Things I learned dealing with psychopaths in startups
medium.com
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I've been in situations where people performed blatant religious discrimination towards me, and also threatened to reduce my wage due to discussing pay with a coworker (threatening any form of retaliation for discussing pay is blatantly illegal).
The company easily could have raised some of these same complaints towards me just to try to leverage their comparably greater resources to pin blame on the worker rather than own up to the all too common sociopathic tendencies that develop inside bureaucracies.
In the end, both this comment and the parent article are just anecdotes. But I say it's a better prior to be more skeptical of managers/higher-ups/bureaucrats who are willing to drop the "psychopath" nuke on behavior they don't like, than the toxic employee.
In this sense, we ought to be more willing to apply skepticism to the company, and more skeptical in general that things like company charter documents, HR policies, company handbooks, or even just email memos about company culture and policy (the more likely case in a start-up), are designed to create legal deniability for the pursuit of illegal and irrational whims of executives, and truly nothing more.
This is so much the modus operandi of companies in general, start-up or otherwise, that until after we account for the huge base rate of company-initiated transgressions, it just has little relevance to focus so much on the "toxic" employee. In fact, one of the most successful scams of the organizational HR world is to draw so much disproportionate attention to the scarecrow "toxic employee."
Both of my worst experiences with outright fraudulent and corrupt managers have come at start-ups, where there wasn't even the thin veneer of an HR apparatus to even pay lip service to protecting us from executive whims.
Now, having said all that, I can certainly still agree that your case might be an exception. But I would prefer if your article was written more that way: that when this happens on the part of an employee, it's generally very rare and the best thing for the company to do is try to learn how they could have handled it better (read: publicly calling someone something as incendiary as "psychopath" is not it, even if it were true), and voiciferously acknowledge that in the vast, vast majority of cases, it is the company being toxic, not the employee who responds by standing up for herself.
> psychopaths
> utterly insane
> psychopathic minority member
> latent craziness
> psychopaths
> broken psychology
> psychopath’s
> crazy will make the sane crazy
> their crazy existence
> psychopath
> crazy
I should stop being surprised when company owners leave themselves open to litigation. MH is a disability, and disability is a protected characteristic in US law.
Out of curiosity I browsed Wikipedia which had this to say:
Psychopathy emphasize three observable characteristics to varying degrees:
- Boldness. Low fear, high tolerance of stress, unfamiliarity and danger, and
high self-confidence and social assertiveness.
- Disinhibition. Poor impulse control including problems with planning and
foresight, lacking affect and urge control, and demand
for immediate gratification. Low conscientiousness.
- Meanness. Lacking empathy and close attachments with others, use of cruelty
to gain empowerment, exploitative tendencies, defiance
of authority, and destructive excitement seeking.
I am surprised that the tendency to compulsively lie is not also in the Wikipedia definition.
If you already don't like this coworker because of disagreements and actions at work, you're very likely to overestimate these symptoms, or believe that someone who is only a little ways along the spectrum to psychopath is actually much further.
Imagine if we believed everyone who went through a bad breakup or divorce and called their ex partner a psychopath out of anger (even justified anger). It just seems really extreme to use some armchair diagnosis from someone emotionally invested in believing bad things about the other person.
Again this post was a message to any founder finding a partner. Things may be rosy in the beginning but if you are paired with someone who fundamentally is only motivated by money they will always choose their own interest over the company. Even if that means actively sabotaging and slandering.
Again I do not want to air dirty laundry but I was landed the unfortunate worst case scenario.
Anyone who thinks that I am being one sided is allowed to have that prerogative. I cannot give full details but please imagine the worse situation you can get into with a first partner, I am talking them trying to smear your reputation and sabotaging the company in order to get their way, not just some friendship that went bad. Please proceed with caution and do not be overly trustworthy.
If anyone wants to know more I would be happy to talk directly. But I'm sharing this because founders with genuine intentions and the ones who get damaged the most by individuals like this.
Your problem seems, based on what you say, a lot more narcissistic than the guys I had to deal with - yes, that is actually a positive, believe me. The problem is obvious... I lost 5 years of my life to this stupid startup and got little out of it except some harsh life lessons.
Good luck, and if you don't have a lawyer, get one.
I have never really met "crazy" or understood in a direct sense what "psychopathic" meant but to associate certain word I would attribute the following as to what I mean as psychopathic with this individual: "a pathological liar", "self-destructive", "narcissistic", "irrational", "vitrolic". I mean this person thought he was the next coming of Marc Andreessen.
In an objective sense it is unfortunate that there are actually people who live like this. But I wrote this article to warn start-up founders that are just starting out looking for a co-founder or a "mentor". I was just a PhD engineering student when I started, I did not know how to adequately gauge business prowess or to read through a person like this.
I can say I've learned what NOT to do and what NOT to be like. Now I am a less trusting and more guarded person.
And thus the interaction they have with people. They're like an information black hole - little leaks out of them, but they are sucking up every bit of non-verbal etc info out of you and consciously processing it. Thus they see your blind spots and can devise ways to take advantage of your 'shadow' side or hidden psychological needs.
What the fuck.
This tiny little article gives you nothing with which you can make those claims.
ok, I have no idea why I wrote schizoid. I was probably drunk at the time... I stand corrected on that. I still say 'psychopath' is the wrong term to use though. On the face of it, it seems to be something different - certainly some anti-social personality disorder.
What is most infuriating this person is just not smart enough to be a good psychopath, if there is such a thing as a "good psychopath".
His lies just put him into a smaller and smaller box. And not trying to be an intellectual elitist but this individual thinks he is the most intellectual and clever person to walk on the plant yet can even understand how much more intellect I and my team members have over him. Again I'm not trying to seem arrogant but arguing with someone who does not know how dumb they are, and who is poorly lying is very infuriating.
Ever read an email where the person's grammar was so bad it hurts your head? Witnessing a person trying to outsmart you via email by writing in old english with excessive use of semi-colons really hurts your brain.
The guy certainly sounds disordered, but psychopathic as in the 'dark triad'? No, not all, from what you say.