Is It Okay to Manipulate Your Employees and Customers?

By Sunny Bonnell

Hypnotic.

Charismatic.

Machiavellian.

Great CEOs and other leaders, from groundbreaking artists to politicians, can often be described in this way. They might be spellbinding orators or fearless visionaries who paint word pictures of alternate realities that convince employees to become acolytes, but however they work their magic, the result is always the same. Some people become beguiled, willing to say and do anything in order not to break the spell.

There’s a name for that effect: manipulation. We don’t have to tell you that’s a word freighted with a container ship’s worth of negative baggage. It conjures mental images of fraudsters and schemers deluding people for their own selfish ends — and certainly, that’s sometimes true, whether you’re talking about corporate villains like WeWork’s Adam Neumann and Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes, Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff, or infamous con artist Frank Abagnale of Catch Me If You Can. The worlds of business, finance, and, to be fair, romance is littered with the broken egos and fortunes of suckers who let themselves be taken in by silver-tongued manipulators. Even streetwise venture capital sharks aren’t immune.

But is being manipulative always a negative?

Consider the implications of the word: to persuade someone to see things the way you want them to see them. Marketers do that every day. So do debaters. So do speechwriters, teachers, lobbyists, and rose-clutching Romeos pulling out all the stops to get a date with the girl (or guy) of their dreams.

Now, to be fair, Merriam-Webster defines manipulate as,

“to control or play upon by artful, unfair, or insidious means, especially to one’s own advantage.”

But does that mean manipulation has to be laced with malice? The wooing lover is trying to get the object of his affection to see him as sincere, sexy, and charming, and while that’s to his advantage, does that make him a bad guy? What about the CEO who gives a rousing speech to the troops to rally them to work nights and weekends for the impossible project that might turn the company around? Is he a mind game-playing asshat or a compelling leader?

Answer: It depends. Like most things do, it depends on what lies behind the manipulation — on whether the man behind the curtain is really a wizard or just a humbug balloonist from Nebraska. One of the best examples we’ve ever run across is the late creator of the uber-hipster Ace Hotels chain, Alex Calderwood.

A soft-spoken Seattlite with a Sideshow Bob mop of hair and the eager, “Squirrel!” gaze of someone whose eyes see invisible sketches and prototypes and entire worlds that the rest of us mere mortals can only guess at, Calderwood billed himself as a “cultural engineer.” After a few false starts as a vintage clothier and party promoter, he began applying his talents for reinvention and an uncanny sense of cool to a variety of industries: barbering, nightclubs, record labels. But the jewel in his crown was undoubtedly Ace Hotels, which by his untimely death at 47 had grown into an eclectic collection of artisan hostelry magic boxes — flophouses packed with vintage this and bespoke that, speakeasy-feeling common spaces and comfy rooms aimed at the often skint but authenticity-starved Millennials and Gen Zs.

But what made Calderwood an example of benign manipulation wasn’t so much his touch at carving effortlessly chic spaces out of derelict buildings. It was his effect on the people who worked for him. Listen to them. Read their testimonials upon his passing. You’ll see that for his assistants, managers, and rank and file workers, Calderwood was the patron saint of possibility. He was a man whose belief in limitlessness extended to everyone around him and made the people he led feel inspired and uplifted, as though the only thing standing between them and bringing their own baroque dreams to life was a little hustle, some fortunate timing, a dash of courage, and some Kickstarter seed capital.

At Motto, and within our book, RARE BREED: A Guide to Success for the Defiant, Dangerous, and Different, we have a saying we share with clients:

“Leave your ghost in the halls.”

It means that being a great leader means having presence so potent that when you’re elsewhere (or in the case of Alex Calderwood, when you’ve shuffled off this mortal coil), it’s still influencing how others think and behave. But that ghost can terrify or inspire, depending on the answers to a few critical questions:

Is the intent of the manipulation selfish or selfless?

Steve Jobs was notoriously prickly and unpredictable, even to people who had worked with him for many years. But as many former Apple employees have stated, Jobs was not out for himself. He simply had no tolerance for stupidity or mediocrity and knew that his company and people could change the world if he could just get them back on the right road. To that end, he would manipulate people shamelessly, as Walter Isaacson wrote in his biography of Jobs: “Jobs could seduce and charm people at will, and he liked to do so. People such as Amelio and Sculley allowed themselves to believe that because Jobs was charming them, it meant that he liked and respected them. It was an impression that he sometimes fostered by dishing out insincere flattery to those hungry for it. But Jobs could be charming to people he hated just as easily as he could be insulting to people he liked.”

But Jobs could also be disarmingly honest and self-effacing when he thought things weren’t right. As Michael Hageloh, a 22-year Apple sales veteran points out in his book Live from Cupertino, when Jobs returned to the company in 1997, he turned the struggling company around instantly by admitting to staff that things were bad and freeing everyone to rediscover the passionate “music” that had so infused Apple before they were taken over by a string of clueless CEOs.

Yes, Jobs was renowned for being self-aggrandizing, obsessive, and dictatorial. But many of the people who worked with him also say that he freed them to do their best work and be their best selves, and the proof is in the extraordinary products. His manipulation was mostly directed at getting people to dare to “think different.” Manipulation that’s intended primarily to serve others is a good thing, if…

Are claims substantive or suspicious?

In the business world, lies are often framed as over-promising or “dreaming big,” but to us that’s code for “I’m telling you what you want to hear.” It’s easy to exaggerate about financial prospects or new technology in order to fire up a team or a group of investors, but there’s a big difference between a little salesmanship and flat-out fabrication. A charismatic but honest leader might brush a veneer of hype over a quarterly report; a malicious manipulator will venture into complete fantasy because the truth is either unbearable or ordinary. As listeners, we must remember the advice that too many in the entrepreneurial world forget: If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

The many, many investors, journalists and employees who lionized disgraced former Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes should have taken that advice. After the initial hype about the allegedly revoltionary blood testing company faded, it should have become clear to everyone that the technology to perform hundreds of diagnostic tests from a single finger prick didn’t exist. But it didn’t, at least not right away. Holmes was an adept manipulator, covering her tracks with increasingly desperate measures designed to keep a company built on lies afloat for as long as possible. Why? Ego, maybe. The fear of criminal action, for sure. But there’s another insidious reason: sometimes, manipulators start to believe their own fabrications. That’s when they become dangerous.

The reality check is simple: If asked to back up a claim, a leader can do it. True, when he unveiled the first iPhone at MacWorld 2007, Steve Jobs used a cobbled-together prototype that barely functioned (that’s the nature of demos, by the way; Google Home’s debut was similar), but he knew that if given time and support, his team could work wonders. And it did. A malicious manipulator, on the other hand, will be full of excuses why he or she can’t ever deliver what was promised. Holmes never did.

Is the manipulator directing his or her personality at skeptics or people who want to be fooled?

This is where the really skilled manipulators stand out, because they know that deep down, we want to be fooled. We want to believe that Product X will change the world, that there’s a secret investing method that can beat the market. The charlatans know the old saying that “the real mark convinces himself,” and aim their rhetoric at the audience that has an emotional investment in believing even the most ridiculous claims.

Suprisingly, in the business world, that audience is often investors and fellow entrepreneurs. And why not? Those are two groups predisposed, either by training or temperament, to believe six impossible things before breakfast. They love big dreams and the dreamers who dream them and often make willing audiences for manipulators. Young, inexperienced employees are also targets, because they haven’t built up their cynicism muscles yet, and they’re dying to make a dent in the universe. Malicious manipulators will often aim their fabrications at these groups.

They’ll avoid the skeptics: journalists, attorneys, experienced executives who’ve been around the block and know nonsense when they see it. So if you find a leader waxing poetic only to the audiences most likely to believe anything, while the needle on your B.S. meter is going crazy, that’s a danger sign. Real leaders can convince anyone, because their claims are hopeful but reasonable, built on substance. They don’t need anyone to believe, because they have the evidence to back up what they say.

We’re Sunny Bonnell and Ashleigh Hansberger, authors of Rare Breed: A Guide to Success for the Defiant, Dangerous, and Different (HarperOne), hosts, and executive producers. We’re also the co-founders of the award-winning branding agency Motto. Learn more about us and our book at www.rarebreedbook.com.

© Sunny Bonnell and Ashleigh Hansberger 2020