The ‘Flip Side’ of Mr. Naysayer

After last week’s post I received an email from a reader who had a suggestion:

You need to write about the “flip side” of Mr. Naysayer.

Her rationale?

I once had a job where I became the Mr. Naysayer. It was uncomfortable for me — uncomfortable for all around me — and it was a question of conscience. Eventually, I just left the company. A year and a half later, the company was gone.

The problem? A seagull manager arrived. He was brilliant. Unfortunately, he was a Harvard MBA type who did not know anything of the company, the industry, the technology, etc., and came in and started destroying things wholesale. He got rid of many long-term knowledgeable employees, replaced them with his own house pets who also did not know the industry, the technology, etc. He collected his bonus money and was gone quickly and the company was never quite able to put itself back together. While he was with the company, he destroyed a lot of people’s careers, self-confidence, etc., and it took some of them years to get back to pre-Seagull days. Of course his actions ultimately severely disrupted the lives of over 500 people.

If this manager had not been dishonest, unethical, and immoral, he could have done wondrous things. He was brilliant. He had a lot to teach all of us. He didn’t do so, of course, except in negative ways. Twenty odd years later many of us still use him as our model of how NOT do do things. We use his name as a “shorthand” in much the same way names like Scrooge, Shylock, Murdoch, etc., have become shorthand for a whole raft of behaviors . . . In retrospect, some of those other members of the team have said that they just did not dare “say no.” Frankly, I wondered at the time why I survived when so many others didn’t survive — perhaps he was afraid of getting rid of me? Who knows. But it is a place I never want to be again.

It’s apparent from her description that she felt compelled to be a naysayer to combat a CEO whom she believed was not only unethical, but was also ruining the company.

Let me be clear, there’s a big difference between fighting for what you believe in, regardless of how you must do it, and the Mr. Naysayer I was referring to in last week’s column.

My Mr. Naysayer is the person who disagrees with everyone, not in an effort to improve things, but because he believes he’s the only one with the answers. He is smarter than everyone in the room and has no interest in hearing what others have to say. He shouts his colleagues down publicly to demonstrate his superiority.

This reader became a naysayer out of necessity. She was trying to fight a CEO run amuck, and the way she did it was to do her best to stand in the way of his disastrous decisions. That’s a very different type of naysaying than what I was describing. The roadblocks she was throwing up were meant to avoid a disaster, not to demonstrate superiority.

Companies need people like our reader — employees who are willing to stand up for what they think is right, people willing to fight for what they believe in, and, ultimately, those who are prepared to quit before compromising their own beliefs and ethics.

I applaud this reader for her willingness to take on someone at the top she believed was ruining the company she worked for and for leaving instead of compromising her ideals. Neither is an easy thing to do, and both take real strength of character. I don’t consider what she did as being a naysayer. She was a committed employee willing to fight for what she believed in.