A couple of weeks ago I made a note to myself to write a post on this topic, and then the other day I heard that Scott Adams, the creator of the comic strip Dilbert, had just died. So I guess now is the time.

Most of us have probably read Dilbert at some point during our careers. It was a comic strip that ran for decades, dealing with the absurdities of corporate life, and that tended to take particularly sharp aim at failures of management and leadership. The humor — and the strip was regularly very, very funny — often hinged on the cluelessness, venality, egocentrism, and ignorance of people charged with supervising the work of others and furthering the strategic goals of organizations. (Strategic goals themselves — or the lack thereof, or the incoherence thereof, or the manifest idiocy thereof — were also a frequent target.)

Almost 30 years ago, I was in a conference session at which a library director gave a talk during which she expressed her frustration with Dilbert and what she believed was its tendency to foment and nurture cynicism among the workforce. What I found interesting was that the solution she proposed to her audience was not to avoid the kinds of management approaches that were regularly lampooned in Dilbert — instead, what she proposed was that we try to get our employees to stop reading Dilbert.*

The irony of this stance should be immediately obvious; it’s exactly the kind of solution that a clueless manager in Dilbert might have suggested. But it’s also a helpful negative illustration of an important principle of management and leadership. That principle is: you can’t outlaw cynicism; you can only undermine it by genuinely earning your people’s trust. In fact, if you try to outlaw cynicism, all you’ll do is increase it.

You can’t outlaw cynicism in your workplace; you can only undermine it by genuinely earning trust.

Imagine if you were one of the speaker’s library employees in that meeting, and heard your library director say “People need to stop reading Dilbert; it just makes them cynical about the workplace.” What thoughts would be going through your head? If that were me, I would probably be thinking things like:

• “If she thinks we’re going to identify with Dilbert, then doesn’t that suggest there are things that need to change in our library?”
• “Does she really think that avoiding Dilbert will make us less cynical about our workplace?”
• “Can she hear herself? She’s a library director who is literally trying to tell us what not to read.”

But the real lesson for us as leaders isn’t really “don’t tell your staff not to read Dilbert.” In this regard I think this particular library director was an outlier and — let’s be charitable — was speaking off the cuff and may very well have just been having a bad day. The real lesson is that if we find ourselves struggling with an environment of cynicism and mistrust in the units or organizations we lead, the first place to look is not at the failings in our employees’ reading habits, but at the workplace culture for which we have responsibility. If you’re sensing disaffection or grumpiness in the people you lead, start asking around: is that a general vibe, or are you just noticing a few people who are exceptionally unhappy for some reason? Talk to supervisors: how do they read the mood in their particular areas? If you are getting the impression that discontent is generally distributed throughout the library rather than concentrated in a particular trouble spot, consider soliciting anonymous feedback and reviewing it with your leadership and management teams.

Of course, soliciting anonymous feedback is complicated itself, and comes with both pros and cons. We’ll discuss these in my next post.

* Note: I’m aware of Scott Adams’ racially problematic views and his practice of airing them publicly. To be clear, the experience I’ve related here took place many years before those views came to light; this library director’s unhappiness with Dilbert clearly arose from the content of the comic strip itself — it was not a call to boycott Dilbert because of Adams’ views on race.