Stop Enabling

This is a guest post by JC Hewitt, founder of Fail Often and contributor to NYC 3.0, a new site covering startups in NYC.

Bad habits end themselves without outside support. Every alcoholic has a small network of little people keeping them running. It’s usually the romantic partner who ensures that the ne’er-do-well gets out of bed every morning for work. They keep them fed while they’re unemployed.

This extends beyond intimate relationships. Dysfunctional people often require a large hierarchy under them to function. When the drunk walks into the office hung over, there’s someone who’s willing to expend heroic efforts to cover for the lost productivity due to self-destructive habits.

Most of us have an array of vices that prevent us from achieving our full potential. The role of the enabler in a social network is to bear the toxic pain that would otherwise be felt by the irresponsible members of the tribe.

This is intensive emotional labor, and necessary to maintain malfunctioning corporations, families, and other groups.

A typical enabler casts themselves as “supportive,” playing the role of the amateur therapist or pseudo-parent. Enablers are stereotypically females, but the behavior is practiced by both genders.

Steve Jobs, for example, is well-known for his verbally abusive managerial style. In order to function, Jobs, no doubt, must vent his rage on his subordinates on a regular basis in order to maintain his psychic equilibrium.

Apple is a successful corporation, and I don’t begrudge it. Much of the success of the company has been attributed to Jobs’ leadership, and with good reason. I’ve never been impressed by Apple products, but I can respect the quality of the workmanship and the marketing mystique the company created.

The trouble in these sorts of dysfunctional systems only becomes apparent over time. It’s challenging to remember this, but the success of Apple is a recent phenomenon. Apple’s shift to a design-conscious consumer electronics firm only began with the release of the iMac in 1998. The continued success of the enterprise isn’t guaranteed, and is rather unlikely.

Look at the iPad. The immediate reaction of thousands of outside observers was to ridicule the brand name.

When you make a habit of dumping your toxic rage on your subordinates, over time, they begin to resent it. Usually, those feelings remain unconscious. Subtle rebellion creeps in. The public humiliation of Jobs following the iPad announcement seems to be the fruit of passive-aggressive rebellion from all the co-workers that Jobs has insulted over the years.

To a certain extent, we all have bad habits. Some of these are more virulent than others. Striving to eliminate all of our self-harming tendencies can be a life-long task that most of us have no time for.

Yes, you should quit heroin if you’re an addict, but the energy that you’d need to expend to become a tee-totaler that never eats cookies or watches TV and only eats a diet of protein powder, vitamins and flavored air might be more intensive than it would be worth.

However, there are some habits that you must excise from your personality if you’ve ambition. While accruing a network of sycophants can be a profitable survival strategy, it’s fraught with long-term risk, and typically results in profound misery.

Like Lindsay Lohan. Or Josef Stalin. He died in 1953, surrounded by his lackies, after living decades in stupendous luxury, successfully getting away with the murders of millions of people, lauded by a terrified population. He was perhaps the most successful Machivellian ever.

He was also unhappy, unloved, and perpetually wracked with violent moods of fear and loathing.

Lifestyle design is about the hunt for happiness.

This isn’t a cute-and-cuddly process in which everyone comes out ahead.

Dysfunctional people require slavish poison-sucking behavior from their enablers. Severe alcoholics abandoned by their families end up homeless, institutionalized, dead, or (in some rare cases) clean up their acts.

While life as a whole is not a zero-sum game, in many cases, some people must be abandoned to their own self-destructive ends.

Mutual exploitation is an unstable relationship style. It can provide short-term benefits to both parties, but in the long run, it corrodes the integrity of everyone involved.

Bear in mind that most people around you will be incapable of forming mutually nurturing relationships – in business or in personal life. Look for the little hints that people (and clients) give off about the gaping voids in their personality. These are market demand signals for other people to rush in and fulfill their unmet needs.

There’s nothing strictly wrong with helping other people in this manner. It’s what keeps the economy moving. I have no idea how to fix broken plumbing, so I’ll hire a plumber to do it for me. It only becomes a problem if the enabling person becomes trapped in a relationship without adequate compensation.

Beware of people who will ask you to accomplish something that you can’t. It’s beyond your capabilities to repair a broken business model for a client. You might be able to polish up the surface for them, collect a fee, and then depart, but avoid getting sucked into a never-ending process of remaking an entire company unless you’re getting paid McKinsey-like money.

This is a process of negotiating professional and personal limits and boundaries.

Clients that give off red flags will fit solidly within the 80% of people that aren’t worth your time.

For example, if a client fails to explain their business model when asked, it’s probably not worth working with them. You might be able to learn from working for failures up to a certain extent, but in the long run, it’s healthier to work with rational clients, regardless of the short-term benefits of skimming from the bottom.

This includes working for startups funded by profligate investors that have no actual customers. I doubt that there are many of these out there still breathing, but it still stands as a good rule to follow – even if you’re desperate.

Bad management teaches you poor work habits. The marketplace itself is the ultimate teacher. Companies without an established market are more like hobbies than enterprises.

The Wage System

The wage system functions because so many people are willing to be exploited, so they can lubricate the cogs of the grandiose machines of the powerful for pitiful rewards. They gain a lukewarm sort of satisfaction out of their place in life from doing so, metered by an all-encompassing misery.

I also think that such people are better off working than they would be otherwise, but I can understand that their training into subordinacy (which they’re not responsible for) makes them more willing to work for less.

Simultaneously, I understand that this socio-economic system is unsustainable. There are too many perfectly capable people out there working far below their potential. Anything that we can do to unlock that dormant human capital will create a happier, more productive world.

When a customer comes to you with a nebulous array of problems, your job is not to save them from themselves. Like a combat medic, you perform triage. Take care of the life-threatening problems first, within the budget. Leave the rest alone.

Break down those problems into next-action lists. The mind can’t make sense of incoherent concepts.

Never accept abuse or harassment from a client, superior, or co-worker. It’s not worth the stress and fall-out, even if you might lose out on some cash in the short run. If you’re worried about them, rest assured that they’ll find another punching bag on the labor market.

Photo Credit: agitprop

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