Comment by cmos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmos | Hacker News Reader

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Valid point - but from the way the article was written this was a life changing event.

Read it again.

While I agree 'yelling' is not the most professional method of getting your point across, the CEO felt the need to impress a point on everyone that he wasn't going to stand for something. And that he was going to put resources (travel with VP of sales to talk to customers) into the person he was yelling at to make sure he does things differently.

This was not a casual emotional rant about something he said. This was a thought out attack on a way of thinking that was unacceptable to the CEO, followed up with a strategy to fix it.

I'll bet the author would agree that was one of the more pivotal moments of his professional life. A lot of CEO's might hear a comment like that, file it away, and then just not promote you, or put you first in line to be laid off. It takes effort and guts to stand up and pronounce what you, the leader of the company, believe in.

And that's something that's often missing today with CEO's.

I'm reminded of the story told by Randy Pausch where the assistant coach said to him (regarding being yelled at by the coach): “That’s a good thing. When you’re screwing up and nobody’s saying anything to you any more, that means they gave up.”

Right. You can also look at it as a type of hack ... an emotional hack, if you will. It tends to work well with men. It is similar to the cliche teachers use: "you will never amount to anything". The idea is you will get so angry, you will self-motivate just to prove them wrong. The army also uses these tricks in boot camp.

A good leader will figure out a priori which techniques work with which people and apply them appropriately.

I'm sure nobody cares, but there's a huge body of psychological research that goes to show that such "negative motivations" do. not. work.

They are especially horrible when the person is in a real position of authority, like an adult over a child (parent, teacher), or an employer. It not only de-motivates over the long term, it causes a lot of damage to the relationship.

The military situation is a bit different, because of the pseudo-brainwashing ("break em down and build em up" approach -- downvote me if you like, but we all know that's an explicit goal to create team cohesion), not to mention huge legal obligations, and maybe because of the type of people who go into it to start with.

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