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Bob: Greg, I have an undocumented but deep-set concern that’s been slowly building over the past few years. It’s that malfeasance is on the rise, and many business leaders aren’t prepared or equipped to deal with it.

Do I have evidence to back this up? Well yes, so long as you accept a Gallup Poll on the subject as evidence. Which I would, except that (1)  looking at the result of its survey, Gallup didn’t ask respondents to assess the trustworthiness of pollsters; (2) like so many polls, the results are just the aggregated opinion of a bunch of average schmoes, not experts in the fields being rated; and (3) the closest the survey comes to IT professionals is “Business Executives,” and I don’t think our audience would appreciate being tarred with that particular brush.

What do you think, Greg? Have you seen a decline in ethics among the folks you deal with, whether we’re talking about employees, vendors, clients, or anyone else who would be of interest to KJR’s readers?

 

Greg:  The sad part is, Bob, I think the answer is yes, and I think the trend kinda took off as a result of the events and reckoning we affectionately remember as the year of 2020.   In previous experiences around crises, ( and I have experienced a few), a crisis typically will bring people together more than pull them apart. In the current situation, we see more alienation, and anxiety, pulling people apart, and to some degree, making malfeasance more acceptable, as well as more expected.    The implosion of FTX, the Bitcoin exchange, demonstrates malfeasance at scale, but also demonstrates that the people involved thought they were nice, decent, and completely within their rights to do what they did.

However, I think there is a solution– and that is for Professions to start acting like Professions again.  What do I mean by this?

A smart political scientist accidently defined what a profession was, in order to talk about whether a career was a professional job or not.

He came up with three criteria-

  • The career required some sort of expertise, and learning this might require extended practical and theoretical training.
  • The career’s impact was substantial to society, and that average people could trust that it would be practiced effectively.
  • The person practicing this career could expect to be part of a self-policing community, using its own language and standards of quality.

Somewhere along the lines, we have created new careers (Like IT Management and IT Engineering),  where conditions #1 and #2 plausibly exist, but perhaps not having condition #3.  Additionally, existing professions (like Accounting) get pushback when they try to update their standards for condition #1.

It seems to me that we need to build some consensus around these points in each profession, but we want to know that the people practicing it are living up to these three points.

 

Bob: I like where you’re going with this, Greg. There will be a “but” (of course there will!). Before we get to my qualifiers, though, what I like most about your emphasis on professionalism is that it provides a strong initial focal point, where folks who care about curtailing our current spiral into malfeasance embrace can establish what their tribe considers acceptable. And as tribalism is one of the root causes of our current drift, your approach can help facilitate the desired change in culture.

And from there it might encourage practitioners to extend their profession’s ethical code to their everyday lives.

But … (there it is!) we’ll have to deal with your prescription’s chicken-and-egg-ness. That is, a large enough fraction of a profession’s practitioners must want this outcome instead of considering a code of ethics to be confining. And, a large enough fraction of a profession’s practitioners must accept their profession’s governing body and respect its ethical consensus.

Or am I being too pessimistic about the situation?

 

Greg:   I hope that we haven’t gone completely nihilistic, and that we can still trust our “Better Angels” to believe that most people in a profession expect others in their profession to behave appropriately in a professional situation, and are willing to invest in this idea, to some degree.  What I think is missing is educating people that a word for what they are expecting exists, and it is “Professionalism”, and that bad actors, who demonstrate malfeasance, should be dealt with, according to condition #3– Who better to detect and correct the issues that CloudStrike had than others in the know, who can offer effective advice?

Goodness, please don’t go cynical on me, Bob!  We need to spread the word and ask our own profession to adopt these three conditions, and set an example.

 

Bob: Someone once defined “cynic” as someone who looks at the world through glass-colored glasses. So … who, me?

Anyway, Bob’s Last Word is that I changed my mind about the best part of your prescription. I now think it’s that it leverages our tribalist instincts to maximum advantage.

I’ll leave the last word to you.

 

Greg:  I like how you suggest using our instincts for good, not for evil!   Let’s roll with it.

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Mostly, when you work with someone for any length of time at all you can figure out if they were born with the Sense-o’-Humor gene.

Except for one person I worked with who had a sense of humor some days but not all days. We tried to get him to wear a badge – red on one side, green on the other – but he didn’t get the joke.

I rarely mind if someone doesn’t laugh when I crack wise. When they don’t know I’m cracking wise? That’s more of a challenge, especially as “I was just kidding!” has become the go-to excuse for anyone and everyone who’s been just plain offensive.

Meanwhile, a long-time subscriber writes of his recent trip to HR, the result of his having shown, at a company social event, the usual string of photos of attendees having fun and goofing around. What triggered the trip to HR: A slide showing one of the male attendees engaging in a minor bit of what he considered to be a harmless display of cross-dressing (women’s lingerie worn outside his clothing), which another attendee found offensive. To which, a few thoughts, musings, and concerns, starting with:

What offended the complainer? If they were offended by the cross-dressing itself, they’re the one who needs some HR coaching about tolerance. The “T” in “LGBTQ” might not stand for “transvestite,” but intolerance toward transvestites shouldn’t be acceptable.

The complaint might have been that the offender’s fashion statement ridiculed transvestites. That might hold water if this had been a repeat offense coupled with his having made derogatory statements about transvestites in general, or about a specific transvestite in particular. That wasn’t the case here.

My best guess is that HR decided to play it as safe as possible. Asking “What specifically did you find offensive about this?” could be counted as failing to deal with a harassing environment, and extracting a promise from the offender to never cross-dress at a company function again would seem to be a harmless way to close the matter and get on with business.

Except that extracting that same promise from anyone and everyone who cross-dresses at a company event would create an unwelcoming and harassing environment to transvestite employees.

Do all complaints require HR action? We are, to mix metaphors so badly you might want to complain to HR, on the knife edge of a pendulum you might think has swung too far. If businesses can only work when joking, joshing, and goofing around are banned because someone might find a way to take offense, that’s one more step in the evolution of employee/employee relationships, from interpersonal trust-based collaboration to interacting purely on the transactional basis of inputs and outputs.

On the other hand, as we’ve been discovering over the past several years, there’s no shortage of bigotry here in the U.S. of A. Should HR tell everyone who’s been offended by an overtly and expressively bigoted colleague to grow a thicker skin? That’s one more step on a different slippery slope – the one in which anger and hostility become the dominant characteristics of the business culture.

Bob’s last word: The problem managers find themselves dealing with when it comes to workplace harassment is that offensiveness, like its polar opposite, beauty, is in the eye (or ears) of the beholder.

My personal preference, which goes nowhere because it can’t, would be for the company policies and procedures manual to prescribe the process to be followed by anyone who’s been offended by anyone else:

Step 1: Inform the offender that you were offended, explain why, and ask that the offender not become a repeat offender.

Step 2a: If the offender acknowledges the legitimacy of the complaint and agrees to not engage in similar behavior in the future, case closed.

Step 2b: If the offender fails to acknowledge the legitimacy of the complaint, and repeats the offense, that’s when the person who’s been offended should contact HR, which would lay out the company’s you’re-way-beyond-our-zero-tolerance-for-bigotry-and-harassment policy.

But this isn’t going to happen – it would result in too much tangible risk, for rewards that are too intangible to warrant the risk.

The unsatisfactory alternative, which I unhappily recommend, is that we all need to be patient as the pendulum swings back and forth a few more times.

Bob’s sales pitch: Did you like what you read this week? Consider forwarding it to your HR director with my compliments. HR can’t be any happier about the numbification of the workforce than we are, and the more companies that are willing to try out alternative solutions the better.

If you do, let me know how it goes.

Now on CIO.com: Now on CIO.com: “Bad metrics are worse than no metrics,” and especially why SMART goals just might be worse than no goals at all.

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