“Don’t make people into heroes, John.”

2013 was a big year for me. It was the year I stopped being a school kid and became a corporate employee. It was the first time I saw women in the workplace—even through I’d spent all my life watching, without seeing, my mum work harder and longer than any of them.

It was exciting. I was finally entering the world of adults who make their own money to spend on their own interests.

It was also the year Sheryl Sandberg launched a book that broke the internet and every expectation of women in leadership. Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead is a book that “encourages women to assert themselves in their careers and personal lives,” says Penguin Books.

I only learnt about the book a couple of years after, so when I truly realised I now have to work every day to feed myself, so many of the women around me had new-found confidence and opinions about the role of women in workplaces. Sheryl’s thought leadership made the rounds in group chats. Phrases like “glass ceiling” were thrown around.

I haven’t read Sheryl’s book yet. It’s been in my “I’ll get to it one day” pile for about a decade now, and I still think I will at some point.

But I did read Sarah Wynn-Williams’ memoir about her job at Facebook as its international policy manager. In her book, the Kiwi-American former-diplomat, shares what it was like to work for Sheryl.

Not only the long hours and expectations to hide her child’s existence, but also the subtle and not-so-subtle instances where SWW was asked to risk freedom, her pregnancy, and her life for her employer. Let’s just say it felt like a glass ceiling, above which Sheryl’s book sat, shattered to a million pieces.

It struck me how widely accepted the behaviour was in the company. This isn’t new. We hear stories about bad workplace culture all the time. But it’s yet another high-profile reminder that normal people like you and I can become complicit in creating and sustaining unsafe workplace cultures.

So many people tell lies, evade taxes, betray their spouses, and abuse others. But when there’s a leader or powerful personality attached to these things, we react in one of two ways:

1. We’re shocked and disappointed. A monster takes charge of our minds, rages indignantly in its cage. How could they?!

2. We (unconsciously) avoid seeing the truth in front of us. We create excuses for bad behaviour. “Are you sure you’re not imagining it?” we ask when someone says a senior manager makes inappropriate gestures. ”She’s just direct and straightforward,” we say masking passive aggression as “strong leadership.”

It reminded me, again, that we love to make people into heroes, worship them, and put them on pedestals they don’t belong on. And then be disappointed when they inevitably misstep.

I’ve done it, and I know others who’ve done it. This is why it’s good to talk about these things—normalise calling out bad behaviour and normalise not treating people like gods.

Careless people

In 2021, when Sophie Zhang, a data scientist, blew the whistle on her former employer, Facebook, the world was shocked at just how much power Facebook had had over global political and social issues.

But no one was surprised that the company wasn’t the saintly, do-gooder it had claimed to be in the early 2000s, when most of us embraced Facebook for connecting us with old school mates.

Since then, the façade gradually fell and many of us grew skeptical of Facebook as the platform designed for community building and social connection. After the 2016 presidential election, however, whatever appreciation we had for Facebook plummeted down to the ditches and remained there.

There are so many things that Facebook did well in its early years. But as any registered company, Facebook also has the legal obligation to further its own commercial interests. Consequently, the platform that claimed to want to democratise the internet ended up causing extreme psychosocial harm across the world. The road to hell is paved with good intensions, as they say.

Over the weekend, I finished reading a book titled Careless people – A story of where I used to work. A book I devoured during my runs, gasping mildly, smirking, and shaking my head in disbelief at what I was hearing. It’s dark and funny and deeply disturbing.

It’s a memoir of a Kiwi-American, former-diplomat who created the international policy team at Facebook—just before it started engaging with governments. She remained in a leadership position throughout some of the biggest political and social events that Facebook was involved in, including (but not limited to) the internet[.]org project’s entry into Asia, the hate crimes in Myanmar, the “Facebook elections” in the Philippines and the US, the company’s stealth launch in China, and the preparations for the senate hearing.

In her book, Sarah Wynn-Williams talks about how careless the company’s leadership was in their handling of the power that comes with owning and managing tools that can manipulate the truth at scale.

There are plenty of themes in this book that’re great for staying up at night.

Things like workplace culture, how the corporate world sees motherhood and maternity leave, how sometimes girl bosses can be bad bosses, how the idea of heroes is deeply flawed, how whistleblowers spend years silent and complicit, how even big companies with thousands of employees can be dangerously understaffed, and so much more.

I’ll be thinking and writing about these in the coming weeks, and if you also read the book, I’d love to hear your thoughts.