Podcast transcript about "servant-style management"

An AOLer was impacted by the podcast I did with Ewan in which I discussed our “servant-style” management philosophy. He took the time to do a rough transcript of what I said:

We had a big philosophical rule at Weblogs, Inc., which was, anybody who was negative, a downer, not a go-getter, not resilient, we got rid of immediately, from bloggers, to programmers, to people in the management team, anybody involved in the company. And we probably let go of, in the history of the 300 bloggers we have, might have turned off the accounts of 5 or 10 bloggers in the history of it, I don’t know exactly. A very small number of people, considering most of the bloggers we’ve signed up we’ve never met in person. I think the overwhelming majority of the time, 90% of the time we turned somebody off, was because they were just a negative, downer, complaining: why don’t we have this yet, why don’t we have a wiki, why don’t we have enclosures? I find that those–when you’re in management, the people who are–you spend more than half your time on the people who are complainers, then what happens is over time, you don’t pay attention to the good people, so the Peter Rojas’s of the world, the Ryan Block’s of the world, the Judith’s of the world, the Barb’s or Brad’s … those people just sit there and do it day-in and day-out–Brian Alvey–and then you wind up paying attention to those people who are complaining. As a manager, you are there for the service of the people work–and you know, I’m making those quotes with my fingers–the people “under” you, which I hate [that phrase]. Weblogs, Inc., is the flattest organization I’ve ever been part of, and I don’t consider myself above anybody in the company. I actually consider myself the servant of the people on my management team, and I consider my management team the servants of the people who work with them.

Dossy… the first step to not being a drain or negative force is knowing that you’re one. I’m sure you can turn it around…