No one should ever be driven to despair because of work. That’s not to say that you won’t be (and frankly, if passion is your guide, a little despair should come naturally), but simply to say that it shouldn’t be the norm, and it certainly shouldn’t be imposed. Despair can come up a lot of ways, but professional despair – the kind that breaks departments and projects and ramps up spite – is a thing that every organization has a responsibility to manage. To do so, look to the distribution and concentration of emotional labor.
This is hard to do. Keeping an accounting of mental health is enormously challenging.
In most organizations, the angriest and most confused customers will encounter the lowest paid, least respected, and probably most overworked members of the company first. The most common frustrations accumulate and follow a confused escalation tree towards some resolution. Solutions take time of course, but complaints accumulate – rather like sewage. And rather like sewage workers, support/complaints departments, must somehow labor to clear the blockages and keep the pipes running clean.
This is certainly common in startups, where the fierceness of the learning curve is matched only by the struggle to avoid drowning. But it holds true in most organizations – consider the pressures applied to call-center jockeys at Wells Fargo to cheat customers and falsify records. None of those managers needed to commit the fraud themselves, they just needed to terrify and intimidate the people who did.
And what were those poor souls to do? They certainly couldn’t escalate their concerns. The entire hierarchy they were attached to had turned their departments into the spindly hands of thieves. Who could they turn to?
No one. The burden fell on them, and them alone.
When escalation becomes impossible, when there’s no one to escalate to (or no one willing to take responsibility), emotional labor becomes a stuck thing. Like a fatberg made of resentment and spreadsheets. Such resentment fills this space like the limits of religious faith – the failure of prayer is only apparent when starvation sets in.
As a rule, this happens because managers don’t like to get dirty. And frequently, the higher up the chain you go, the stronger the urge to resist handling shit. Most people ladder climb to get out of the muck, choosing to forget and resent (the smell is improved, even if the cost is death), rather than take responsibility. Ask around your own office – if you work in a software company, I can promise that the higher up the chain you go the less likely people are to know what it is you’re actually working on. Especially startups: startups are insecure and quick to leap at pretend talent. That’s why the upper echelons of these organizations tend to be so heavy with charming, but ultimately useless narcissists.
(Exceptions certainly exist, but I haven’t encountered many. If your organization is one, I’d love to learn more! How does a company avoid incompetence creep?)
During my own time working in software, I always wondered why is was so difficult to get senior management to take essential issues seriously; to use their clout to influence positive change. A little digging always led back to that same problem: they didn’t know what the platform was, how it worked, or who was using it. They were all too keen to throw the little guys under the bus if it meant avoiding an unpleasant phone call (I developed a real talent for eating crow on behalf of “leadership” – they appreciated it, to a point), but the biggest reason they dreaded these things is because, as a rule, they had no idea what they were talking about. As it turns out, there’s little in an MBA that actually prepares you for humans. Being friends with a hedge fund manager usually just means you know where to get coke, and not that either of you know anything about people or running things. And I was working with weed companies – all too often, they didn’t do the expected (absurdist) dance in quite the same way. Worse, stoners had a way of making things especially hard on people who counted on certain assumptions about authority.
So my advice is this: if you run a software company, grill management. See if they actually have any idea what they’re talking about. You’ll probably find its a great way of trimming unnecessary overhead. Idiots and assholes tend to climb the ladder first – people who are better with excuses than progress; people who’s only real talent is for taking credit. Steve Jobs, we should remember, was actually a creep – enabled by a culture that assumes a loudmouth with money to be in possession of virtue (consider Elon Musk – famous for taking his anxious insecurity out on subordinates at all hours).
But it could simply be that, broken creatures like we are, we tend to glob onto whoever seems to be willing to save us the trouble of thinking; when bullies meet the Dunning-Kruger effect, toadyism is sure to follow.
And most importantly, check your own ego, lest you become dependent on it, and those who would fluff it for you. Besides, done right, you can probably save yourself a bunch of overhead on leadership – if you really want to trim the fat, start at the top; protect the people that shoulder the real burden.