I'm Putting Yellers on Notice

[Karl Edwards]

It’s over. We’re done. No more.

Labor Day 2009. The day leaders stopped yelling.

Yelling as a “tool” for leaders is one of the great excuses and abuses that persists in the workplace.

It’s an excuse, because yelling is a cover for one’s own inability to either control one’s temper or come up with effective communication alternatives. While occasionally necessary to communicate seriousness, dissatisfaction, and/or anger about work-related dynamics, it is positively never necessary to use yelling to do so.

It’s an abuse because yelling uses the cover of power to get away with a behavior that would not be tolerated from those with less power than you. Because the cover of power is yelling’s only outlet, it is a form of bullying and therefore cowardice.

It’s over.

I‘m putting yellers on notice. Your day is over. Get help or get out. Muster the courage to learn effective alternatives or make way for those who can.

We’re done.

I’m putting anyone who makes excuses for these verbally violent leaders on notice. These are not our great leaders, and those who lionize them as such must stop. You are intentionally ignoring the evidence. While publishing books that claim short term results, you ignore the long term costs and consequences of the high turnover, low morale, bare minimum work efforts, self-protective resistances, retaliatory subterfuges, and antagonistic cultures that spread like cancers throughout these organizations.

No more.

It’s a new day. It will be a day characterized by mutual respect, lofty aspirations, meaningful accountability, shared commitments, trust-based collaborations, and concrete results that outperform anything we’ve ever seen before.

What sort of leader will you be? Not one who yells, I trust.