​I taught college composition for decades and long preached that clarity trumps everything—grammar, mechanics, style, everything. If you strive first to be understood, you need to spit out your gum and embrace clarity. Once you do that, all the other elements of communication tend to fall in line in support of the goal of making yourself understood.

This concept is particularly important to grasp when attempting to communicate in the workplace, which can be a dicey affair on the best day. Therefore, it behooves the good boss to spit out the gum and to communicate as clearly as possible. And what could be clearer than transparency?

Unless your work environment demands security clearances or requires knowledge of super-secret recipes, transparency in leadership is a vital tool for building a healthy workplace. But you may be thinking, transparency sure can be mighty hard. After all, if you aren’t transparent enough, all folks see are the flecks of dirt, the smudges, and the thin film of filth that coats the surface. If you are too transparent, why then you are liable to have a bird fly right into you. What is a boss to do?

The simple fact of the matter is that every leadership action has consequences, and those consequences are felt by employees and clients even when the original action had been concealed. In other words, sooner or later, in one way or another, transparent or not, the truth will usually out. Better to be in front of it rather than constantly trailing behind.

​As counterintuitive as it may seem, transparency is the art of visibility. Transparency has to do with candor and openness, and a transparent leader will habitually seek to keep employees up-to-date and aware of circumstances and how they inform decision making. Truly transparent leaders do not distinguish between good and bad news, major or minor facts, or anything in between when sharing information. As with writing or any form of communication, the goal is to be apparent, easy to read, visible.

A transparent boss leads with forthright candor on the assumption that most professionals would prefer the freedom of knowing even bad news over blissful ignorance. Furthermore, an informed employee is an empowered employee, and the price of that empowerment is accountability, which is an easy bargain. In my experience with overseeing transparent and accountable workplaces, true professionals really do want to deliver more while being held to higher standards. 

Transparent leaders stand out for their straight-forward honesty, not wanting to conceal either news or themselves from colleagues and employees. Practicing such transparency reduces the element of surprise and its disruptive potential. It also signals to employees that they are valued and trusted enough to share in news. Finally, it helps to motivate employees because an informed employee will have a better sense of workplace goals and will be able to enjoy more autonomy.

​The transparent leader will face some challenges, the first being the most obvious. True transparency will make you more susceptible to criticism and attacks—it’s the cost of honesty. Some boors imagine that vulnerability in a leader is a sign of weakness, that to be vulnerable is to be meek and ineffectual, but the opposite is true. To purposely render oneself vulnerable requires courage, mettle, and resilience and and will increase inner strength. By contrast, in my experience leaders who practice opacity often act as though they have a license to bully even as they cower behind bureaucratic hierarchies and sycophantic underlings. Certainly, willful opacity is the last refuge of cowards.

Another, far thornier challenge is that the transparent leader can never be transparent enough. In other words, no matter how open and candid you attempt to be, no matter how forthrightly you hold yourself, there will always be something you hold back. Perhaps you withhold something that is not fit for general consumption, such as a sensitive personnel action. More often though, it is just something you overlooked or just plain forgot because you thought it trivial or figured it was already known. Worse still, the more transparent you attempt to be, the likelier someone will call you out for a matter you did not reveal. That said, I find that within a culture of forthright candor, explaining that certain information is sensitive or simply acknowledging an honest oversight will mollify most detractors, at least the reasonable ones, and the unreasonable ones will likely remain miserable no matter what you do.

On the other hand, if you claim to be transparent but purposely withhold non-sensitive information or cover up oversights, your employees will simply mistrust you. You would be better off choosing opacity over outright deception although the distinction tends to blur over time.

Leaders who default to forthright candor and openness will likely find their workplaces less aggrieved and more productive, particularly if they also seek to develop a culture of “yes.” In addition, they will earn political capital and increase their mettle and will find themselves better able to face challenges alongside their employees rather than in opposition to them. 

So, spit out your gum and communicate clearly and openly by embracing a philosophy of forthright candor and maximum transparency as you develop a culture of “yes.” Empowering your people this way will free you from the burden of constant guardedness and will transform your workplace for the better.

It is not enough to do good. Let me repeat that. Doing good is not enough. Many people do some good in this world, by which I mean achieve some positive outcome, but too often we achieve that outcome by doing bad, which is not good enough.

Yes, this is a piece about how the ends almost never justify the means spiced up with a dash of the Golden Rule.

To start, I will readily concede that sometimes the ends may indeed justify the means. But rarely. If we agree that killing people is bad, we may still conclude that killing a bad person before they can harm an innocent is okay. Great. That is a pretty exotic scenario, though. More commonly, you may have experiences where you determine that being mean or loud or harsh or blunt or rude or even flagrantly dishonest will achieve your positive end, but doing so begs key questions: Is the choice to behave badly worth it? Is it the only or even the best option for achieving that good end?

And don’t rationalize. It is all too easy for us humans to rationalize doing bad when the outcome is positive even though we have made no exertion of  integrity. 

After all, while much good in this world has come from those who seek laudable goals such as freedom, truth, virtue, progress, and even love, how many atrocities have been committed in the pursuit of freedom, truth, virtue, progress, and even love?

​To help us along, here is a three-part test for determining just when the ends justify the means. All three standards must be met in order to pass the test.
First, is the outcome truly good? 

Second, does the good of the outcome completely offset the bad of the means, including foreseeable repercussions​?

Third, if the outcome both is truly good and absolutely offsets any bad associated with the means, can you be sure that there was no other reasonable way of achieving your purpose?

​Failing to meet any one of these three admittedly lofty bars is enough to sink the integrity of the whole project and you must conclude that the ends do not justify the means.

These sorts of dilemmas come up all the time for mission-driven organizations. Assuming that your mission is truly good (the first test), what negative or harmful means are allowable for you to achieve that good? Hopefully none, but for some reason that conclusion seems perpetually out of reach for so many decision-makers and organizations.

As I have mentioned numerous times, I spent decades in higher education as a faculty member and as an academic administrator. Every institution of higher education, no matter its type or size, is exceedingly complex and has a tremendous impact on its students, its staff, their families, and the community. Therefore, the brand of moral dilemma I sketched comes up all the time. In my experience, though, rarely is that three-part test applied in any rigorous or honest way. I certainly failed to apply it many times myself in decisions both large and small. To make matters worse, the complexity of many scenarios sometimes can obscure the ramifications.

From that experience I learned that it is all too easy to convince oneself that because the overall mission of the institution is good, the actions of the institution in pursuit of that mission must also be good. Sadly, that is infrequently the case. I have seen administrators and faculty rationalize away all sorts of egregious behavior by assuming that since the first test is met (that the outcome is truly good), the other two tests may be waived. 
​

​Here is a rule of thumb for visionary, beneficent, and mission-driven organizations to apply to help avoid such pitfalls: 

Not following this rule is tantamount to instant and de facto failure.

If your mission is to educate students to be successful in life while upholding ethical and professional standards (a common intention in university mission statements), then do so throughout the institution. Treat students, faculty, and staff they way you expect your graduates to treat others. This is golden-rule-level stuff here as well as plain good educational modeling.

The same is true for any mission-driven organization. Consider your mission. Ask yourself, what does it mean? What does it really mean? What are its implications? What assumptions does it make about ethics and behavior? Does your organization live up to those standards every day and in everything? Do you?

Of course not. We all screw up. But do you habitually correct course when you are astray and then learn from your errors, or do you just thinkingly or unthinkingly rationalize flaws away, thus compounding  or repeating them? 

If your organization strives to achieve some standard of human decency for your clients or society, a broad goal of many nonprofits whatever the specifics, do you apply that same standard to how you treat your workforce? Do you tolerate and rationalize low pay or a stringent work culture because you think the good you do for clients offsets it (test 2)? Is there another way (test 3)? And, please, never assume the answer is no because of past practice, culture, or (shudder) tradition.

I offer another rule of thumb: 

​None of what I have written here is simply to apply.

To summarize:
The ends do not justify the means except when they do, which is not very often yet does happen although so infrequently that you probably should doubt yourself when it does but not every time, so it is best to just not look for it.

See? Easy-peazy.

As a public service, I offer here an algorithmic take on my three-part test:
1. Is the end truly good? 

2. Does the good of the end offset or overmatch the harm of the means?

3. Is there any other way to minimize harm while still achieving the end?

Applying this test to every decision that involves a moral or ethical dimension (and don’t they all?) sounds like a lot, but it quickly can become a habit. Two more rules of thumb may help:

It is great to do good. Please, keep doing good, but be very sure you are doing good the right way. Otherwise, what is the point?

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​In my last post, I described an alternative conception of US higher education that supplants the current thinking of the student-as-customer and the problems it engenders. I proposed that we should abandon that model for one that promotes the individual student as a consumer with society as a whole being the customer. This new paradigm merges the best of the traditional view of higher education as a meritocracy to improve society and the trending view of higher education as merely a private benefit for student careers. It also identifies the college mission as the product each institution must deliver to society.

I further suggested that this new paradigm can offer insights into most mission-driven organizational systems.
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This one should be pretty apparent. Your mission is a purpose as viewed through the lens of your organization’s values. It is what you are trying to produce or to deliver on. It keeps you centered and on track and, deployed wisely, it can be a strong incentive for both staff and leadership.

If you were a carmaker, your product would presumably be cars. But in that for-profit world, where the main value is to make money by making cars, if the same company could make money by doing something else, such as floating car loans or manufacturing buggy whips, then those would be viable options for production and profit too.

If “product” is too concrete, think of your mission then as a process or service. Whatever the analogy, your mission is both the purpose and the overarching desired outcome of your organization.

In the mission-driven and nonprofit world, the focus should largely be on the mission. If your mission is to support developmentally disabled kids, then that is what you do. You cannot get sidetracked by a sudden impulse to start a food bank no matter how altruistic and beneficial doing so may be—at least not without considerably altering the scope of your mission and your organizational structure.
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Just as students are a college’s principal consumers, your clients, the people and organizations you directly provide services to and/or support, are your consumers, not your customers.

So what is the difference? In the for-profit world, a customer is an individual who buys or receives a product or service; in the case of nonprofits, this would be whatever good or service fulfills the mission. With for-profits, the consumer is an individual who directly uses the product and is often one-and-the-same with the customer who makes the purchase. It is similar for nonprofits although the consumer and customer are more often separate. In many cases, the mission itself is to supply some good and/or service to clients who are not paying for that service, at least not at market value. Consequently, they consume (literally or figuratively) the goods and/or service you provide.

For instance, if the mission of your organization is to develop and provide studio space to up-and-coming artists, those artists become the consumers of whatever space and assistance you offer. This holds true even if you charge a reduced or at-cost rent. If they were clients in a purely transactional relationship in which you offer the space at an undiscounted or unsubsidized market rate, you would just be a commercial realtor. Another example: If your mission is to support a particular political cause by producing studies in line with your position, those who read and apply those studies are your consumers.
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​At its simplest, the customer is that individual who pays you to deliver your product. For nonprofits and mission-driven organizations, this would be society itself, which, one way or another, is paying you to fulfill your mission. The payment could be through direct donations, foundation grants, government entities, or some other source. The relationship here is evidently transactional, but, just as with higher education, the idea is that your mission (product) is transformational.

Mission-driven organizations presumably serve a higher cause by adding value to society. In some cases the service to clients will directly benefit society, such as supporting economic development or promoting beautification or conserving land. In such cases, the consumer and the customer overlap or blend. Consider, if your nonprofit mission is to promote a political point of view, the very act of doing so would, in accord with your convictions, advance society. Your political opponents, though, may differ on that assumption.

More frequently, the service to society is indirect or cumulative, such as educating or feeding those in need or expanding the reach of the arts or providing religious instruction. If you are a church, your direct reach only extends as far as your congregation or the recipients of your charity, but presumably you intend the value to your individual constituents will extend through them to improve society in part or whole.

Of course, the societal improvements envisioned would be peculiar to each organization and its mission, and such improvement is in the eye of the beholder.
​

​As in my example from higher ed in Part 1, these distinctions matter. When in the past the focus of US higher ed was heavily on the mission as a transcendental aspiration and on the claim that higher ed was primarily a meritocracy that inherently benefitted society, students tended to get lost in the sauce. When the paradigm shifted to the student-as-customer model, the focus on societal benefit faded, and the student-university relationship became much too transactional. A balanced approach, with the college mission as product, society as customer, and the student as consumer, eliminates false dichotomies and recalibrates the relationship of higher ed to its product, customer, and consumer.

This healthy model can inform all mission-driven organizations albeit with two obvious caveats:

1. Each organization and its functions are distinctive, so the precise balance of the relationship to product, customer, and consumer will vary.
2. All analogies such as the one I am promoting are merely aids to understanding and are imperfect comparisons, not literal one-to-one formulas.

Nonetheless, considering your mission-driven organization in these terms can help you grasp its overall purpose while reconceptualizing and balancing the relations among its functions. Shifting emphasis to one area does not necessarily mean shifting focus away from another so long as their interdependence is understood. Assuring that the mission (product) is paramount does not warrant neglecting clients (consumers) or the overriding contribution of your organization to society (customer). Nor does it mean that focusing on the mission overrides organizational concerns, such as treating staff with the same dignity you seek for your clients. Doing good starts at home.

The relationship I describe deemphasizes the transactional and, when properly appreciated and calibrated, can guide your organization to be appropriately and powerfully transformational.

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​Every organization needs to understand how its processes function, but in the world of nonprofits and other mission-driven organizations it can be difficult to maintain perspective on how that works exactly. What are the most important pieces of the operation, and how do they perform together? How do you maintain transactional relationships while fulfilling a transformational mission? Developments in nonprofit higher education in the US may offer insight.

For decades now, nonprofit and public higher education has endured an ongoing paradigm shift that reimagines students as customers. This shift ostensibly offers some considerable improvements over older models that assumed college to be primarily a meritocracy, such as a focus on providing students more access to college services to help assure their success. In practice, though, it has tended to displace the focus on academic matters in favor of concerns about student satisfaction, with decidedly mixed results. It also has contributed to more intensive attention to college marketing and pricing, which in turn contributes to a trend of students making initial college selections or even transferring from school to school in search of the best deals and not necessarily the best fit. 

While finances are critically important, of course, and have always played a role in the choice of college or whether to go to college at all, decisions based solely or largely on fiscal anxiety seldom benefit students in the long run. Nonetheless, the conceptualization of college has gone from an overemphasis on academia as a transformational meritocracy to a predominantly transactional model.

Worse still, culturally and politically, this new model has recast higher ed primarily as being a benefit to individual college students rather than as a collective good, a perspective that is reflected in US education policy. From the individual student standpoint, college pricing and costs (which are discrete considerations) have risen precipitously as government subsidies dwindle. Furthermore, this shift has wrought an epistemological crisis that arguably can be seen playing out in our politics today where speculation and fabrication hold nearly the same status as a fact-based understanding of reality. The new perception is that college no longer exists primarily to make you better informed and even smarter. College is just there to get you a better job.

Meanwhile, simply going back to the old model of higher ed as a meritocracy for the select is not a desirable option either. That system tended to treat students almost as interchangeable or even disposable commodities. The individual student’s success mattered little to an apparatus that basked in its own sense of inherent value and entitlement and touted a supposed transcendental potentiality. Under those assumptions, if you struggled as a student, you deserved to struggle. The system itself could not be at fault or offer relief. Meanwhile and in sharp contrast, the scions of the privileged class were treated as though their parentage and social stratum were merit enough to for them to succeed no matter how inept they actually were. We can see this assumption still playing out among the most elite institutions.

Therefore, we need a new paradigm. What if, as Yan Dominic Searcy, a dean at California State University, Northridge, has proposed, rather than customers or end purchasers, the students were regarded as the consumers of what the college offers? In this formulation, the student is not involved in a purely business transaction but is simply an ancillary beneficiary of a transaction that the college conducts with its real customer: society itself. While the student may still (or not) contribute tuition, the people—usually via the government—significantly funds and benefits from the individual student’s education and its contribution to the growth of an educated populace. This public funding is clearest in public higher ed, but even private nonprofit institutions do and have long received a variety of both direct and indirect government and charitable subsidies. 

​For clarity on the distinction between a consumer and a customer, you can do a simple Google search for the terms. Shockingly, dig a little deeper and you may find that there are many discussions in higher ed literature, including peer-reviewed research papers, that seem to use the terms interchangeably, which hampers full understanding of the matter within higher ed. This seems particularly the case with UK studies for some reason.

A simple way of thinking about this distinction is to consider a gift. If I purchase a mug to give to you, I am the customer (the purchaser), and you are the consumer (the end user). If I keep the mug for myself, I am both the customer and the consumer. 

Think of all the cheesy gift shops you have ever seen, particularly in tourist areas. Many of these are filled with products you would never buy for yourself but will still readily purchase to fulfill some need to return home laden with memorabilia to give others. 

Recall just about any trip you have taken to a tourist site. No doubt, you have seen store that sells mugs or other trinkets as souvenirs. Perhaps you have no need of a new mug. Perhaps you have no desire to possess a chintzy reminder of your trip. Or, perhaps the mug is just plain awful. Whatever the case, imagine that you do not want to own this particular mug. Still, at the right price, it could be a suitable gift your neighbor who has been dutifully chasing kids off your lawn while you were on vacation. Thus, you may purchase this artifact and, in so doing, become the satisfied customer. For her part, your curmudgeonly neighbor may, out of guilt, out of a love of kitsch, or out of a need for an extra beverage container, keep the item. Your neighbor is then the satisfied, or at least gratified, consumer. 

Thus, an entire industry—the cheesy tourist gift shop—exists in no small part due to this distinction between the customer who wants to buy but not own the product and the consumer who is not the buyer but is content to own it. And I bet, like me, you have no end of mugs, magnets, and other such tchotchkes from places you have never visited and never would visit cluttering up your house.

​The economic, cultural, and epistemological advantages of introducing college-educated citizens into society are evident. College is a public good even as it benefits individual students. Ergo, the old dichotomy between the public good and private benefit is and has always been false. In this formulation with the student as the college’s consumer and society as its customer, we can see that the product a college offers is in fact its very mission. Alternately, if you prefer, the mission is a process or a service offered by the institution. However you conceive it, fulfillment of the mission is the desired outcome of institutional success. Importantly, a product, be it the college mission or the souvenir mug, only has value if it benefits both the consumer and the customer. If one is not happy, the whole process is a failure. 

This new paradigm allows us to perceive the value of college education to society at large, which would serve to induce that society, via the government, to increase its support of higher education as it once did. Meanwhile, since we can then dispose of the false dichotomy between the societal benefit and the private good of higher education, individual student success can remain an important focus as students gain career and life skills—certainly the most valuable outcome from the student-as-customer model.

Furthermore, understanding this new paradigm for higher ed can inform how other mission-driven organizations regard and present themselves in the world.

No matter how much I explained that the trip leader was at the police station armed with only a flip phone and had no access to email, they would not relent in their anger at him. They were looking for someone to hang, and he would do nicely. (I don’t hesitate to point out that he is Black and they are all White.) 
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They also were furious that he had not already secured a bus to get everyone to the airport at a moment’s notice. I pointed out that even in the U.S. he would have been hard-pressed to have arranged a bus so quickly and to have it wait on-call. I also explained that, although the Tambo airport was only thirty miles away, it is a large and difficult airport to navigate, that it often had long lines, and that clearance to fly to the States included individual pat-downs of every passenger by security. All this delay would have to be factored into the timing of any departing flight.

The VPs were having none of it. One of them speculated that given the special circumstances, the airline would certainly suspend security checks! I just cannot make this stuff up. The three kept hammering away as I tried to reason with them and protect the trip leader. Our words grew heated. At one point, one of the VPs, the one who was afraid of flying, yelled, “You sound defensive!” To this day, I do not know how I refrained from yelling back, “And you are being highly offensive, you ignorant racist jackass!” Anyway, that’s what went screaming through my mind.

All the while, through the window I could see the camera crews outside adjusting their equipment. They were almost ready for me. The VP for communications came to the office door several times to get me ready, but the other VPs shooed her away. Eventually I realized that the only way for me to get out of this was to let the bully VPs take it out on the Black employee in South Africa. As we called his cell by speakerphone, I anticipated that they would rip right into him when he answered. Instead, they all looked at me. Cowards. They expected me to do their filthy work. 

I greeted him and then sternly but without raising my voice, chided him for neither magically arranging for a bus to appear nor somehow commandeering all the police vans and drivers in the city of Pretoria. He and I were friends, and he knew me well enough to read my tone and put on a show of indignity to make it sound good. The VPs were satisfied, or at least that is how I read their smug expressions. That deplorable task out of the way, I was free to go talk to the media now without any preparation.

Later on, when I was done with the press, I called the trip leader to apologize for my earlier sternness. He knew the players and had grasped the situation but appreciated my call nonetheless.

Fortunately, the press conference went fine—almost. For the broadcast, one TV station juxtaposed my statements with contrary claims from a lying secret source whose voice was electronically distorted (cannot make it up!), but I was later able to correct the record during a post-return press conference. The journalistic malpractice on display was astonishing. We eventually got everyone home safely albeit several days later than necessary due to delays spawned by finger-pointing tantrums. As for the bullying VPs who ambushed me, they just crawled back under their bridges to troll another day.

My first administrative position at a university was as the founding dean of a School of Humanities and Social Sciences. My education and professional background is in the humanities, so I had much to learn about the social sciences and how they relate to the humanities as I stitched two disparate academic areas together.

​For those whose have not been anointed as academic cognoscenti, the humanities are fields such as philosophy, religion, English, and often history. The social sciences consist of such fields as psychology, sociology, economics, political science, and sometimes history. This being academia, there are many other fields I could list as well as more overlaps, underlaps, interlaps, metalaps, and burlaps, but you get the idea.

Academic fields can be surprisingly territorial and unaccountably competitive. Take, for instance, the sometimes factious relationship encapsulated in the common phrases “soft sciences” and "hard sciences." The behavioral or social sciences are designated "soft" (read: inadequate, facile, insubstantial) while the natural sciences are regarded as "hard" (read: formidable, challenging, consequential). As strange as such hierarchies may seem to nonacademics, there are more. The humanities are often dismissed as not serious (read: just plain soft without even the patina of scientific hardness, mushy). Further down the pecking order, you may find the fine and performing arts, which are cast as softer still, (read: squishy). These are just some examples of the disciplinary caste system that bedevils  academia.

Despite these distinctions and hierarchies, commonalities among these fields are evident. The natural sciences and the social sciences share research methodologies and even terminology. Meanwhile, although humanistic methodologies allow for far more fluidity than do the natural and social sciences, the social sciences and humanities share a common set of questions and inferences regarding the human experience. For their part, humanists themselves sometimes look down upon the arts as not being serious or scholarly enough even as they rely on the arts for much of their subject matter and much of their way of knowing, among other things.

Soft skills, though, involve a mastery of the plasticity of human nature while hard skills are needed to perform particular tasks in a specific field. For example, the ability to persuade would be a soft skill in the workplace while the ability to utilize a database would be a hard skill. Both skills can be learned, but soft skills can be quite slippery while hard skills are often (not always) more readily grasped. 

Importantly, despite the negative implications of the term “soft skills,” when employers are surveyed about what abilities they most value when hiring, the response invariably focuses on these very soft skills, such as communication, critical thinking, leadership, teamwork, problem-solving, creativity and on and on, with the implication that hard skills can be mastered on the job. Note that all these skills are difficult to define and yet are transferable across most professional fields. 
​​

What Are Human Tools+Paradigms?

I prefer to think of soft skills as “human skills" or “human tools and paradigms,” which, by a wild coincidence, is almost the title of this very blog, where I develop and offer a kit of tools and paradigms for leaders to understand their organization’s mission, their employees, their colleagues, and their role in the whole scheme. My essays don’t simply recite and describe the skills that need to be mastered. For that, just Google "soft skills" to get lists of "The 7 Soft Skills," "The Top 10 Soft Skills," or the 120 soft skills. Each of the tools and paradigms I elucidate, being rather challenging, demand contemplation, analysis, and sometimes demystification.
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It did not take long for the committees to get their acts together and change their mindsets. Faculty and students who needed funding for travel, study, equipment, books, and so on were able to access what was available while the committees balanced oversight and equity with minimized friction. Committee members made decisions strictly on the merits of the applications and did not penalize for petty errors. We had to have deadlines, but we also had provisions for retroactive decisions where necessary. The default position shifted so that the committees understood their charge was to distribute funds, not to horde them. In other words, I convinced them to always start with yes, one of my core principles.

In the process, I learned something about the nature of arbitrary decision-making. Lurking on the extreme edges of the old system were two enemies of equity. On one side, was my predecessor’s reputed predilection for handing out funds pretty much upon request with scant discernment. On the other was an overly bureaucratized committee system that did not allow for uncertainty.
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I came to embrace a truth that has guided my building of processes and systems ever since. Higher ed, like most industries, is rife with laments about the unwarranted impositions of bureaucracy, and rightly so. Bloated bureaucracies, with their proscriptive and prescriptive unreason--the proverbial red tape--can be oppressive. 

Nonetheless, I learned that the enemy of efficiency is not bureaucracy, per se. Nor is the enemy the executive officer who directs activities with few checks (even while cutting a few checks). The true enemy of efficiency is the arbitrariness that invariably accompanies extremes of overly bureaucratized or overly capricious administration. No matter the size of the organization, the governance system needs to be carefully calibrated to be both benign and helpful in order to eliminate the inequity and arbitrariness of both extreme bureaucracy and extreme capriciousness. The task of a system-builder and leader is to find that sweet spot in the middle, build upon it, and maintain it.

Having control of bags o' money may sound swell, and it really is, but relinquishing control to a rational process is even sweller.

​Is it ever okay for a boss to yell at employees?

I am not talking about being stern or raising one’s voice. I mean yelling, as in flat-out screaming as an expression of anger and an attempt to exert control. Again, I am not referencing a slightly elevated volume or even harsh language. I am not speaking about stern looks or flinty expressions of disappointment or ire. This essay is about bosses who just yell.

​Take this instance of what I mean. I once had a boss blast me with the insult "I hate your words!" She then ripped into me so loudly that someone across the hall closed the office door. That is what I am talking about. Nasty, malicious shouting unleashed to silence, insult, or mortify an employee. By the way, I still have no idea what I said that set her off. She was just bonkers.

No.

Of course, with all things management, there is a nuance to unpack. Some yelling may be appropriate or even necessary, but very rarely and only in very narrow circumstances. I can imagine scenarios where an employee is acting out in public or screaming at a colleague or  colleagues are screaming at each other and only the boss’s raised voice will halt the tirade. I can imagine these scenarios because I have lived them and had to, as a boss, loudly intervene myself. I had to noisily assert my authority to stop the shouting and then set about assuring that a more civil tone would prevail. Such things happen. If they happen often, they are a symptom of a larger problem. Whatever the cause, though, yelling should lurk at the very bottom of the boss's well-supplied tool chest.

A boss who yells purely in anger or animus, even if infrequently, is out of line, plain and simple. Yelling may provide the boss some degree of control but only temporarily. In the meantime, the humiliated employee and any witnesses will harbor a combination of fear and resentment that can gestate into raw contempt for the boss no matter how out-of-character the boss’s anger was. Unwarranted yelling is a sign of weakness. It is never more than an attempt to release frustration and exert raw power to overwhelm a subordinate. Because the employee is subordinate and usually has no ability to fight back, it is the crassest and most pathetic form of bullying and a mark of craven cruelty. A sincere, appropriately public, and well-timed apology may mitigate the resentment, but there will still be much goodwill to make up.

There is a special place in hell for bosses who yell.

​The ramifications of a boss’s bullying can be massive and long-lasting. A boss who regularly yells will create deep divisions among employees. Most will cower and comply while others will hunker down and hide. The smallest group will want to stand up to the abuse. None of these employees will have any real respect for the boss who relies on fear to lead, though, and the rupture and discord among them is a sure mark of a failure of leadership and an unhealthy workplace. Expect sinking morale, decreased productivity, and rampant turnover.

​In fact, perhaps the special place in hell that is reserved for screaming bosses is a perverse replica of the hell they produced in their own workplace. Maybe, for some of the worst, they will end up with someone just like them or even themselves as their own boss!

In "No Exit," Sartre made the point that "Hell is other people." I posit that for the particularly pusillanimous class of hell denizens, the yelling bosses, maybe the most deserved and torturous hell is just other yelling bosses.