F*** you! A grown-up reaction to being sacked requires rather more restraint
The second prejudice of mine says that women leaders can be every bit as aggressive and
foul-mouthed as men. Next time I hear diversity experts
spouting their customary nonsense about female executives being consensual and nurturing, I will think of Ms Bartz,
incandescent with rage, ranting "these people fucked me over".
The third principle is that honesty can be a poor strategy, especially at work. Corporate life is based on a system of deals, and observing these is generally a better idea than
speaking your mind. The deal with being CEO is that you get paid a lot to do the job, but if things don't go well, you get fired. When that happens, the deal is that you keep your mouth shut and your purse open to receive a gi-normous pay-off. You don't tell a journalist that your former board colleagues were "
doofuses". To do so might be honest, but it is also
undignified and undermines the whole system.
Indeed in Ms Bartz's e-mail to staff, the only bits that sounded good were the places where honesty took a back seat. She was evidently not "very sad" to relay the news to colleagues - she was
livid. And surely it wasn't a "pleasure" to work with "all" the Yahoo workers - I bet she didn't enjoy working with the "doofuses" at all. And did she really wish them "only the best"? Or was she praying that whoever replaces her will
make (even more of) a pig's ear out of running Yahoo than she did?
Yet she did well to fall back on these untruths: they are part of the necessary, comforting script that goes with departure. Things only started to unravel when she departed from it.
The fourth prejudice is about
swearing. I'm strongly in favour of swearing at work, but only in the right circumstances. Swearing can reduce stress, be good for bonding and for signalling that you aren't a
stuffed shirt.
However, it is always a mistake for CEOs to use the f-word in public, especially in the US and especially to a journalist. It is only ok in an interview if one is 40 years younger than Mrs Bartz and in the music business.
As well as upholding my four prejudices, the Bartz
farewell has encouraged me to adopt a new one. Sacking by phone may not be such a bad idea after all.
Until last week, I held the standard view that it's best to fire someone face to face as it shows more respect and so on. But now I'm thinking the chairman may have done her a favour in waiting until she was on the other side of the continent and then calling to read out his legal script. Ms Bartz claims this lacked class, but I wonder if she really would have found it classier if he had looked her in the eye and said: "You're no good -
off you go."
The main benefit of being sacked over the phone (or by e-mail or text message) is that it gives the person being fired something small and uncomplicated to visit their rage upon. To work yourself up into a froth of righteous
indignation over the crass manner of the firing distracts you from the nasty, humiliating truth that you are deemed to have screwed up big time.
The only thing wrong with encouraging people to conduct sackings by phone is that it makes life much too easy for the sacker, who ought to be made to suffer, too.
But in this particular case, given Ms Bartz's devotion to honesty, swearing and to anger, I'm not so sure. If the chairman had confronted her in person, axe in hand, she could well have
wrested it from him and the play might have had an even more dramatic conclusion: everyone might have been hacked to death.
