Chad Silverstein on why leaders must watch for sabotage from within their own teams. He gave employee loans at his former company and saw them weaponized against him. Inspect what you expect, root out undermining fast, and protect your principles anyway.
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Here's a fact. If you're leading anything, something you just have to accept is that there are people right now that you're trying to lead that are probably actively engaged in sabotaging you, whether they like to think that they are or not. It's besides the point. Sabotage is just a fact of reality when it comes to leading anything, because people have their own agendas. And most of the time, when a leader is leading something that they're very passionate about, they care about it more than everybody else. So you're gonna have people who not only don't care as much as you, they don't care at all. And they're either using you to get to where they're going, or they're using you just to get by. Whatever the case is, you know, you have to try to root that out. You do that by being curious. You do that by inspecting what you expect. And you do that by not ignoring the red flags that are kind of going off all the time. And you're just delaying it because you don't want to make a change. You don't want to make it harder for yourself. But, yeah, that's exactly what you're actually doing. You know, betrayal and sabotage is a real thing, especially on successful teams where there are high performers and people who are being incentivized, doing well, and people who are not, people who are being promoted, people are being skipped over. You know, I mean, people are bitter for reasons that you can't understand. And as a leader, you just. Again, you don't know everything that's going on. And there are a lot of people who know a lot more than you because you're either not on the floor, you're not on the phones, you're not in front of the clients. Wherever it is that you find yourself, there are going to be people in your organization or on your team that are doing things that you're not. And they're. They're. They're involved with processes that you have nothing to do with. And sabotage is just a part of the game, and you want to try to root it out, do something about it. Don't let it linger. And remember that you can't let it change who you are. Meaning if you have a set of principles that you are going to live and be a certain way and there are people in your organization that hurt that effort. Don't let it change you. Stay the path. You know, I'll give you one example. I used to. I used to give people loans because I could. I used the company to give people a loan they needed to advance on their paycheck. So my old company was called ffcc. And I used to have my. My veterans would joke with me, they called it FFCC Savings and Loans because I used to give out loans and there occasionally would be someone who screwed me over. They quit, they still owed me money. And I'd have people pissed and they'd say, why do you keep doing it? And I'd say, look, I'm not going to change who I am because I want to help people because they screwed me over. I'm not going to be naive, but when I want to help someone, I'm going to help them. And I'm not going to not help you because so and so did something to me two years ago. You know, look, I'm the first to learn from my experiences and, you know, adapt. But when you have a set of principles that you are who you are and you have designed them in a way that makes you feel good about who you are and how you're living your life, you can't let some bad seeds change that. And this is why having clarity on your worldview and having a set of principles that you're going to live by is so important. You know, if you ask people what they believe about trust, you have people who've been screwed over before and they're going to have a worldview about trust that's going to be very different from a built lead leader who most of the time, the ones that I know, they believe that you trust first. And that's not the tendency of most people because they've been screwed over because they don't trust people. And so a lot of our baggage and a lot of our experiences did dictate the way we behave and believe. And I think that's dangerous place to live because you can't use a few scenarios to dictate how you're going to live your life. You know, those people have to live it themselves for doing the things that they do. And you may have just been the messenger or the recipient of whatever it is that they were doing, but at the end of the day, don't let it change who you are. And so just accept the fact that betrayal and sabotage exists and do your best to root it out as quickly as possible. And you have to inspect what you inspect expect in order to do that. So don't be naive and don't take your eyes off the ball, especially when it comes to the financial part of your business.
