and did them. I happily accepted promotions and raises when they were offered, but I never asked for them, set my hopes or expectations on them, or judged my sense of self worth by them (though I may have if I hadn’t gotten them).
As I rose higher in the organization, I developed a passion for leadership and people management. I started to care much more about being a good manager than about the work my team was responsible for. I found that this worked quite well; the more I focused on being a good leader, the better my team “performed” with their work. (I have come to recoil at our obsession with the idea of getting “performance” out of people and measuring the value of people by our subjective judgment of their “performance”, which is why I now use air quotes around the word).
While I think I became a good manager, and earnestly tried to do right by the people in my organization, there was always an abstract detachment to how I approached my work, the way I imagine a surgeon views a patient - focusing in on the technical details of the operation without thinking about the patent’s family, how they must be feeling, the impact of the surgery on the patient’s life, and so forth. All that might distract the surgeon from the task at hand.
As I became more and more senior in the organization, and spent more time with executives, the more I began to realize that detachment is a key ingredient in corporate success. The ultimate goal in business is to make money (absurd amounts of money in many cases), and if leaders get too passionate about anything other than that, they tend to get “derailed”. (The idea of “derailment” is another bizarre corporate concept, as if we are all on train tracks that lead to a specific destination, and if we make a mistake our train will fall off the tracks and we’ll be stranded there, in the middle of nowhere, left to rot).
Thinking about this from the autistic perspective, I’m realizing that my autistic characteristics may have helped me with my career rise. It’s easy for me to focus on processes rather than on people, to compartmentalize the work of leadership into different types of tasks, and to dive into those tasks with a fascination that helps me focus and push forward. I’m not easily distracted by how other people feel, or even by potential unintended consequences of my work. I developed the ability to make hard decisions because I could focus clearly on what was “best for the business” regardless of any other factors (such as, is it good for the employees? The customers? The community?). The more “tough” decisions I made (like laying people off, restructuring projects, or driving significant change efforts in the work people do), the more I was rewarded.
I used to say “not wanting it” was the secret to success, but I began to realize that “not caring” was a better way to say it. I found that the more you care about your work and the impact it has, the harder it is to get ahead. When I first articulated this to myself, it didn't bother me. I didn’t think any real harm was being done, and I figured that if the system is there, and if somehow I found my way to benefiting from the system, then I might as well take advantage of it. But I knew deep down that this was not the best way to think about the situation.
A few months before the pandemic hit, an employee on my team died. I didn’t know the person well (they were several levels down in the organization), but I had had several conversations with them, appreciated their perspective, and especially appreciated how they would challenge me to think differently, especially in regards to the wellbeing of employees and how external events impact people’s ability to manage their work. It’s not that I was a callous person, or a completely cold, unemotional person. I was simply always able to separate my feelings from my work, and I assumed everyone else could do the same. When this person died, something changed.
I cried while holding an all hands meeting (over video conference) for the three hundred employees in my group, when I suggested we take a moment to remember our lost colleague. I couldn’t get the words out. I just choked up and started crying. I couldn’t talk, I just had to sit and wait for the tears to pass, while hundreds of people watched, and then try to continue with other topics. I am not a crier. Even when people close to me experience great sadness, or even when someone dies, I don’t cry. I just accept that this is what has happened and think about where we go from here. But something changed when this person died, this person that I didn’t really know, and whose death would have no tangible impact on my life in any way.
The death was hard to understand. There was no explanation, no obvious cause. My mind immediately went to suicide. Had they killed themselves? Why did I think that? There was something about this person. They were in late middle age, and I knew they had lived alone (which probably conjured some stereotypes in me). When I saw them on video calls their house looked sad to me. They would do the calls from the kitchen, the counters and sink in the background piled with dirty dishes. They were a bit overweight, which conjured more stereotypes in my head. They reminded me a bit of myself - not who I am now, but who I was when I was younger. I used to live in this marginalized space on the fringes of social acceptance. I didn’t conform to how people were meant to dress, speak, or participate, and I felt very rejected for being different. I was projecting this onto the dead person, which I have no right to do and which isn’t fair to them. I was assuming that they were rejected and marginalized, that they had lived their whole lives the way I lived in my late teens and early twenties. Thank god I learned how to be normal, I thought. Otherwise would I have killed myself?
I didn’t think any of these thoughts consciously at the time. All I knew in the weeks and months after the death of this employee is that I was reacting differently than I would have thought. Then the pandemic came. And I found that the thing I was worried about more than anything was how people were doing. I was experiencing challenges that I hadn’t experienced before. The loss of daycare for our toddler, the loss of eating out, the loss of all the things that made up the life that I thought was so successful. But did any of that stuff really matter? Did I really care about all the aspects of life that involved other people? If anything, I was relieved at the indefinite suspension of social obligations and expectations, especially around work. No more travel. No more crowded planes, noisy hotels, disruptions to my routine, trouble finding food I enjoy. And most of all, no more meaningless, awkward, and prolonged social encounters with colleagues.
But the loss of daycare - that was a real hardship. That’s what made me empathetic towards others. That’s what made me care. The more my wife and I tried to struggle through two busy full time jobs and spending time with our energetic three year old daughter, the more I realized others had many more challenges than we did. We just have one kid, we live in a safe neighborhood, we’re wealthy, and we have highly flexible jobs. There were people in my organization who lived in much smaller places, with much bigger families, and who had a lot less flexibility than I did (to say nothing of people who don’t have the luxury of working a corporate job that enables work from home, flexibility, and support). How are they going to do it? I thought. How are they making it day by day?
Over the first weeks and months of the pandemic, I put the majority of my focus into expressing empathy and support for my employees as human beings. At first, I did this because I felt like I should do it. I felt like “this is what a good leader would do”. The way I have generally navigated my career (my whole life really) is to try to read about or observe what others would do in a given situation and then to copy that. But this time was different; I found the more I expressed my empathy, the more empathetic I felt. The more I expressed care and support, the more I really cared.
And then the police in my city, the place I’ve called home for most of my adult life, murdered George Floyd. It was the latest in a long line of Black and Brown people being murdered by our police department. At first, I reacted the same way I have reacted to all of these killings. I was outraged in my head, I thought about how corrupt and systemically inflicted the police department was, and I went on with my life (such as it was in May of 2020). But when people took to the streets, I knew something was changing. Not just in me, but all around. As the city burned, as the rule of law seemed to disappear overnight, as the panic and helplessness and outrage set in among the citizens and government officials alike, I realized both how fragile our society is, how loosely it hangs together by a very fine piece of thread, and how much bullshit we all accept in our daily lives.
Government officials so clearly made their first priority self preservation rather than ensuring the best interests of our citizens. Their actions and words were calculated to try to appease the rioting masses while reassuring the pillars of the status quo. They promised change and reform in ways that would allow them to say the words without taking any meaningful action. I didn’t understand - why wouldn’t we want to reform a broken system? Why wouldn’t we want to fix blatant injustice? Because too many people are happy with the system as it is, and the system’s primary purpose is to maintain itself. The people who were in the streets were not the people the system cared about. And, they were not the people that were needed to maintain the system. Those people, the people who generated the money to feed the system, and who benefited the most from how the system worked, they all expressed empathy and support in public, but behind closed doors they worked hard to ensure no real change would ensue.
And this brought my mind back to my job in my company, where, over the years, I established myself nicely as a beneficiary, and active maintainer, of the system. Was I doing in my company the same thing the government officials were doing in our city? I started listening to Black and Indigenous colleagues. I started reading works by Black and Indigenous people. I started subscribing to Black and Indigenous owned media. I allowed myself to see the reality that had always been there but that I had always been able to avert my eyes to. I started to really care.
“I’m worried about you,” my boss told me in a one-on-one video meeting. We’d been working together for a long time - well over a decade - but we didn’t really know each other beyond the surface we scratched at work. We traveled together, we drank together, we ate meals together, all for the sake of accomplishing some goal for the business. We had a sense of each other, but only to the extent that we allowed our colleagues to see us as people. I nodded at my boss’s observation.
“I’m thinking a lot about people,” I said.
“I can see that,” he replied. We looked at each other for a few moments before he said, “I think it’s hurting you.”
My boss cared about me. He really cared about me - in a way. He wanted me to be successful. He wanted me to continue my rise in the organization, taking on more responsibility, getting more money, and helping the company achieve its goals. He didn’t want me to get “derailed” by caring about people to the extent that it would impede me from carrying out my job in the normal way. I don’t think he would articulate it like this, but that is my sense of it. And I knew he was right - if I wanted to continue my career trajectory I’d have to find a way to reduce the amount of caring and empathy I was feeling. I’d have to “focus on the business” and align my efforts and energy toward the things that would move the business forward. And, I felt an unusual amount of certainty that I did not want to do that. I really didn’t care about the business goals or the success of the company, I realized that what I really cared about was being a good person.
I am sure I’ve never done anything illegal, I’ve never lied, and I’ve never done anything that I think is unethical. But still, I’ve hurt people through my decisions and actions for the benefit of the business, and I’m no longer willing to do that. I do think great business leaders can put people first most of the time. But I don’t think businesses will accommodate leaders who insist on putting people first all the time. It’s not because business is somehow inherently bad or morally corrupt. It’s because achieving personal career success at the highest corporate levels, and providing the “returns” expected by our system, requires a kind of focus that doesn’t leave room for anything that is “nice to have” (like true equity for employees). It is possible to change this, but it would require systemic change that is outside the control of any company or any person, no matter how powerful their position. The nature of this system is embedded in the fabric of our society, with roots that go back to the earliest colonizers of this land. For as long as I’m still inside the system (which I am, just not on the path I was on before) I will work to change it in whatever small way I can. But ultimately, I think opting out is, at least for now, the only way to truly avoid it.