Is the Cult of Personality a Liability for Your Employer Brand?
In late August, the CEO of Gravity Payments, Dan Price, resigned after several women accused him of sexual assault.
Before the accusations were made public, Price was popular on social media for his posts that promoted fair pay (in 2015, Price set the starting salary at Gravity Payments at $70,000 and reduced his salary to match), compassionate work environments, and work-life balance, and that criticized corporate greed, workaholism, and the overpaid C-suite.
Price is not just the founder of the company, he’s also been the face of the company. His pro-worker position has become the company’s position and a terrific employer branding tool. Price has a cult-like following online. His LinkedIn posts alone often draw more than 10,000 likes and hundreds of comments, many of them fawning.
He’s regularly in the media. In 2020, Ashleigh Carter reported for Now This that Price asked “lawmakers to increase his taxes in order to help people experiencing homelessness.” Inc. put him on the cover of their print edition in 2015 with the headline, “Is This the Best Boss in America?” He’s been on The Kelly Clarkson Show twice.
Price’s reputation has not been without complication, though. There has been a fair share of articles giving the side-eye to his sparkling image and flagging inconsistencies in his stories. Still, the company has maintained its favorable reputation.
But now that Price has been accused, in great detail, of assault, will the company be able to redeem its image? Is Price too closely linked to the company?
When personality becomes unpopular
In 2019, Zoe Schiffer reported for The Verge about the ugly culture at Away, the brand that makes the hardshell suitcases every Millennial, including myself, rolls around the airport.
Apparently, Away’s founders, Steph Korey and Jen Rubio (more specifically Korey, according to Schiffer’s story), were creating a toxic work environment by asking employees to work late into the night and on weekends, telling employees to cancel holiday travel plans, singling out workers for mistakes in front of the whole company, berating the customer service team for minor errors, and being passive aggressive (and sometimes cruel) on Slack.
Here’s one chilling Slack message Steph Korey sent around three o’clock in the morning.
“I know this group is hungry for career development opportunities, and in an effort to support you in developing your skills, I am going to help you learn the career skill of accountability. To hold you accountable...no more [paid time off] or [work from home] requests will be considered from the 6 of you...I hope everyone in this group appreciates the thoughtfulness I’ve put into creating this career development opportunity and that you’re all excited to operate consistently with our core values.”
Before the Verge story, Korey and Rubio were popular features during the pitch of #MeToo and the most recent women’s movement, and were the subjects of a great deal of publicity as a result of their extremely popular company. Both women are young, attractive, and successful role-model types for ambitious Millennials, and they were featured as a boss-girl pair in TIME, Inc., The Cut, Fortune, and TODAY. The same year the story about its toxic work culture ran, the company had been valued at $1.4 billion.
After the Verge story, Korey left her CEO position and the company in December 2019. Sort of. She came back as CEO in January. But that was a bad move. Korey’s persona was too toxic. She resigned again later that year. In 2021, her co-founder Jen Rubio took over.
Rubio was president and chief brand officer when all of this was going on, but it was Korey who took the fall. A head rolled and the media and the public were placated. Whether the culture changed, we don’t know.
Ultimately, the company recovered. In 2022, Away expanded its product line and Rubio was appointed to the board of directors at Scripps Research and at Yahoo. I can’t find another valuation since 2019 (they haven’t been fundraising), but the company seems to be doing just fine.
The same can’t be said for Man Repeller, the fashion site that started as Leandra Medine’s personal style blog. Medine was the man repeller herself, and a completely new kind of writer in a stodgy fashion industry. The blog grew into a multi-contributor site with a full-time staff and frequent collaborations with designers on limited-edition product lines. Medine was always the face of the brand.
Medine “stepped back” from her chief role and took a board seat in 2020 after being accused of fostering a workplace that discriminated against people of color and of posting on the company’s socials about racial justice just for the PR bump. Remaining employees rebranded the site, but it folded just two months after Medine’s departure.
Audrey Gelman, the founder and public face of The Wing, a woman-only coworking space and social club, resigned in 2020 after multiple accusations by Black and Brown employees that the company was effectively a country club, with a white old guard and a staff made of poorly compensated and poorly treated people of color. Black members weren’t any happier with their experiences. Char Adams wrote about an incident at the Wing’s Hollywood location in which a white Wing member yelled “insults and threats” at a Black Wing member and her guest over a disputed parking space. The shouting woman was not asked to leave.
The Wing closed in fall 2022.
The liability of a cult following
I want to be clear that there is a difference between what Korey, Medine, and Gelman are accused of and what Price is accused of. There is being an asshole, and then there is being a criminal: It’s a long, long way from bully to rapist.
I also don’t want to attribute the dissolution of these companies only to the events recounted here. This isn’t data as much as it is anecdote. For example, many coworking spaces have closed since 2020 because they just couldn’t operate.
What these companies have in common is executive leaders that were the face of the brand. Leaders whose falls, if they didn’t bring down the company, certainly didn’t help.
The cult of personality that glorifies a single person as the billboard representative is a risk to an employer brand. Whether the takedown is warranted or not, the persona gives the public a figurehead to torch. But even that doesn’t always solve the problem. For some brands, the reputation is just too damaged, and the entire operation can be labeled poisonous, even if the problem is just one person or a handful of people.
According to an HBR article by Wade Burgess from 2016, “the top three factors that contribute most to a bad reputation as a place to work are concerns about job security, dysfunctional teams, and poor leadership.” In a survey of 1,000 workers in the U.S., half said they wouldn’t take a job with a company that exhibited those three things, even if it paid more.
Burgess continues: “A company with 10,000 employees could be spending as much as $7.6 million in additional wages to make up for a poor reputation.”
It’s not surprising the cult of personality works for an employer brand. It’s fun to root for a hero. Further, people don’t want to just buy from companies with a “mission,” they want to work for them too. We don’t know yet whether Price’s fall will tank Gravity Payments, but we do know that when these company heroes fall, they fall a very long way.
Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza writes about workplace culture, DEI, and hiring. Her work has appeared in Fast Company, From Day One, and InHerSight, among others.
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