Santa’s Sweatshop: Red flags among Big Red’s leadership

Merry Christmas, ya filthy animals.

I’m sticking with the Christmas motif for today’s newsletter, and picking some beef with the big guy.

America's capitalist culture is guilty of tech and entrepreneur worship. We put founders on pedestals, or even worse, ivory towers. These corporate castles often crumble overtime as the weather changes. Some are even found to be total facades, lacking any real substance inside. 

We’ve seen this time and time again:

• Adam Neumann built the brand of “We” on the back of “he”

• Steve Jobs was a product mastermind, but a tyrannical psycho behind the scenes

• Elizabeth Holmes was focused on stopping patients’ pain, but in reality was testing a failing product on hundreds of people

• Walt Disney built a brand on family, but often kept his own team from seeing their families in order to produce

Today, I’m outing another one of these tyrants. He’s built a loyal if not cult-like following who believes in his self aggrandizing leadership. He’s become a cultural icon while ignoring culture, not unlike Walt Disney. In fact, he and Walt Disney even partnered on countless projects.

I am, of course, talking about Santa Claus. 

Let’s break down the cultural breakdowns. 

1) Santa is feared by his team

You can scan all of the tales of Santa, and in every version, the elves fear Big Red. They fear disagreeing with and disappointing him. When you build a culture on a foundation of fear instead of candor, your team will hide bad news from you for fear of retribution or for a boss saying the dreaded “bring me solutions not problems.”

“The Year Without a Santa Claus” is one of the few instances where elves break rank with Santa. And do you remember what happened? Santa leaves the North Poll to find them to set them straight. 

Improvement:

Santa should embrace a culture that empowers elves to speak up with ideas for improvements. For example, remember the old Rankin/Bass classic, “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer?” Why did Hermey’s boss shut him down in his pursuit to be a dentist or to build a dentist doll? Hermey’s contribution was going to improve the team’s healthcare and he brought a new product to market (the dentist toy), yet he was shamed.

2) Santa focuses on the wrong output 

In every depiction I’ve seen, Santa focuses on the quantity of toy trains or jack-in-the-boxes made, not the quality. In the movie “Elf,” Buddy can’t keep up on the Etch a Sketches and gets banished to the quality department, which is even called out as effectively being punishment. 

This is bad leadership. Encouraging a team to hit numbers on products shipped without any respect for quality control is leading to a bad customer experience. Maybe this explains why two of my recent “Santa” purchases on Amazon arrived broken. Santa’s elves are checking boxes insteading of inspecting them.

Improvement: 

Santa’s culture puts the toy makers at the top, but it’s important to remember everyone on the team contributes. With so much focus and pride on how many toys the elves are making, they’ve made quality control (QC) not only unsexy, it’s embarrassing. A team can’t operate this way. When my sales team lands a deal, I congratulate them, but also the rest of the team. Without the designers, engineers and project coordinator, we don’t have a product to sell. We all win together. 

3) Santa needs a project manager

Big Red could use some help in the project management department. His process reminds me of my ad agency days, effectively waterfalling towards one big deadline. When you build this way, it can be really expensive to improve the project if it means changes earlier in the process. Known mistakes get left behind and compound because the team has only one goal—hit the damn deadline. 

I did more than 100 website builds this way, and when a grand deadline becomes the goal in a waterfall process, quality gets cut every time. I’ve never seen a story of Santa where he has quarterly deadlines for various departments—it’s all just one big waterfall towards December 24, which creates chaos among his team. In fact, a good many of Christmas movies even hinge on making this deadline. 

Improvement: 

Santa should hire a project manager to oversee his day-to-day, and focus on a more iterative process throughout the year to break up the work. A proper process for a company of this size would also build in layers of project managers as well as product owners. Instead, Santa seems to be experimenting with Tony Hsieh’s failed “no one has a manager” process (or maybe Tony stole it from Santa?). 

4) Santa lets himself be the hero

This is a big one. Everyone knows the elves do the work all year long and Santa steps in like Amazon for the last mile delivery. But how many movies and books have been made about the elves? Very few (and in fact, the one I know of and enjoy is a mere 22 minutes long). 

Improvement:

Santa needs to realize that his team could probably do his job, but he can’t do theirs. Santa needs a strong team of elves building, and his last mile delivery is merely the outcome of their work. He should share in the glory of the moment, and maybe a few cookies. I mean, can Santa even eat a few billion cookies in one night? Seems doubtful. He must be giving them to the reindeer. 

5) Santa’s workshop has a glass ceiling

There is a significant problem with the lack of diversity on Santa’s team. Sure, we could go down the DEI path, too, as it seems the elves have been young and white for hundreds of years (seems suspect), but I actually mean something else. There is absolutely no diversity in the roles one can do in Santa’s Sweatshop unless it’s make or test toys. 

This creates a big problem because your overachievers and A+ talent are going to want more for themselves. Only in a few instances have I seen much of anything in the way of leadership among the elves beyond a floor manager, such as Bernard in the Santa Clause with Tim Allen. 

Improvement:

I don’t really understand if Santa is a human or lives forever. It would seem to behoove him though, to come up with some type of secession plan and to build in a management training program within the ranks. I am thinking a good Christmas gift for Santa could be Jocko Willink’s and Leif Babin’s “Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win.” The closest I’ve seen to a secession is the Tim Allen movie and Ernest Saves Christmas, but even then, there needs to be more infrastructure and opportunity within the elf community. 

There’s no wrap up today. I just wanted to share a fun few lessons in the spirit of the holiday. I hope that you have a great weekend no matter what you’re celebrating. Stay safe, stay warm and rest up.

Who I’m listening to: My Americana Christmas Playlist

What I’m reading: “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life” by Walter Isaacson

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