Читать книгу The Good Ones - Bruce Weinstein - Страница 13
ОглавлениеThe price of greatness is responsibility.
—Winston Churchill
Harvey is a senior manager with an electronic stock-trading company. One of his direct reports, Lisa, was having performance issues. She had a habit of texting friends while she was at work, and this sometimes made her slow to return calls, respond to emails, and attend to other duties. But her mistakes didn’t have serious financial consequences for the company or its clients. Because she was a personable, well-liked employee who had a positive effect on employee morale, Harvey struggled with how to handle her shortcomings.
Eventually it came time to manage Lisa up or out. Because of his concerns about Lisa’s performance, Harvey put her on probation for two months. He explained that if her work did not improve, she would be fired. During the probationary period, Lisa’s performance was excellent. Harvey was startled to see how well she did her work when she set her mind to it. After the two-month probationary period, Harvey told Lisa that she was on track for a promotion, as long as she could focus on her work and represent the company well.
A few weeks later, Lisa made a serious technical error that caused several hundred customer calls to be dropped simultaneously. The company spent tens of thousands of dollars compensating these customers for deals that were affected by the error. Lisa had gone back to texting on the job, and her distraction had led to the technical glitch.
Lisa was fired immediately, but Harvey felt personally responsible for the dropped calls, even though no one could have foreseen that Lisa could have caused a problem of such magnitude. “If I had fired her instead of putting her on probation, none of this would have happened,” he told a few of his colleagues. The day Harvey fired Lisa, he went to his own boss, Suresh, and submitted his resignation. But Suresh wouldn’t accept it. Instead he did something completely unexpected: he promoted Harvey.
“What Harvey did showed a lot of accountability,” one of his colleagues told me. “He took responsibility for what one of his direct reports did, even though Harvey had nothing to do with it directly. Although Lisa did have performance issues for a long time, she shaped up during the probationary period, so Harvey had no reason to let her go. In fact, she’d improved quite a bit.”
Harvey is one of the Good Ones, because he took responsibility for a mistake that one of his team members caused. His honorable conduct resulted in a promotion that his colleagues felt was well deserved.
What Is Accountability?
Accountable employees do four things consistently:
• They keep their promises.
• They consider the consequences of their actions.
• They take responsibility for their mistakes.
• They make amends for those mistakes.
Let’s consider each of these characteristics in greater detail.
Keeping a Promise
“I’m going to do what I say I’m going to do, and if I don’t do it, I’ll let you know,” Karen Jacobsen says with great passion. Karen, who is known as the GPS Girl, is the Australian female voice of Siri on the iPhone and on some GPS car-navigation devices. An associate who didn’t care about keeping promises changed the way Karen conducts her business.
Karen makes her living as a professional singer and speaker. She has shared the bill with Neil Sedaka, Norah Jones, and Christopher Cross and has sung the National Anthem at Fenway Park before a sold-out Boston Red Sox game. Mel, a promoter, had impressed Karen with his charisma, high energy, and enthusiasm, so she hired him to handle the logistics of an event where she wanted to perform. When the event wasn’t selling as well as Karen and Mel had hoped, Mel told Karen he wanted to cancel the engagement. “I was shocked he would even suggest such a thing, because I come from a world where the philosophy is ‘The show must go on,’” Karen says. “For one thing, we’d hired a lot of freelancers who would stand to lose income if the event were canceled.”
Karen hadn’t signed contracts with all of the freelancers. “At that time, I didn’t always formalize these agreements. Just shaking hands had always worked for me.” But Mel wasn’t concerned about whether he’d made any promises, even implied ones, so he had no compunction about walking away from the assignment — which he did. As a result, Karen had to cancel the event, because she wasn’t equipped to manage it on her own. She contacted all of the freelancers, explained what had happened, and apologized profusely. She was upset at letting so many people down.
There are two ways of looking at this story through the lens of character. One interpretation is that Karen and Mel simply had different values. For Karen, booking a musical event had both a financial component and a people-centered component. It was important to make a profit, but it was also important to honor the implied promise of hiring the freelancers she and Mel had contacted. Mel’s only concern was financial, so his decision to cancel the gig was simply a pragmatic one.
Viewed another way, however, Mel’s narrow focus on finances wasn’t merely different from Karen’s broader view: it was dishonorable. Dozens of people who had reason to believe they would earn money from the event (many of whom had probably turned down other opportunities in order to commit to this one) lost out.
Looking at the story this way makes more business sense as well as more ethical sense. By walking away from a commitment, Mel damaged several professional relationships. First, he ruined his chances of doing business with Karen again, or getting a good referral from her. Second, he hurt his chances of working with the freelancers he had approached. Third, the venue Mel had booked will not want to do business with him again, for the same reasons.
In some cases, performers and organizers stand to lose so much money from a poorly attended show that continuing with it does not make sense. In this instance, however, the show was imminent, and for Karen, who values keeping her word above all else, cancellation was not an option.
The relationship between a promoter and an artist is a partnership. It is counterproductive for the two parties to have opposing values. Karen now works with another promoter, Tom, whom she has known for years, who shares her values — and to whom she is married. Tom knows he may have to be willing to take a financial hit on occasion so that performers can count on him to keep his promise. In the years Karen has been working with Tom, however, she hasn’t had to compromise her financial well-being to maintain her ethical standards.
“I do still use handshakes from time to time,” Karen texted me recently. “However, I now use contracts and require full payment before live engagements. That has been a massive shift in the way I do business, and it’s very positive. The experience with Mel definitely was a turning point.”
Considering Consequences
Diana Mekota, a recent college graduate, moved back to Cleveland, her hometown, and thought that reaching out to Kelly Blazek, the self-described “Job Bank Mother,” would be a smart move. Since Diana didn’t know Kelly personally, she did what millions of people around the world do every day to connect with people they don’t know: she contacted her through the business networking website LinkedIn.
Most LinkedIn users who get a connection request from someone they don’t know do one of two things: ignore it or accept it. A few ask for clarification. Kelly chose to respond in another way. She wrote to Diana and said, “Your invite to connect is inappropriate, beneficial only to you, and tacky. Wow, I cannot wait to let every 25-year-old jobseeker mine my top-tier marketing connections to help them land a job. Love the sense of entitlement in your generation. And therefore I enjoy denying your invite.” Kelly added that Diana was “a total stranger who has nothing to offer me,” and after several more condescending statements and personal attacks, she ended with “Don’t ever write me again.”
Perhaps Kelly thought Diana was a casting agent for a remake of Mommie Dearest. It’s hard to find any other explanation for such a contemptuous message. Ironically, the Cleveland chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators had chosen Kelly as their 2013 Communicator of the Year. In one sense, they were correct to do so: Kelly certainly communicated her contempt clearly and unambiguously. She set out to accomplish a goal — humiliating a job seeker — and succeeded. However, she didn’t consider the possible consequences.
Diana posted Kelly’s message on other social networking websites, including Reddit, Imgur, and Facebook, and asked readers to “please call this lady out.” The message was linked to Buzzfeed and then went viral on Twitter and other social media. The story was picked up by news outlets, including CNN, Adweek, and the BBC. Many in the Cleveland business community and beyond pressured Kelly to return her communicator award, which she eventually did. She also apologized to Diana and deleted her own Twitter account, her blog, and everything in her LinkedIn account except her recommendations.
The ethical issues in this story aren’t as clear-cut as they might seem. LinkedIn requests from complete strangers can indeed be bothersome, especially if you get a lot of them, as Kelly apparently did. Diana would have shown greater respect for Kelly by asking a mutual friend for an introduction. And Kelly is far from a villain. A Cleveland marketing and sales consultant, Terry Novak, described her as having been “selfless in her efforts to help people in the sales/marketing, PR, and media fields find leads for jobs in Northeast Ohio for a long time.” It’s also troubling that Diana’s revelations made Kelly’s private communication a matter of public record, easily and permanently accessible on the internet.
If Kelly’s email to Diana were the only stain on an otherwise spotless record of supporting job seekers in Cleveland, one might be tempted to grant Kelly a pass and move on. Who among us hasn’t made a colossal error in judgment like Kelly’s? But other recipients of hateful communications from Kelly have come forward, indicating that her mistreatment of people is closer to a pattern than to a single, isolated incident.
As Stefanie Moore, an assistant professor at Kent State University’s School of Journalism and Mass Communications, told the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “This serves as another reminder that we are held accountable for our actions, even more so in our online-driven world. If we’re inconsistent in our interactions with our audiences online and offline, we’ll be called out. It can take years to build your online reputation and only one slip-up on social media to destroy it. Another lesson: Think before hitting ‘send.’”
Professor Moore is right. In a world where work is increasingly conducted online, high-character employees consider the consequences of every text, email, tweet, and online forum post they make at work. Some go further and apply that standard to their online activity outside work.
Back when news was disseminated in physical objects called newspapers, a popular guideline for acting honorably was “Don’t do anything you wouldn’t want to see as a headline in tomorrow’s paper.” The story of Kelly Blazek’s LinkedIn communications suggests an updated rule: “Avoid writing or saying anything you wouldn’t want to go viral.”
This sounds like a standard that allows for communicating only trivialities, but it’s not as stringent as that. It simply calls on us to consider the consequences of what we write. Freedom has never meant having the right to insult anyone at anytime for any reason. The internet is the most powerful communications tool the world has ever seen, and as Uncle Ben told Peter Parker in the Spider-Man saga, “With great power comes great responsibility.”
Some of the Good Ones handle their work-related frustrations by writing an angry response and then deleting it before sending. This tactic offers all of the giddy pleasure of saying exactly what you feel without any of the unpleasant side effects, such as getting fired, jeopardizing your reputation, or being the subject of a social-media campaign. Had Kelly Blazek read David Shipley and Will Schwalbe’s book Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better, she might have thought twice about communicating in this hurtful way.
Taking Responsibility
The head of the marketing department was furious. “I want Brad fired — now!” he yelled to Geri, a human resources director with a large pharmaceutical company. Brad worked in the mailroom, and, during his rounds delivering the mail, he had made a threatening remark to an employee in marketing. Brad’s career could have come to an abrupt end that day, but Geri didn’t want to move so quickly.
She invited Brad and two witnesses to come to her office to discuss the matter. “Did you really tell someone, ‘You better watch your back?’” she asked. Brad denied it several times. After several uncomfortable moments of silence, he asked, “Um, can you please open the window?” Geri could see that he was troubled by the proceedings. “OK, yes, I said it, but I didn’t mean anything by it,” Brad admitted. “I wasn’t actually going to hurt the guy I said it to.”
Geri came from a sales background and prided herself on being able to read people well. She believed that Brad was sincere and that letting him go would be a mistake. She told him, “Maybe you didn’t mean anything by what you said, but you have to understand that saying ‘You better watch your back’ can seem threatening to the person on the other end. You can’t talk like that if you want to work here.”
“You’re right,” Brad said. “I take full responsibility for what I did.” But he went further than that.
Making Amends
Geri told me that Brad had come from a troubled background but that she saw him as “a sweet fellow underneath a gruff exterior.” The reason the head of marketing wanted Brad fired, Geri believed, was not so much the remark Brad had made as the way he looked — like a guy who’d had a hardscrabble life. Geri’s success in HR is due in no small part to the fact that she refuses to judge a book by its cover.
Brad volunteered to apologize to the person he’d scared and vowed never to repeat the behavior. He pleaded with Geri to be allowed to keep his job. Geri agreed on the condition that Brad take an anger-management course. That couldn’t have been an easy thing for Brad to do, but he did it. Now, every time he runs into Geri, he thanks her profusely for helping him become a better employee — and a better person. Recently, Brad was voted Employee of the Month, and he views the incident that set all of this in motion as a turning point in his professional and personal development.
By taking responsibility for his actions, making the necessary amends, and growing from the experience, Brad has demonstrated that he is one of the Good Ones. But so is Geri, who had faith in Brad and knew that it would it be a mistake to let him go. Too many of us take others at face value. Fortunately, people like Geri are willing to fight for employees like Brad who accept responsibility for their mistakes and take steps to move beyond them.
A Strong Work Ethic
“Action-oriented” is the first listing in Ken Sundheim’s Forbes.com essay “15 Traits of the Ideal Employee.” “Stagnant employees won’t make your company money; action-oriented employees will,” Sundheim writes. The top item in Kevin Daum’s article for Inc. online, “5 Desirable Traits of Great Employees,” is “accountability.” “Employees can be smart, likeable and talented,” Daum writes, “but, if you can’t trust them to do what they say they’ll do, you and everyone else will constantly waste time and energy checking up on their work.” Who is right?
They both are. A strong work ethic is a component of accountability. If there’s some confusion about this, it’s because we talk about work ethic in psychological or emotional terms. A person with a poor work ethic is called “lazy,” while someone with a superior work ethic is a “self-starter” or “highly motivated.” This is a mistake. Having a strong work ethic fundamentally means keeping promises to one’s employer. That’s why it’s an issue of character.
Some of us take our work ethic too far, however. Let’s consider why high-character employees appreciate the difference between working hard and being a workaholic. We’ll then address a question that older workers are asking a lot these days: Do Millennials (people born between 1980 and the early 2000s) lack a strong work ethic?
Workaholism and Work Ethic: What’s the Difference?
Hubert’s life revolves around his job. He sleeps with his smartphone next to his bed, and it’s always on. The first thing he does in the morning is check his email and answer as many messages as he can. It’s also the last thing he does at night. In between, Hubert never stops. But Hubert has missed, and continues to miss, important milestones in his personal life. He rarely goes to his children’s birthday parties or school band concerts. He frequently interrupts dinner with his family to take a call or send a client a document. When he has a cold, he comes to work because he doesn’t want people to think he’s a slacker. He’s overweight, doesn’t exercise, and eats a lot of junk food.
Marie works hard, too. She is at her desk promptly at the start of the work day, and she is highly focused at staff meetings, on the phone with clients, and at her computer. She’s not a robot: Marie loves to doodle on a notepad when she’s at a meeting (a habit that may enhance retention and promote creativity). She watches what she eats, goes to the gym several times a week, and on the rare occasions when she comes down with a cold or the flu, she stays home until she’s well enough to be productive at the office. Marie, by her own admission, isn’t perfect. Like Hubert, she checks her smartphone for work-related email at home from time to time. But unlike Hubert, she knows this compulsion is neither healthy nor necessary.
Marie has a strong work ethic. Hubert is a workaholic. I know both people, and it’s difficult to imagine that Hubert is going to have a long life. He’s in his early fifties but looks ten years older. He has developed a chronic illness that, even if it’s not caused directly by his workaholism, isn’t being made any better by it. One look at Hubert, and you know this man is in trouble. But he doesn’t see it that way.
Hubert is defined by his work. His constant preoccupation with his job isn’t a sign of a strong work ethic: it’s more akin to an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Marie works hard for her clients, but she also makes time for valued relationships outside work. She establishes and maintains healthy boundaries between her work and the rest of her life.
“Kids Today!” Do Millennials Lack a Strong Work Ethic?
A few years ago, I had a Q&A video series on Bloomberg Businessweek online called Ask the Ethics Guy. Thomas Lanis, director of the Oscar L. Parker Center for the Advancement of Ethical Standards in Business and Society at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma, submitted the following question: “Are there generational differences in ethical values? Some of our local employers and some of my business school colleagues seem to think that young people lack the work ethic of their parents and grandparents. What do you think?”
A study conducted at Bentley University showed that 89 percent of the Millennials surveyed said they have a strong work ethic; 74 percent of non-Millennials saw Millennials this way. The latter group was composed primarily of older people — business decisionmakers and corporate recruiters among them — but also included some people younger than Millennials. On the basis of this survey, Professor Lanis’s associates aren’t the only ones who believe Millennials avoid working hard. But what’s striking about the Bentley finding is that almost three-quarters of non-Millennials claimed that Millennials take their work seriously. That’s the takeaway message from this extensive survey.
Do young people really exhibit “luxury, bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect to elders, and a love for chatter in place of exercise”? This quotation comes from Kenneth John Freeman’s 1907 dissertation at Cambridge University. Freeman was summarizing ancient views of young people, and his words are often misattributed to Socrates (a blunder I made myself in my video response to Dr. Lanis’s question). Senior members of society have been complaining about the habits of youngsters for eons, but it’s time to label those complaints for what they are: prejudice.
Perhaps the people grousing about Millennials are simply jealous, like the old man in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life who watches George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) trying to work up the nerve to kiss Mary Hatch (Donna Reed). Fed up by Bailey’s shyness, the gentleman saunters back into his house and mutters, “Oh, youth is wasted on the wrong people!”
The Cost of Failing to Be Accountable
Employees Who Aren’t Accountable Don’t Stick around for Long
Nadine was an administrative assistant at a large staffing firm. Marcus, her supervisor, told me that she didn’t have a lot of clerical experience before he hired her, but she was most enthusiastic about working for the company. “I can teach people how to do a job,” he said, “but I can’t teach them to be passionate about doing it.” During the initial phase of her employment, Nadine impressed Marcus by how quickly she acclimated to the work. “Some of her colleagues told me how personable she was, and a few clients said she was friendly and efficient. That counts for a lot.”
But the quality of Nadine’s work started to suffer. She stopped responding to Marcus’s emails and texts promptly. She didn’t complete basic assignments she said she was going to do. And she made a lot of excuses for why things weren’t getting done. “She went from working to shirking,” Marcus said. He gave her many opportunities to improve, but things got worse, not better. Nothing in Nadine’s personal life had changed, but for whatever reason, it became clear that Nadine wasn’t accountable to her employer. Marcus fired her and quickly found a replacement he can count on.
“Hype artists — people who promise a lot but don’t deliver — usually get found out pretty quickly and don’t last long,” says Jonathan Taplin, whose extensive career in the film, television, music, and financial industries has included producing Martin Scorsese’s film Mean Streets, working with George Harrison to organize the Concert for Bangladesh, overseeing media mergers and acquisitions at Merrill Lynch, and creating the world’s first video-on-demand internet service. Employees who repeatedly fail to do what they say they’ll do damage their reputations and their employability, Jonathan adds. Blaming others or making excuses for their mistakes doesn’t do them any favors, either.
Or as Melvin Meads, my high school band director, used to say, “We could have the Tonight Show’s lead trumpet player in the band, but it wouldn’t do us any good if he showed up late for rehearsal all the time.” He said this just before telling a latecomer to go home.
Failing to Hold People Accountable Costs Businesses Money
Laura, a senior human resources manager at a large hospital, told me about Hank, an employee who many believed was taking kickbacks from a pharmacy for patient referrals. He had also been a poor performer for a long time. Eventually the company decided to fire him, but since he was a union employee, the company chose to reach a financial settlement with Hank rather than go before a third-party arbitrator, as required by the union.
“We settled for the highest amount I’d ever settled an arbitration for,” Laura said. This was partly because there weren’t enough people willing to go on the record to document Hank’s alleged misconduct, so the company would not have fared well in arbitration. “But part of that settlement,” Laura observed, “is the penalty we pay for not having dealt with Hank’s substandard work performance. There are financial consequences for failing to hold people accountable.”
This is true in nonunion environments too, notes Alan Tecktiel. “When employees are not held accountable until the point when they need to be fired, companies are usually forced to provide a severance package to avoid legal trouble. Depending on the size of the company, this can cost millions of dollars.”
Obstacles to Accountability
What gets in the way of being accountable at work?
An Organizational Culture That Doesn’t Value Accountability
Wouldn’t you expect that after the government bailouts of 2008 and 2009, a company like General Motors would go out of its way to avoid even the perception of wrongdoing? Recently, however, GM has been called before Congress to account for its failure, for over a decade, to recall thousands of defective automobiles that resulted in more than a dozen deaths.
According to CEO Mary Barra, the problem had to do with “bureaucratic processes that avoided accountability.” In practical terms, this meant that no one in the chain of command was willing to take responsibility for mistakes. Gretchen Morgenson reported in the New York Times that an internal investigation revealed the following common practices:
• Executives learned about defective ignition switches at committee meetings but either took no action or punted the matter to other committees. Because minutes of meetings were rarely taken, it was impossible to discover who had made decisions.
• Some evasive ploys by executives became so common that they acquired names. In the GM nod, attendees at meetings agreed to take action but then adjourned with no intention of actually doing anything. The GM salute entailed a crossing of the arms and pointing outward toward others, indicating that the responsibility belongs to someone else, not me.
• In a rhetorical move worthy of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, employees were forbidden from using certain words in their written communications. A “problem” became an “issue”; a “defect” was changed to a feature that “does not perform to design.”
The buck stops with the CEO, so Mary Barra was on the right track in identifying a systemic resistance to accountability at GM. Now comes the hard part: changing the culture. The jury is still out on whether GM will be able to achieve that.
The Urge to Overpromise
Why don’t people follow through on what they say they’re going to do? When I fail to keep a promise I make, it’s not because I don’t intend to keep the promise when I make it. That’s what Jean-Paul Sartre calls “bad faith.” Rather, it’s because I want to please the person who is making the request and don’t think about how much effort it will entail.
For example, in 2013 I gave a talk to a group of association executives, and a member of the audience — I’ll call her Alison — approached me after the speech and asked me to write an article for her organization’s magazine. I was honored and agreed on the spot to do it. As the deadline for the piece approached, I found myself swamped by promises I’d made previously (namely giving talks to other organizations), and I missed the deadline. I contacted Alison, apologized profusely, and asked if I could still write the piece for her.
No dice. The magazine had contracted with someone else. I suspect I’m permanently on the do-not-call list for this group, and I have no one to blame but myself.
Instead of promising Alison right away that I’d write the article, I should have carefully reviewed my schedule to see if I’d have time to take on the project. An honest assessment would have shown me that I would not be able to do it (at least not well). But I wanted to please her, so my knee-jerk reaction was to say, “Yes, I’d love to do it!” Ironically, my failure to follow through thwarted my desire to please her.
Time, Money, and Energy
Early in my career as a professional speaker, a prestigious high school hired me to deliver a talk on ethics to the faculty. Just as Karen Jacobsen did with Mel, I trusted the person I was working with to honor our agreement. In fact, I had a written contract, which stated that payment was due on the day of the presentation. The school’s representative, Enid, assured me the day before the talk that she had the check ready to deliver.
I arrived well before the starting time and asked Enid to confirm that the check would be available after my talk. “Well, I thought I’d have it by now, but I promise I can get it to you tomorrow,” she told me. The school was technically in breach of contract, but I didn’t see why over one hundred faculty members had to be penalized for a failure they had nothing to do with, so I gave the speech.
The next day Enid told me that she was having trouble getting the check processed. “No later than next week,” she assured me. Weeks, then months, passed with no payment forthcoming.
At that point I had the choice of either writing off the loss or taking the school to court. The amount of money at stake wasn’t a fortune, but it wasn’t insubstantial, either. I felt the client had betrayed my trust, and I also wondered how many other speakers the school might stiff if I didn’t fight back. I felt that a lawsuit was justified. So Richard Solomon, an attorney friend of mine, said he would take on my case.
The school didn’t bother sending a lawyer to the hearing because they had no defense. It took two years of diligent work on my friend’s part, but I received the payment I’d been promised.
My kind lawyer refused to accept payment for his good work, even though it cost him a lot of time and energy to resolve the matter. He agrees with me that it was worth the effort to hold the school accountable for its debt. But it’s understandable that many people who suffer losses through someone else’s dishonorable behavior choose to move on rather than fight. It can cost a lot of time and effort as well as money to hold promise breakers accountable. Karen Jacobsen told me, “I don’t want to have negative energy in my life, which is what going after a deadbeat client would entail.”
Employees who routinely fail to be accountable rack up all three costs — time, money, and energy — for their employers. Supervisors have to divert their attention to the errant employees, which also incurs an opportunity cost. A report from the staffing firm Robert Half International reveals that managers spend almost 17 percent of their time at work — or close to a full day out of five — dealing with underperforming employees.
