By Bill Catlette and Richard Hadden
Last month, smack in the middle of a keynote speech
on Discretionary Effort to a management group, an
audience member raised his hand and asked me to
back up to the previous slide, one that provided a
visual summary of some of our thoughts on leadership
morality, as it pertains to discretionary effort. One of
the notes on that slide suggested that, as a
fundamental element of trust, "Truth is essentially a
black and white issue." He then asked me to explain
my thinking, which I was more than happy to do. I
told him what I thought, and moved on.
Unfortunately, in retrospect, I didn't answer his
question very well, owing perhaps to the fact that
my little pea brain was fully consumed at the moment
with retaining and ordering the next thirty minutes of
stuff I really wanted them to hear. My bad. Herein is
what I hope is a better answer to his question, which
I intend to send him. You may ride along.
No Ethics, No Effort
People don't ordinarily commit chunks of their
Discretionary Effort without cause, or on behalf of
those they find lacking in some important respect.
More to the point, they won't follow them period, let
alone part with Oomph (our chosen word
for 'Discretionary Effort.') That is especially the case
when it comes to those who lack, or have lost touch
with the essential, character-related qualities of
leadership. If your job is to get people to dispense
Discretionary Effort in pursuit of your organization's
goals (as we suspect it is), some self-evaluation, vis-
à-vis your own character-related qualities of
leadership might be in order.
One of those qualities - indeed the very foundation
on which this thing called leadership rests, is the
expectation that a leader has an accurate moral
compass, and can be trusted by those who would
follow him or her to reliably do the right thing, even in
the absence of guidelines or laws. Make that
especially in the absence of guidelines. When
these
un-anticipatable situations present themselves, are
you guided by your internal, and highly reliable sense
of what's 'right'? Or by office politics and short-term
self-interest?
We're not talking about do-gooders, but ordinary
people who, when under the pressure of danger,
threats, or temptation, manage to maintain an
abiding sense of right and wrong. They are
comfortable within their own skin. They will take a
stand, and they tell the truth - each time, every time.
Moral Anchors
Are there people you've known who could always be
counted on to find their "True North", and act
accordingly? We call these people 'Moral Anchors'.
Think about them. How would they respond to that
ethical dilemma you're faced with? How have things
turned out for them?
Years ago (as in before kids), my wife and I used to
get together with a group of friends, and often, we
would play the board game 'Scruples' (still available,
at www.scruplesg
ame.com), in which players are asked to name
their response to various moral and ethical dilemmas,
and, even more tellingly, to guess how the other
players would respond. This group, which we came to
call the 'Scruples Group' still gets together
occasionally, and we decided that at our next
gathering, set for next month, we're going to break
out the old game again. (Someone's dog has chewed
on our 1985 edition, and so we've ordered the new
Millennium edition.) If you want to test
your 'scruples', you may want to consider playing the
game...at the office. In fact, we've used it as a
teaching tool in the corporate classroom.
Right is Right
One of the reasons most of us have so little faith in
our political 'leaders' is that nearly all of them seem
perfectly capable of rationalizing any position on just
about any subject in order to inflate their
appearance, advance an agenda, or save their own
skin. Truth to them is a relative matter, based more
on polls, votes, or weasel words than an internal
compass.
This is often manifest through the careful parsing of
words, or 'dancing on the head of a pin' if you will.
Whether it has to do with what "the meaning of the
word 'is' is," as one former resident of 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue put it, or another's difficulty in
characterizing the pre-2003 relationship between al
Quaeda and Iraq, we are all too familiar with the
condition.
Sadly, this notion of shading (if not inventing) the
truth, and attempting to redefine the boundaries of
right and wrong resides in the business world as well.
An Accumulation of Little One-Off
Decisions
For years, Canadian born Bernie Ebbers was viewed
as a wonder boy as he grew a tiny Mississippi phone
company into a telecommunications powerhouse
through a series of highly leveraged acquisitions.
With commercials featuring basketball uberstar,
Michael Jordan, and the $40 billion acquisition of MCI
in 1998, WorldCom was the darling of Wall Street.
Things seemed great until June 25, 2002, when
Ebbers' MCI WorldCom announced that, due to what
later proved to be fraudulent accounting irregularities
of gargantuan proportion, the company would need
to restate earnings. When the dust finally settled,
the restatement amounted to $11 billion, and MCI
WorldCom's subsequent bankruptcy filing wiped out
thousands of jobs and billions in shareholder wealth.
In July 2005, Ebbers was forced to surrender much of
his personal wealth, and sentenced by a federal
judge to spend effectively the rest of his life in prison.
What happened? What went wrong? Though it is
difficult to ever really know what is in a person's
heart, there is a pretty good trail of behavior to
suggest that Bernie Ebbers didn't wake up one
morning and decide to pull off one of the greatest
train robberies in history. No, it seems far more
probable, that Ebbers, the former basketball coach,
Sunday school teacher, and gentleman farmer, had
succumbed to the accretive influence of what former
Schwab CEO, David Pottruck called a bunch of little
one-off decisions.
Speaking of difficulties his own firm had encountered
during his tenure as CEO, Pottruck allowed that,
"Firms like Schwab don't get into trouble because
somebody at the top decided one day that conflicts
of interest are okay... but because of an
accumulation of little one-off decisions."
Whether the cheating started as a result of a
little white lie to investment bankers, a little
something extra on an expense report, or the
tendency to start believing one's own marketing
hype, chances are, the great WorldCom meltdown
started low and slow, and worked its way up from
there.
The lesson for the rest of us who would accept the
mantle of leadership is that when it comes to doing
the right thing, there is no middle ground; there can
be no equivocating. This is not 'horseshoes and hand
grenades.' Little sins of omission have a nasty habit
of growing into big sins of commission. A little fudging
on an expense report or performance review is the
same as digging into the corporate till with a big
Caterpillar 972H wheel loader, and should be treated
in the same manner.
