Are you running a narcissist business?

Narcissism seems to be trending these days. There are tons of articles, videos and such talking about how to identify a narcissist, how to overcome a relationship with one and so on.

This year as I worked for a particular business I realised the narcissist label can also be applied to businesses. Do you think I have gone nuts? I am gonna follow the description of the Mayo Clinic about a narcissist, picking some of the key concepts and see how it can be translated into a business:

• Have an inability or unwillingness to recognize the needs and feelings of others. The business does not consider at all employee wellbeing or see employees as humans that need and deserve work-life balance.
• Expect special favours and expect other people to do what they want without questioning them &
• Take advantage of others to get what they want. The business uses manipulation and other mechanisms to create guilt so that employees end up giving more to the business than reasonable or originally agreed. This can be instigated by the management level in how they ask people to perform extra tasks. It can also be instigated institutionally if extra hours are expected and demanded without any discussion for example.
• Be envious of others and believe others envy them &
• Expect to be recognized as superior even without achievements &
• Make achievements and talents seem bigger than they are &
• Behave in an arrogant way, brag a lot and come across as conceited. The business is obsessed in their marketing campaigns to present themselves as the best, doing dirty comments about other brands, bragging about their company or product unreasonably, selling themselves as a luxury car when in reality they operate as a low budget vehicle.
• Insist on having the best of everything — for instance, the best car or office. The business behaves obsessively about what equipment they have or their position in the market, even if they are actually hiding that they don't pay their employees on time or have any handle on their budget expenses.

So there are clear traits on how to detect whether a business is a narcissist. Of course you may think businesses are not people, but they are run by people. If the ownership team (whether a single person or a group of people) institute these types of practices in the business then their business can be labeled as a narcissist in my humble opinion.

To be able to survive this work environment employees will likely have to submit to this modus operandi. And become empath employees. They won't be able to get their emotional needs met, nor be seen as humans doing an important function for the company. They will always be seen as someone that can be replaceable, no matter their role. They will start loosing their self-esteem, ingenuity and wellbeing because those traits are not compatible in an oppressive work place. Which in turn will make the business less competitive, unless the upper management are a bunch of genius able to conquer their market all on their own. Quite unlikely.

This will in turn create a high turn over when people get maxed out or deeply stressed employees that will end up performing poorly.

Some narcissist businesses can even go as far as to instigate fear in their employees in their effort to try to control them. I've seen this happening too. Pretty much like narcissist individuals do when they gaslight people to try to control them. In businesses you can see this when the company is telling employees they can be replaced if they don't comply with this or this other demand. Now I am not talking about managing poor performance. I am talking about indicating an employee that if they don't submit to the will of the company they would be replaced, when the will of the company contains unreasonable demands like working 12 hours shifts when the contract talks about 8 hours a day.

Call me naive but I believe after the pandemic people are going to start looking more into the values of the company they work for/with. Beyond the great resignation there will be a search for fulfilment at the work place and being able to have a fulfilled professional life as well as a fulfilled personal life. After all when you are at the brink of losing it all too soon for many people their priorities tend to shift to focus on the experiences and moments with their loved ones and the things they love. No one is going to get money with them to the great beyond, or at least not until the afterlife-reincarnation ATM gets invented.

If you have a narcissist business please consider what type of culture you have created and what is it that you would like to create from this moment forwards. What type of legacy do you really want to leave behind?

It is not that difficult to introduce wellbeing practices and kindness into your operations so employees can feel like humans rather than numbers. They would thank you for it, very likely literally, but even more likely with their rise in productivity, motivation and loyalty. A very constant turned over has more impacts to a business than just the cost of new hiring and training. It is worth trying to keep turnover as a minimum to increase team stability.

You can choose to do marketing from a showcasing and service stand point rather than trying to obliterate your competitors or saying anything you can about your product hoping something sticks. Remember with the over saturation of marketing and questionable news sources people are going to start searching for authenticity soon. Some of us already do. Every human has a built-in lie detector, not all of us use it but I believe more and more often this mechanism will get activated in humans to start discerning better amongst the vast amounts of data, information and misinformation we end up consuming every day. The end product of fake news is going to be a focus on authenticity and integrity.

Lastly please consider that transforming a narcissist business into a conscious one will be able to put you at the forefront of businesses. You will be a pioneer on a new way of operating. When you can honestly say you are in service of your employees and even the planet in your quest for sharing your product and of course creating wealth. You will have money flow in your business. Money doesn't care about your business model but more and more customers will start paying attention to the inner workings of a company. And that money will actually serve as a landmark that another way of doing businesses is possible. Wouldn't' that be a great legacy to be part of?