Everything is more political these days. The C-suite and boardroom are no exception — which can make running a business more complicated.
Consider the conference call for a product launch that longtime tech executive and investor Malcolm CasSelle was on about six weeks ago.
Participants had started to get comfortable during the two-hour meeting. Talk turned to the protests engulfing many U.S. cities at the time, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.
Then a German participant with a fondness for footwear joked that he hoped sneaker stores near the Los Angeles-area company wouldn’t be looted.
“It was like hearing a record scratch,” recalls Mr. CasSelle, who was in the meeting as one of the company’s biggest investors. “Somebody said, ‘Are you saying all the protesters are looters?’”
The German participant apologized quickly. The meeting’s leader, a Black woman, moved the conversation along. But it put a damper on the rest of the call, Mr. CasSelle says. “It just hurts collaboration, because people are afraid of stepping on each other’s toes.”
Other interactions can be far more poisonous. I spoke to one top executive at a Silicon Valley startup who is barely speaking with his co-founder. Friends since childhood, the two men had long bantered about their differing political views, but the talk became more tense over the summer. Then the executive, a libertarian, went on social media to complain about nearby protests and graffiti reading “kill the rich.”
“‘Kill the rich’ is a violent statement, and I got upset with that,” he says. His cofounder accused him of being part of the problem for criticizing the protestors.
“He said to me, ‘If you vote for Trump, you’re going to blow up this company,’” the executive recalls. “This is America. I will vote for whoever the f— I want to vote for.”
Lately, the two men have communicated almost exclusively by Slack — which only works because they have clear-cut responsibilities and the company isn’t facing major strategic, operational or funding challenges.
He’s optimistic that the two will iron out their differences, but worries the business will suffer if they can’t. For now, social distancing may have bought them some time.
“The tension between us, you could cut with a knife,” he says. “I could not fathom being in close proximity with him with this thing unresolved.”
Some founders and executives have found it helpful to explicitly leave politics at the office door, including Eric Seifert, who co-founded AgentAdvice.com less than a year ago. The company helps real-estate agents pick everything from brokerage firms to software tools.
Mr. Seifert describes the company’s four founders as ranging from liberal to old-school conservative. Usually, the team is good about avoiding political comments. But in an early-September meeting, someone jokingly dismissed a question about tax planning by saying, “Well, you don’t need to worry about that, so-and-so is going to win,” Mr. Seifert recalls.
“There was an official time-out in the conversation right there.”
Simply brushing such comments off doesn’t work anymore, he’s found. “Now, it’s not something you can make light of, because some people are just so raw.”
Indeed, political tensions are so high that AgentAdvice is making politics part of the hiring process — not to screen for like-minded candidates, but to make clear that employees are expected to respect political diversity along with other differences.
“Genuine human dignity and respect is a requirement,” Mr. Seifert says. “When we all get back to the office, it has to be more collegial — you can’t have these spats to distract you unnecessarily.”
Political tension is blossoming everywhere. Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Google have battled internal dissent over how — and whether — to police political views on their services, among other issues. Meanwhile, manufacturing giant Goodyear recently found itself criticized by President Trump for prohibiting staff from wearing caps with political slogans.
It may be inevitable that politics crops up in today’s highly charged atmosphere. How much that hurts operations can come down to how corporate leaders handle conflicts themselves, says Jocelyn Kung, a CEO of the Kung Group, a consulting firm for tech-company executives.
In many cases, the best approach is to acknowledge differences while keeping disagreements civil and above-board, Ms. Kung says. “The ideal conflict zone exists somewhere in between artificial harmony or passive aggression and mean-spirited attacks.”
More formally, companies can establish places or online forums for such discussions, and enlist employees to help run them who are able to bridge differences and build trust, she says. In the long run, it may benefit the business.
“When you see organizations that have a lot of healthy debate and have ways of doing it where people aren’t threatened by it, they have more ideas,” Ms. Kung says. “People feel empowered to say and do what they really think.”