Does a large organization automatically have to adopt formal, non-personal public forms of engagement?
Chip Conley is facing major push back from his employees because he went to Burning Man, engaged in some activities that some found controversial, and posted the photos his Facebook page. I am fascinated by his case, simple because the scale of his operation is larger than what I can imagine running. I can imagine someday running a company with 40 or 50 employees. In that circumstance, I don’t think my behavior would matter much, since I would be in daily touch with all of my employees and I could reassure them that I had not lost my mind. But he has thousands of employees, most of whom will only see him a few times a year. The sheer lack of contact seems to create a pressure for a more formal kind of public persona.
First, a little bit about me. I run Joie de Vivre, a company that operates a collection of boutique hotels in California. I founded the business 22 years ago, when I was 26 and a freshly minted MBA from Stanford. The first property I bought was a pay-by-the hour motel in a seedy part of San Francisco. People told me I was crazy to buy it, but I transformed it into a world-renowned rock ’n‘ roll hotel. Today, Joie de Vivre is a $230 million company with more than 3,000 employees and 38 properties. From the luxury spa resort in Big Sur to the urban chic hotel in San Francisco and a surfer-inspired hotel in Huntington Beach, our mission statement is simple: to celebrate the joy of life.
And that’s precisely what I was doing at Burning Man, which, incidentally, I have attended twice before in the past decade, before this social media problem existed. I went with a close friend. She took a ton of pictures, and when I got home to San Francisco, I posted six of them, two of which show me shirtless. In one I’m wearing a tutu; in the other a sarong.
…I’m just not a blazer kind of guy. I consider myself a rebel. My first book —The Rebel Rules: Daring to Be Yourself in Business — preaches the value of authenticity in business, of being true to yourself. So a few pictures on my Facebook page that show me having a good time? I honestly didn’t give it a second thought.
I had, however, given thought as to how others at my company use social media, and this is where the whole thing gets a little messy. In fact, the issue of my pictures came up as we were creating a social media policy and seeking input from our cultural ambassadors. Our ambassadors are employees who are elected by their peers to represent each hotel; they work on such efforts as local philanthropy, employee recognition programs, and, lately, social media policies. It’s a role I instituted about 12 years ago after reading about how Southwest Airlines had cultural ambassadors who served as representatives between field offices and headquarters. Joie de Vivre was growing fast, and I was concerned about keeping our culture intact.
I learned from my head of HR that four of our cultural ambassadors had fielded complaints from young staff members who, odd as it sounded to me, looked up to me, almost like a father figure. And, well, they didn’t like seeing their father in a tutu. I also learned that staffers were concerned about some of my Twitter musings, in which I expressed anguish over the demise of an eight-year relationship. Somehow, all this seemed inappropriate for a CEO with thousands of employees.