I remember well those words spoken in a Pantene shampoo commercial back in the 1980’s. The attractive woman with the fabulous hair looked right into the camera and made the plea “Don’t hate me because I am beautiful.” That phrase became front and center once again earlier this year when UK columnist Samantha Brick wrote her article claiming that women hated her because of her beauty.
The woman in the commercial feared the envy and jealousy of others. Samantha Brick, apparently, feared the same thing. Now whether these two women were, in fact, envied by others is not important to the point I want to make. What is important is the fact that when other people are genuinely jealous or envious of another, it leads them to believe that they must tear that person down in order for them to personally get ahead, and that is certainly something to be feared; especially in the workplace.
As a CEO I saw it time and time again: An employee would start to compare themselves to a coworker. First they would try to emulate the coworker, copying the traits they admired most. When it stopped at that it would serve as a positive motivator for improved behavior and end in a positive result. Unfortunately it didn’t always stop there. Often times the person trying to emulate their coworker began to see everything as a competition. They began to see the situation as “one of us will win and one of us must lose”. Comparing themselves in this way often led them to uncut their coworker in order to ensure that they could come out victorious. Gossiping and backbiting were often tools used in the process to ensure their outcome of being crowned the “winner”.
Allowing this type of behavior in any organization is detrimental to the culture. When employees see that this behavior is accepted, or even worse, rewarded, they will ultimately make a choice to either join in with the cutthroat competition or they will walk away from their job. Either way, the company ends up as the ultimate loser. The negative culture grows larger and becomes more embedded in the organization, and the company’s reputation will spread far beyond itself, ensuring that good people will steer clear of coming on board.
How can this type of behavior be kept from infesting a company? It must start at the top. Leadership must be willing to adopt the principle that there will be no comparing or unhealthy competing against one another. Leadership must be willing to uphold this principle as well, making it possible for all the leaders to succeed together. It can’t be me against you, where one must win and one must lose. It must be an attitude of “we are in this together, and we succeed or fail together”. When leadership sets the example from the top, the employees will recognize this and follow it. If and when a bad apple gets into the bunch, leadership must be committed to removing them from the organization swiftly and without fail, sending the message that the company will not allow a cancer to grow. If the bad apple were to be tolerated or excused by leadership the entire culture would begin to crumble because employees would stop trusting them. Having leadership walk the talk is critical to protecting the company’s culture.
All of us are susceptible to becoming the bad apple if we are not careful. We live in a world where we are constantly tempted to compare ourselves to others. We live in a world where we are constantly hearing that we need to be better, smarter, wealthier, thinner, and more attractive. There is nothing wrong with striving to be the best we can be, however, there is everything wrong with holding ourselves in comparison to anyone else. The moment we stop competing with our own personal best and we start competing with someone else, we allow ourselves to get sucked into the “hating someone because they are beautiful” syndrome. We become that person who has to see and point out the negative in someone else in order to let ourselves come out ahead, because we have made it a situation where only one can win and one must lose. On the contrary, if we keep ourselves focused on becoming the best we can be, continuously competing with our own personal best, then no one else has to lose for us to come out ahead. Our focus becomes a positive one where we can be happy for other people in their own success without feeling like we are losing part of ourselves in the process. When we spend our days trying to improve our own abilities we earn our success the right way, and we get the satisfaction of knowing that we didn’t have to tear anyone else down to get ahead. We can be beautiful ourselves while appreciating the beauty in everyone around us as well, and that my friend, is a beautiful thing.
~Amy (for my daily blogs go to www.amyreesanderson.com/blog)
