Disrupted

by Dan Lyons

  “Unless the stock gets to $40, it’s not even worth it for me to stay here,” he says.

  We go to Starbucks and get our coffee. We walk back to HubSpot and sit down on the couches in the lobby on the first floor.

  At last I ask why he seems so angry at me.

  “I feel like something must have happened, and I don’t know what it is,” I say. “If I did something to piss you off, I just want to know, so I can apologize and make things right.”

  I’m hoping he’ll soften up a bit and remember that we’re friends. But unfortunately that doesn’t happen. Trotsky sticks to his guns. He says that he is angry at me, and that I’m doing a shitty job, and I have a shitty attitude. I’m not showing enough team spirit, and I don’t respect him enough.

  “I’m the only person here who gives a shit about you,” he says, practically seething. “I don’t think you realize this, but I’m the only reason that you still have a job here at all. If it weren’t for me, they would have fired you a long time ago.”

  “How would they fire me?” I say. “Fire me for what?”

  “They’d call it an experiment that didn’t work out. They hired a journalist, but it wasn’t a good fit.”

  “Jesus. So Cranium wants to fire me?”

  “You’ve shown me no gratitude, and no respect. I’ve gone out of my way to help you. Over and over, I’ve tried to help you. I wanted to help you. But frankly, right now, I’m a lot less inclined to help you anymore. That’s just the truth.”

  He gets up. I get up too. We walk to the elevators and share an awkward, uncomfortable ride up to the fourth floor and back to our desks.

  I write to my friend, the C-level executive, and tell her that her suggestion about going out for coffee didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped.

  It turns out the abuse from Trotsky has only begun. From this point on he will be looking for any possible reason to tell me that I’ve done something wrong. One day I have a lunch set up with a local tech CEO, a guy who might be a good guest for the podcast. To make the lunch I have to miss the marketing department meeting, but this is no big deal. Cranium holds this meeting every Monday. It’s not mandatory. Sixty or so people attend, but it’s just a way to get an update on what’s happening in the department. People miss it all the time.

  Nevertheless after the meeting I get an angry email from Trotsky demanding to know why I wasn’t at the department meeting. I remind him that I had a lunch with a CEO and that I had cleared it with him in advance.

  Back comes an angry, argumentative email saying that I’m being standoffish and not making enough effort to demonstrate my loyalty to the team. I send a list of things I’ve done in my first week back to reconnect with my colleagues. He fires back with an email saying he does not accept my explanation and offering point-by-point rebuttals to all of the items on my list.

  Now that we’re on the subject of my loyalty, he has some other questions for me. How many sessions did I attend at Inbound? He doesn’t recall seeing me there. I send him a list of the panels I attended and the people I spoke to, which includes several of HubSpot’s board members and investors, one of whom, Lorrie Norrington, thanked me for doing a good job moderating the panel on which she appeared. I tell him the name of everyone at HubSpot with whom I’ve had coffee or lunch as part of my effort to reintegrate myself at the company.

  Okay, Trotsky says. But that’s not all. Why did I remove any mention of HubSpot from my profiles on Twitter and Facebook when I was away in Los Angeles? Why have I still not put the word HubSpot back into my profiles there? Why did I skip the Thursday night after-party at the Inbound conference? Do I not like to socialize with my colleagues?

  I explain that I don’t drink, and I don’t like going to parties where people drink too much. Also, I have two young kids, I’ve just spent part of the summer away from them, and when given the choice of spending a night home with my family or going to a keg party with a bunch of twenty-two-year-olds, I’m probably going to choose my family. Is this really a problem?

  It is. All of these little things, Trotsky says, are adding up to create a picture of an employee who just doesn’t care enough about the company. Each one makes it a little less likely that I will earn my way back into the company’s good graces.

  “These are setbacks,” he says.

  I keep expecting the old Trotsky to appear, burst out laughing, and say, “Shit, buddy, I’m just kidding! Oh my God, you should have seen the look on your face!” If that doesn’t happen I’m hoping he will at least pull me aside and say, “Look, I have orders from above to just give you loads of shit and make you miserable so you’ll leave. I don’t want to do it, but it’s my job, and I have to. I know it sucks, and I’m sorry.”

  But neither of those things happen. As far as I can tell, Trotsky really, sincerely means everything he says. Never in my life have I had someone turn on me so completely.

  The abuse continues when I start my new secretarial job on the podcast. Whatever I do, I’m falling short. Trotsky wants to know, what is my marketing plan? My marketing plan is to make a great podcast and over time it will build an audience. No! We’re marketing people. We need to do marketing! We need to create an email campaign and send spam to thousands of people urging them to click on a link and subscribe to the podcast. If enough people do that, we can trick Apple into thinking that we have a huge audience, and Apple will put our podcast near the top of its ratings.

  Numbers: We need them! How many listeners will we have in six months, and in a year? Where will the podcast rank in the iTunes Store? How soon will we get into the top ten? At what point can I promise that this will be the number-one business podcast in the entire world? These are projections that I need to make, and once I make them, I have to hit them—or else!

  As far as my career at HubSpot goes, everything is riding on the podcast.

  “It’s a very simple situation,” Trotsky says. “If the podcast succeeds, you keep your job.”

  “And if it doesn’t, then what? I get fired?”

  Trotsky scowls. “Just make sure it’s a success,” he says.

  Left unspoken is how we will define success. My guess is success is whatever Trotsky and Cranium decide it will be, and no matter what I do, I will never achieve it.

  Meanwhile, Trotsky rides me. Constantly. Why haven’t I scheduled meetings with a dozen different people across the marketing department to get them on board with the podcast? Why have I not solicited their help? So I do have those meetings. The question then becomes, Why didn’t I do that sooner? When is our deadline? When do we go live? Why can’t we start sooner? Do I not realize that I am now a project manager, responsible for every step of this project?

  Why have I not sent Trotsky a full report on my progress, in writing? Why have I not created a full podcast marketing campaign document and shared it via Google Docs with everyone in the marketing department so they can read the marketing plan and add comments? Once I do create that document, why am I not responding to comments immediately? Where are my responses to the list of comments that Trotsky has placed into the document?

  We’re creating a dedicated web page for the podcast. It looks great, but the designers miss their deadline and ask for a few extra days. I tell them that’s fine. Why did I do that? Why did I tell them they could have those days? Why did they miss the deadline in the first place? Did I fail to communicate the deadlines clearly enough to them?

  There’s a person I think would be great as a guest on the show. I send an email to Cranium asking him what he thinks. Trotsky leaps in: Why am I writing directly to Cranium? Why am I asking him to get involved in minor details like this? Do I not understand the protocol of how to deal with a C-level executive?

  A conference in Peru wants me to come give a talk. A HubSpot user group in San Diego wants me to come out. I say yes, of course, I want to help promote the brand. But no! Trotsky says I’ve screwed up again! Why am I accepting invitations to speak at conferences when I’m supposed to be hunk
ered down and focusing on the podcast?

  It’s all just crazy-making. The podcast is not a big deal, it’s not hard to do, and frankly nobody is ever going to listen to it, since it will be hosted by Cranium. I’m guessing he will draw about the same size audience as he used to attract with his HubSpot TV video podcast, meaning no one.

  This is basically a vanity project for our boss, and I’m happy to do it, but there’s no point in getting carried away and believing this jackass is going to be the host of the biggest business podcast in the world. There is also no point in setting unrealistic goals that will almost guarantee that I will fall short and fail, unless that’s the whole point, which I suspect it is.

  I try to distance myself from the abuse. I pretend I’m an anthropologist. How does the tribe behave when the chief has decided that one of the members must be driven off? I imagine that I’m a research psychologist and that the HubSpot marketing department is a laboratory exercise, a corporate version of the Stanford prison experiment or the Milgram experiment at Yale.

  I imagine that I am studying the way a corporate department goes about getting rid of an unwanted employee, using myself as the subject of the experiment. I’ve heard horror stories about people who have gone through this, but I’ve never experienced it myself, and I don’t know how it is done, specifically.

  I study Trotsky’s tactics and techniques, the way he will make a point of ignoring me—he sits only a few desks away from me and will sit there without acknowledging my presence. I admire the way he berates me without raising his voice and in fact takes the opposite approach and speaks more softly than usual, in a lower register, sometimes adopting the paternal tone of a teacher admonishing a student. He’ll wait until no one is around and then will pull up a chair, lean close, and explain to me that I’m really trying his patience with my behavior. Why did I ask him that question during that meeting? Was I trying to embarrass him in front of the others? He really wishes I would shape up and stop being so aggressive and hostile.

  Another of his tactics is to tell me that someone else in our department is furious with me and that he has fielded yet another complaint about me. Oddly enough, when I apologize to those people, they have no idea what I’m talking about. One person I’ve allegedly offended is Roberta, Cranium’s administrative assistant. Trotsky says she’s boiling mad because she booked a hotel room for me during the Inbound conference and I never used it, which wasted money and deprived someone else of a room. I can’t imagine why the company would book me a hotel room in Boston, since I live here. But I tell Roberta that I’m really sorry that she booked me a room and I didn’t use it.

  She looks at me as if I’m nuts. “It’s no big deal,” she says. “Nobody gave it a second thought.”

  I tell her I’ve heard she is really upset.

  “That’s ridiculous,” she says.

  The same goes for Monica and Eileen, the women who handle logistics for the conference. Supposedly they were so angry with me that I could never repair the breach, no matter how many times I apologized. This, too, turns out to be complete bullshit.

  “Neither of us was upset with you,” Monica will tell me, months after I leave HubSpot. I tell her I was told that she was furious with me. “That,” she says, “is complete news to me.”

  A public relations guy in Boston writes to me and says Trotsky has been getting into vehement arguments on Facebook, posting angry screeds and ad hominem attacks on people. “Is this guy really your boss?” the PR guy asks, having noticed that Trotsky works at HubSpot, where I also work. “How do you tolerate him? He seems to have a psycho streak in him. He comments on posts in a manner that I would classify as almost nuts. He comes off as insufferable. A first-class douchebag.”

  I’ve never had an abusive boss before. I’ve worked for a few colorful characters, including an editor at Forbes whom I once called a “fucking asshole” and who laughed and told me that this was why he loved working with me. I always found a way to get along with my colleagues. No one in my adult life, at work or elsewhere, has ever spoken to me the way Trotsky does. No one has ever berated me and insulted me, or expressed such hostility and contempt for me. Maybe I’ve just been lucky. Maybe this kind of treatment is what most people experience at work. But I’ve worked in some rough places, from a textile mill to a Hollywood writers’ room, and I’ve never experienced anything like Trotsky.

  I never got bullied in school, either, but I imagine this is what it feels like. Some guy is tormenting me, and I’m afraid to tell anyone, because I’m pretty sure that telling someone will only make things worse. That fear, in turn, sends me down a different rabbit hole and I start to hate myself for being such a coward, for being afraid to stand up for myself. I feel ashamed of myself. This guy is using me as his punching bag, and I’m not doing anything to stop him. It seems to me that if I can just keep it together, eventually he will realize that I won’t fight back and he will get bored with harassing me. Instead the opposite happens. When he realizes that I will not fight back, he becomes even more aggressive. It’s as if I’ve given him permission to beat the shit out of me.

  In a strange way, I almost admire Trotsky. As the subject of a psychology experiment, he’s fascinating. The problem is that this is not a psychology experiment, and despite my attempts to pretend that it is, the abuse begins to take a toll on me. I dread going to work. The office seems surreal, almost Kafkaesque. Trotsky has become my jailer, and I live in fear of doing something that will arouse his ire, but I have no idea what those things might be. Anything can set him off. I feel overpowered and helpless.

  Spinner sits around the corner from me, braying like a donkey at her own jokes. I’m surrounded by happy, upbeat young people who are all having the time of their lives in this adult kindergarten. Their latest innovation is a random lunch date generator, created by the women who work for Jordan, the creator of Fearless Friday: Sign up, and once a week you’ll be paired up with another HubSpotter for a getting-to-know-you-better lunch. The cheery atmosphere doesn’t offset the bleakness that I feel but instead makes it worse. I would love to work from home, but the podcast job requires me to be in the office, and anyway, Trotsky says I need to come into work to show that I’m a team player and that I’m “all in.”

  For weeks I put up with Trotsky’s abuse. No matter what he says, I respond in a calm, measured way. It takes a huge amount of energy to maintain that composure—and eventually I can’t do it anymore. One day I lose my temper and tell him to get off my back.

  It’s a Friday afternoon in October. In what has now become our regular little routine, Trotsky comes over to my desk, pulls up a chair, leans close to me, and in a voice that’s just above a whisper, starts complaining about something I said to him earlier in the day, which he says felt like an insult.

  This time I cut him off.

  “Look,” I say, “are you trying to make me quit? Because if so, it’s working. You’ve been riding me ever since I came back to work, or since before that even. You’re constantly giving me shit, and being hostile to me, and I don’t understand why. But I really wish you would stop.”

  He sits back. After a moment he says, “You know what? You’re right.”

  To my amazement, Trotsky admits that he has been hounding me. He even explains why he’s doing it. He says it’s because I unfriended him on Facebook, back in August. He knows it’s silly, but he felt insulted by this. I explain that after the fiasco over my Spinner joke, I severed my Facebook connections with everyone from HubSpot—not just him. I want to put a big space between my personal life and my work life. “I’m only using Facebook to post pictures of my kids and talk to my friends,” I say.

  Trotsky says he understands. He says he knows he can be thin-skinned and that he has a short temper. He gets offended too easily, and when he does he tends to go cold on people and write them off. Maybe that’s what has happened here, he says.

  “I’m going to get off your back,” he says. “I’ll give you some space.”
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br />   Remarkably, he does—for a few days. But then he comes back, having found a way to turn my complaint against me.

  “You know,” he says, sidling up to me one day, like Lumbergh, the smarmy boss in Office Space, “now that you’re being all defensive, this is causing a problem, because now you’re putting up a wall, and this makes it harder for me to do my job and be your manager. If I try to give you feedback, I’m worried that you’ll say I’m being hostile, or that I’m harassing you. Do you see what I’m saying?”

  Yes, I do: He’s saying that when I told him to stop harassing me, I was being hostile to him. I have to admit, it’s a good play on his part.

  My friend, the former C-level executive, the person who previously suggested I talk things over with Trotsky over coffee, now gives me new advice: Get out.

  “There aren’t any other options,” she says. “The guy has it in for you.”

  As if to add insult to injury, one day in a meeting of the entire content team Trotsky announces that he has come up with a big, bold idea. He is going to launch a new publication—a high-end online magazine, with feature articles aimed at investors and CEOs. It will be separate from the blog. It will have its own website, with beautiful illustrations and photographs, and feature-length articles.

  This is the exact idea that I pitched to Wingman when I first joined, and which he rejected. It’s the idea that I then took to Halligan and Dharmesh, and which they approved, but which Cranium refused to put into effect.

  Trotsky knows that I pitched this idea. He knows the whole story. Now he has just taken my idea and made it his own.

  But there’s more: “Some of you know we’ve been talking to Sandra Bale,” he says. “She gave a talk at Inbound, and everybody loved her.”

  Sandra Bale runs a blog for a venture capital firm in San Francisco. She’s thirty years old and briefly worked at the Wall Street Journal before going into public relations.

  “We’re not sure we can get her, but we’re pitching her really hard,” Trotsky says. “If she takes the job, we’re going to put her in charge of the new publication and have her build it for us. She’s a rock star. It would be a huge deal if we can get her.”