Want to be an authentic CEO? Don’t post a crying selfie on LinkedIn

Last week we saw the backlash for a post from CEO Braden Wallake where he posted a raw Linkedin statement around layoffs, and then included a selfie — a selfie where he was crying. This is where the scales of public perception became unbalanced, moving the resolution away from empathy about his people and more towards the commercial state in which he has found himself and the personal impact it has had on him.

The truth is, the selfie looks almost satirical, and worse than that, he has the made the post about him as an attempt at emotional transparency, and not about the people being let go. Even if the intention was to show vulnerability and remorse, the optics weren’t great and his sense of what this message would convey seemed tone deaf. Andre Spicer from Bayes Business School described it as a problem with ‘bounded authenticity’, the balance of being too authentic and not authentic enough.

With the media and comments all condemning him as a narcissist I started to wonder if the same backlash would have occurred if it was a different CEO, or if the photo was shot from a different angle. We have seen CEOs navigate the complexities around having to make hard decisions and mass layoffs.

Some fail badly, as we see from viral incidents such as the leaked zoom footage of CEO Vishal Garg who let go of 900 employees in an awkward emotionally detached manner. 

There is a very fine line that one must walk as the CEO of a company, and it often goes against the usual instinct to appear authentic and relatable — it is definitely about vulnerability and empathy, yet this must equally be peppered with an unshakeable confidence that you are taking your people in the right direction. That this is the setback, not the demise.

So, what do the market, employees (both retained and lost), and social media want from their CEOs when it comes to difficult announcements? How do we show both leadership and humanity in one palatable swoop?

Expectations are, as they should be, high for a CEO. We must be able to carry the weight of financial and commercial obligation on our backs while also maintaining the sense of vision that excited people to be a part of our teams in the early days, and it never gets easier.

But empowering a culture to thrive while also dealing with financial blows from the market is tough. The laser focus on better financial performance must be met with equally progressive leadership built on transparency, equality, and an understanding that the workforce’s expectations of their employer are evolving — and then actually meeting those expectations.

Doing this while also knowing you have to let go of a percentage of your workforce must be handled in a way that communicates more than Wallake’s admission that the layoffs are due to poor decision making. It needs to show that there is a plan of getting to a place of sustainability for those who remain in the company but are now inevitably rattled. 

For many of us, COVID-19 has been economically tough. While our businesses may thrive and grow, in other areas businesses face inevitable losses — but historically building companies has always been tough and the conditions have always fluctuated.

I have made every tear-inducing mistake possible growing my company, hiring the wrong people, disappointing customers, navigating compliance issues and stakeholders.  Add to that the growing pains associated with discovering how you ran your business four years ago is not how you can run it now — the game has been upped, the stakes are higher, the talent required is different and ultimately the response to commercial conditions must mature also. 

It is unrelenting, painful and even embarrassing but it is also rewarding, empowering and purposeful — but what it is not, is about you, the CEO. 

It is about the market, it is about your people and it is about how you oscillate between nurturing and influencing the two for commercial growth. The public want to see a human CEO but they don’t want a CEO who makes the losses and the hits about them, that is when they want to see leadership. 

I feel for Braden, I have cried over poor decisions also, I don’t look good when I cry so fortunately have never been tempted to take a selfie, but I am also cognisant of the fact that doing so would imply that a difficult situation for my employees is about my feelings, not the company. It wouldn’t convey my anguish at having to make the tough decisions, it would simply suggest I expect sympathy. 

To be honest, rarely should CEOs expect sympathy. We should expect fair analysis from our boards, honest feedback when we get it wrong, and we expect a chance to show that after we take a hit, we can get it right the next time. We don’t get to act authentic, we have to be authentic and think about the people and the market, not just the impact it has on us.

Alexandra Senter is the founder and CEO of The Big Smoke Media Group.