Your humanity is your legacy
You will be remembered for your humanity.
This is something that the founder of ride sharing service Uber, Travis Kalanick, realised when it was too late to do anything about the fact that he’d been sacked from his own company.
In early 2017, Uber was trapped in its own toxic culture tornado. A former employee wrote an article about the harassment she (and others) had faced, which HR and senior management refused to act on. A report in the New York Times highlighted technology that Uber was working on that was designed to deceive law enforcement.
A competitor sued the company for corporate theft and if all that wasn’t enough, Kalanick was recorded berating an Uber driver, Fawzi Kamel, in a video that went viral. In the same video he also boasted to the other people in the car about the fact that he deliberately creates a ‘hard’ working environment.
By June and in response to investor revolt, Kalanick resigned.
At that time, he was also dealing with the death of his mother in an accident which also saw his father seriously injured. During his leave of absence to care for his father, Kalanick penned a 2,000-word note to himself (which was published by Gizmodo - read it here) about the crisis and what he would do differently if he had his time again.
The letter is a fascinating insight into his way of thinking and working, and contains some degree of regret for the toxic culture that he himself created. One set of comments particularly stood out for me.
Kalanick said, ‘I put growing our business ahead of properly scaling our internal culture and organization.’ ‘I favoured logic over empathy, when sometimes it’s more important to show you care than to prove you’re right,’ and finally, ‘I focused on getting the right individuals to build Uber, without doing enough to ensure we’re building the right kind of teams.’
This kind of thinking and behaviour is not unique to Kalanick; it may be prevalent in your organization right now and the people who can fix it and become catalysts for change are those at the top.
Employees will forget what leaders said or did, but they will never forget their humanity, compassion, empathy and the lengths that they went to, to create a safe working environment where good people can thrive.
It’s never too late to be a good human and to avoid the regret of not building a culture that people were proud to be a part of.
