Apparently there is some dispute over the accuracy of this report, but the Post is standing by it for now:
Anyway, whether or not the specific detail about eye contact is true, this is not the first time I’ve heard of a corporate head honcho entering government and making bizarre demands about how to interact with him or her.
(PLEASE DO NOT DERAIL THIS THREAD WITH ARGUMENTS OVER THE TILLERSON STORY.)
A friend of mine went to work in a federal office, and soon after the department got a new presidential appointee head (Obama appointee). This woman was a big shot from Northrop Grumman or something like that and before her first day, she had her minions distribute codes of interaction, including don’t speak unless you’re spoken to, don’t make eye contact, and strange rules about how meeting were to be run.
One rule I remember is that if you see her turn the page of her briefing book while you were speaking to her, you must stop talking immediately, even if you are in the middle of a sentence.
I’m wondering whether this is a phenomenon in high corporate circles that CEOs and other top officers set very strict and strange rules for interaction with underlings. Has anyone heard anything about this?
If you don’t want discussion centered on Sec. Tillerson, why bring him up and why use him as the reason you chose to place this in the Elections forum?
So your question is more about CEOs and what they do and not about elected officials or politics?
Do you want to engage the discussion or do you want to bicker about the these things?
The question is about public figures, in this case corporate officials who may or may not take government appointments. It is not about whether the specific story about Rex Tillerson is true. The Washington Post says it’s true, so this thread accepts as a premise that it is true.
The question is about whether this kind of thing is common among high corporate officials who may or may not serve in government. It is in this forum because the forum says it’s for discussions about “public figures.”
Hardly CEO type public figures, but many years ago (early 1990’s) I worked for the concession company at a largish arena and dealt with stocking the performer’s dressing rooms. I was the guy reading the contract and being sure the dressing room was stocked with the drinks and snacks the performer wanted.
Rarely did I actually meet the performer, but maybe about 20% of the contracts specified that menial staff such as myself should not speak to the performer unless first spoken to. None actually mentioned eye contact, as I recall, but the idea was clear that I was to take care of things without bothering them. Any questions or concerns were to be routed through a show manager or his/her designated underling, but even that was quite rare.
Supposing that CEO types are something of a celebrity within their companies, I can imagine the possibility that their time could be seriously eroded by near constant dealings with pithy and, in the grand scheme of things, unimportant communications. Let the underlings filter the communication. It is the underling’s job to make DAMN SURE that the chief is informed of anything that actually requires his/her attention.
“This is not true and people repeating it are making it more difficult to address very real issues," Lee tweeted. "
That’s two ‘MSM’ outlets disputing it. Meeting the ‘we stand by our story’ standard is IMO in any common sense experience of the veracity of the media not a reason to assume anonymously sourced stories are the whole truth. The ‘eye contact’ part was the end of a sentence referring to State Dept’s professional ranks impression that Tillerson is isolated and only really speaks to other political appointees, perhaps what Lee was referring to in ‘real issues’. Based on one of those political underlings telling a career person who tried to go around them ‘I don’t want you even making f***king eye contact with him going around me’. Who knows?
There’s no way to answer the general question if we ‘don’t get into’ whether a story is wholly true and representative. The same would be true of other stories from which we’d draw a general conclusion. How can it not matter if they are true?
IME in a job where I directly reported to a major company CEO, and besides that non-CEO’s who were paid extremely well, very successful people often have fairly big ego’s and I doubt many really truly want you to totally put out of your mind that they are the big boss. Some might make more of a pretense of supposedly wanting you to than others.
Also IME working with, though not for, govt employees they have a very different mindset typically, and it seems well accepted in general that outside political appointee bosses and govt bureaucracy lifer underlings in Washington have often had trouble getting on the same wavelength. I’m not saying the govt lifers are always the bad guys. Although I don’t think govt is very good at doing many things it doesn’t pretty much have to do, (diplomacy being one of them though). If that opinion disqualifies my observations, fine.
There is a very good reason to accept it as true—because I don’t want to use this thread to argue about it. Start another thread if that’s what you want.
I’ve offered a second example from my friend’s experience personal experience. Take that as true, regardless of what you think of the Tillerson story. I mention it merely because it triggered my memory and serves as an illustration of the behavior under discussion.
I’ve said it three times now and I now consider it threadshitting. Please drop it. I will report it to mods if I have the day it a fourth time.
I don’t pretend to be most familiar with rules and customs of the forum, but if mods have a problem with me (and perhaps others) pointing out what I believe is basic logical problem with your position, so be it, report away and I’ll accept whatever they say.
IMO you have to have some solid evidence to predicate a discussion about something in specific terms like ‘royal deference’, ‘no eye contact’ etc. You have a disputed media story, and an unnamed friend’s account of an unnamed Obama admin official.
I’m also generally not inclined toward the idea of other random web posters telling me what to say if I’m not being insulting, personal, obscene, etc. which I have not been. You can not read my posts if you don’t like them. There’s really no personal offence intended.
The custom is that if the OP makes a request to exclude things from a thread (such as spoilers, for example) then it’s considered violating the “don’t be a jerk” rule to intentionally and repeatedly refuse to abide by that request.
That’s an interesting point, but my understanding is that psychopaths can be very charming and persuasive in order to get what they want. It seems contradictory to the idea of setting down a set of rules to distance yourself fro everyone around you in this way. It, in fact, seems like something that someone without good social skills would do, rather than a psychopath.
The signs and symptoms of psychopathy are identified most commonly in scientific studies by Hare’s 20-item Psychopathy Checklist-Revised. This checklist identifies the following as the symptoms and signs of psychopathy:
Superficial charm and glibness
Inflated sense of self-worth
Constant need for stimulation
Lying pathologically
Conning others; being manipulative
Lack of remorse or guilt
Shallow emotions
Callousness; lack of empathy
Using others (a parasitic lifestyle)
Poor control over behavior
Promiscuous sexual behavior
Behavioral problems early in life
Lack of realistic, long-term goals
Being impulsive
Being irresponsible
Blaming others and refusing to accept responsibility
Having several marital relationships
Delinquency when young
Revocation of conditional release
Criminal acts in several realms (criminal versatility)
seriously, though, psychopaths consider anyone who doesnt have something that directly benefits them(the psychopath) as irrelevant. And they consider themselves smarter than everyone, so those who are irrelevant can be an annoyance and hindrance if they are not properly controlled.
It’s quite possible that CEOs in general may be feeling rather imperial in relation to mere workers, given the trends in that greatest of measuring rods for Self-Worth: pay.
This sort of thing can and does lead human beings to see themselves differently; the business leader making only twenty times what his workers make will have (on average) a different way of interacting with them than will the CEO making a pharaoh-like 2000 times as much as his workers–
People at the top of companies who start thinking of themselves as irreplaceable godlike figures, won’t want to be bothered by having to deal with the eye-contact of peons.
I’d say by general standards you are unquestionably the one violating the ‘don’t be a jerk’ rule. If it’s really so different here, I’d like to hear that from somebody besides you.
You might theorize that. Or you might theorize the opposite, that very high pay would serve as the affirmation of self-worth that would otherwise manifest in wanting other trappings of grandeur like leave to push underlings around to show dominance. Or they might be independent things.
I still find the topic hard to get my head around in the absence of an actual direct and undisputed factual example, let alone a series of them. And even such a series would have to be compared with say how regular a guy (still mostly guys, then almost all were) a typical US CEO of the halcyon* 1950’s really was.
*in respect of very high incomes relative to average ones, or nominally high marginal tax rates (through with more loopholes than now), for which people of a certain political POV have nostalgia, though for other characteristics of society and economy it can be people on the other end of the spectrum who long for the 50’s. Anyway the world changes. It’s not at all apparent IMO how ‘we’ would reduce high comp relative to the average or median without doing more harm than good (noting that the balloon can just expand otherwise if you target solely heads of public stock companies, economic entities don’t have to organize themselves that way). Although if that magically happened, today’s populist right would perhaps be as happy about it as the left, and it would be no skin off my nose either though I don’t care that much either way. But it’s not going to happen, IMO. I wonder if, accepting that reality (again as I see it, though others might not), one would be as likely to spin a yarn of how very high pay makes CEO’s act more personally imperiously. Seems wholly speculative.
My experience is exclusively with Silicon Valley corporations, and having interacted with a dozen or so CEOs over the years, I have never encountered any “rules of behavior” being given to underlings. But then SV is notorious for a more egalitarian workplace environment.
I am closing this thread because it already has multiple (acrimonious) discussions that do not even relate to the OP, some belonging in ATMB, and we have not even hit 20 responses.
Acsenray, this is not a topic ban. Feel free to open the discussion in a new thread, keeping in mind the following suggestions:
If you want to debate whether (some/all?) CEOs routinely regard themselves as imperial personages, open the thread in Great Debates with multiple citations for support.
If you are looking for anecdotes that some or all CEOs regard themselves too highly, open the thread in IMHO or MPSIMS.
