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“Do the right thing” is to ethics as “best practice” is to business processes. They’re phrases that sound just like they might mean something.

Except that they don’t.

Case in point, based on a recent request for advice: You’re on a team. The team’s job is to figure out a better way for the company to do something or other.

In the early stages of analysis two alternatives came into focus as potential solutions. Neither was obviously wrong, but over time a team consensus has emerged as to which of the two was the better path forward.

When the time comes to report the preliminary solution to the project’s sponsor and steering committee, though, the project manager presents the other alternative. He’s completely within his authority. You and the rest of the team simply disagree with him.

The ethical question: You’re on the team. Your company’s Values Card makes it clear you’re supposed to do the right thing.

What, however, is this “right thing” you’re supposed to do?

The most obvious approach is to blow the whistle. That’ll show him.

And it might. Or it might not, but the telltale here is “that’ll show him.” Blowing the whistle might in fact be the right choice, but you’d have no way of knowing, because what you’d be doing is satisfying your urge to vent, not holding yourself to high ethical standards.

There is, after all, a reason mutiny on the high seas is frowned upon, even when the captain’s orders appear highly dubious to the crew. Blow the whistle and it won’t be just the project manager’s standing that is lowered in the eyes of the project sponsor — the entire team will look bad whether or not you persuade the sponsor to overrule the project manager.

Add to that the impact on ongoing team dynamics. Your ability to work with the project manager will be permanently impaired. So will your ability to work with many of the other members of the team, who, while on your side with respect to the design itself, disagree with your decision to escalate.

As an alternative to whistleblowing you might simply leave the team. Except, you can’t just leave the team. You’ll have to provide a reason, or perhaps three reasons — one for the project manager, one for your reporting manager, and one for your soon-to-be-erstwhile teammates.

For each audience you can either be honest about the reason or you can make up a plausible excuse. Plausible excuses being convenient falsehoods, this branch probably won’t survive ethical scrutiny, while honesty will result in everyone who knows about what’s going on concluding you’re a prima donna who bails whenever something doesn’t go your way.

So far, so bad: Two alternatives, two unsatisfactory outcomes.

Here’s another one: You can confront the project manager. “What the fleep do you think you were doing!?!?” you might calmly ask at the next team meeting, or, if you’re in the mood to be discreet, privately.

If the project manager were the sort to accept that he’d done something wrong, he wouldn’t have violated the team’s consensus in the first place. If you choose the public option the blow up you’ve just engineered will further damage the ability of the team to function. If you do this privately you’ll merely damage your ability to work effectively with the project manager.

Either way, you won’t change the outcome.

Hmmm.

Another possibility: You can accept the project manager’s decision and move on from there without comment. This avoids all the previous downsides. It does, on the other hand, encourage a repeat performance.

The point of this little tale of woe? It started as a what-do-you-think-I-should-do inquiry, and from that perspective my answer is simple: Keep your mouth shut and document the event. That way, if everything does fall apart as a result of the project manager’s poor choice, you have some hope of salvaging your own reputation.

But there’s a difference between doing what’s most prudent and taking the most ethical course of action.

Those who advocate doing the right thing generally imagine the main barrier standing in the way of right-thing-ness is fear of the personal consequences.

That may be so in some situations. But in just as many, to my way of counting, the biggest barrier isn’t timidity.

It’s the difficulty of figuring out just exactly what the right thing to do is.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Target Corporation just laid off 1,700 of the 10,000 employees working at its Minneapolis headquarters, with more layoffs likely to come.

The buzz here in the Twin Cities is that Target headquarters was what you’d expect of a corporate headquarters — too many managers, too few of whom contributed tangible value, resulting in excessive overhead and a culture of complacency.

In principle, a company that’s become bloated, sluggish and complacent in an industry as vicious as discount retailing does have to do something drastic. Also, good for Target for laying off headquarters staff instead of starving its stores of employees and merchandise.

And, while pointing this out isn’t particularly kind, many large enterprises do accumulate employees who mostly “hide behind the herd.” They look just like productive employees except for not actually producing very much.

Sometimes layoffs provide a smokescreen for clearing out the herd-hiders. If that was part of Target’s motivation for its layoffs we’ll never know.

What Brian Cornell, Target’s CEO, and the company’s other top executives say is that this move and related steps should result in a $2 billion reduction in operating costs that would make Target leaner and more agile in an effort to better compete with Walmart and Amazon.

To give you a sense of scale, Target’s capital budget last year — a decent proxy for what it invests in itself — was $1.8 billion. $2 billion isn’t chump change. It provides much-needed funds for Target to invest in increased competitiveness and profitable growth.

How will Target invest it?

Discount retailing lives and dies on competitive pricing. Target sells about $73 billion in merchandise each year. So … let’s see … carry the 1 … its savings could finance a 3% across-the-board reduction in prices or a much bigger reduction if Target targeted (sorry) specific product lines, channels, or geographies.

Or, the $2 billion could finance Target’s planned expansion of its grocery business. This is hardly a blue ocean strategy … there’s nothing novel or particularly interesting about Target’s grocery section. And supermarketry has notoriously high competition and poor margins besides (2% is common). But it would at least be a strategy into which the company is investing.

Instead …

As the StarTribune’s headline explained without a hint of irony, “Inside Target’s growth plan, buybacks play a strong role.” How strong? Over the next five years, Target plans to buy back $14 billion worth of its stock — $1.5 billion next year, $2 billion per year for the following four years.

Target will save $2 billion per year and spend every cent of it buying back its own stock, leaving nothing at all … nothing … to increase its investment in profitable growth.

It’s financial engineering at its finest.

How can you benefit from these insights?

Put yourself in a Target manager’s place. Your company is planning a round of layoffs, and you’re told what your department’s share of the pain is going to be. Four suggestions:

  • Be discreet. As a manager you aren’t a free agent. Quite the opposite, you’re acting as your employer agent. So long as you accept your paycheck, your job is to carry out your employer’s plans, so long as those plans are legal. Disagree vehemently? Keep it to yourself.
  • Do lay off your worst performers. You probably have an employee or three on your teams who you’ve kept because they’re nice people, not because they contribute all that much. You no longer have that luxury.

Yes, it’s a shame. Nice people deserve to make a living. But for reasons I hope are obvious, the workplace has to be a meritocracy, not a … nicetocracy?

  • Don’t wait to tell them. Your nice employees deserved to understand, long before the layoff planning started, that first and foremost they had to be strong contributors and if they couldn’t be strong contributors in their current roles, it was up to them to find some other role in which they could be strong contributors. They’re nice people. You’re a nice person. Telling these nice people they aren’t succeeding in their current roles and need to do something to fix this might be an uncomfortable conversation, but it’s the nice thing to do.

So do it.

  • Plan your own departure. While there are exceptions, companies whose primary strategy is financial engineering usually continue to shrink. When you find out yours is one of them it’s a great time to start exploring your own alternatives.

Because failure is contagious. You can catch it from your employer.

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