The CBS story is being told as a fight. I’d tell it as a system.
Scott Pelley versus Bari Weiss. Who’s right, who’s the villain, who threw the first punch.
That framing keeps the whole thing in spectacle mode and spectacle is what makes a situation like this impossible to repair.
If you brought us in to run a leadership off-site at CBS, the first move wouldn’t be figuring out who’s right.
It would be reading the system and running an audit that asks one question: what is each person actually afraid of?
Because everyone here has been disrupted. New owner, new editor-in-chief, new executive producer, colleagues walking out the door. When that much changes that fast, the brain’s threat-detection system goes to red alert and people drop into fight-or-flight. Nobody thinks clearly in that state. Underneath, we’re all five years old, asking the same two questions: Is this safe? Do I belong?
So instead of scoring the fight, look at the fear. A veteran who believes his life’s work is dissolving and underneath the anger is grief. A new leader installed over people who didn’t choose her, with no broadcast background and real pressure to deliver. An executive producer with a title but no earned standing yet. A corporate owner whose priority seems to be getting his deals approved.
Everyone is downstream of someone else’s fear. The stick gets bigger as you go up and the person at the bottom, with the least formal power, gets the loudest, because his voice is all that’s left to him.
So in the audit, we wouldn’t ask who’s right. We’d ask each person: What outcome do you actually want? What do you want to be true in six months? For Pelley, what are you afraid of losing? (I’d guess it’s not the job. It’s the legacy. Did it matter?) For the new leadership, what would earn the standing you don’t yet have? For the owner, do you actually care whether 60 Minutes survives, or do you just need it to stop making headlines?
Because the real question is never who has the most power. It’s who’s regulated enough, secure enough in their own seat, to put the stick down and convene the conversation instead.
Then three moves:
Name the disruption out loud. Don’t send the “let’s get back to work” memo. Dr. Dan Siegel calls it name it to tame it. Say the true thing: people we respected are gone, we’re sad about it, and that’s allowed. Here’s what we’re building, and why.
New owners get to set direction. That’s their right: new strategy, new vision, even a hard pivot. But setting a new direction doesn’t mean clearing out the people who made it what it is. You can be right about where the company needs to go and still get the how badly wrong. And the way you treat the people you let go is being studied, in real time, by everyone you’re keeping.
And this is the hard one. Someone has to go first. In a room this frightened, everyone is waiting for proof it’s safe before they’ll lower their guard, which means no one ever does. Somebody has to move before it’s safe. Somebody has to be willing to say I’m sorry. I got that wrong. Let’s repair it without knowing whether it’ll be met or used against them. When you’re gripped by existential fear, going first is the hardest thing a person can do. But absent it, the imploding just continues. It takes an adult to be the steady one while everyone else is in fight-or-flight.
Here’s the part I most want people to hear.
There are very few people on this planet who are wholly evil. Most are simply trying to do their best inside a situation that has them frightened. Right now every person in that newsroom is firing on a threat response—everyone reads as a foe.
But ask what’s that person’s story, what are they actually experiencing, and something shifts. The brain begins to rewire. Foe softens, maybe not to friend, but at least to ally.
That’s the work. Not deciding who’s right. Stabilizing things enough that the people who tell the story can stop becoming it.
#Leadership #ChangeManagement #Disruption