All Posts in Career Management

|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

When you’re negotiating, be smart and act stupid.

I’ve heard this advice many times over the years, but my pride never lets me accept it. Ego-gratification always ends up taking precedence over financial gain.

This is semi-good career counsel too. When you try to prove you’re smarter than your organizational superiors (superior in position only, of course), one of two things will happen – both bad:

1. You succeed. By both being smarter and spending your energy proving it, you’ve made yourself dangerous.

2. You fail. You’re not executive material – you just don’t measure up.

Keep your ego out of it. When you disagree, you aren’t right and your boss isn’t wrong. You’re discussing and reconciling alternatives, to help fine-tune the program. In the end, your initiative and skill have to advance your boss’s decisions, not your own. This is called “followership” and it’s a valuable and valued skill.

You may be getting peeved, thinking I’m recommending toadyism. Think again. Pride is one of the seven deadly sins. I’m just giving a practical example of how the workplace punishes sinfulness.

Many readers took similar exception to an earlier column, which pointed out that the ethics of power lead to complications beyond commonplace, day-to-day morality. Right is right and wrong is wrong, and that’s all there is too it, complained some of these readers. Regardless of what I actually said, grumbled others, my column encouraged unethical behavior among the powerful.

Notes from readers and messages posted on the InfoWorld Electric forum on the subject, brought several points into sharper focus:

1. The Edge of the Slippery Slope: Politicians used to gain power to advance their programs. Bad enough, but as campaigning has become marketing, politicians now adjust their programs to gain power. This distinction – gaining power to achieve worthwhile ends vs attaching yourself to whatever ends will gain you power, define (for me) the edge of an ethical precipice. When you’re playing the power game, ask yourself this question on a regular basis: “What am I trying to achieve, and if I achieve it, will I approve of the result?”

2. Means and Ends: The ends, we’re told as children, never justify the means. This guidance provides a useful touchstone … for children. Adults, especially those with some power (and that includes everyone in management) need to apply a more sophisticated calculation.

Every action (the means) has both an immediate consequence, consequences intended to achieve a goal (the end), and unintentional effects as well (side effects). Defining the ethics of an action by its immediate consequence alone is naive – the ethical content of an action must be measured through a complex calculus that takes into account all of its consequences.

You’ve heard this before: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

3. Gut Feeling: Should you trust your instincts when it comes to distinguishing right from wrong? Probably not. Huck Finn pointed this out: “If I had a yaller dog with no more sense than a man’s conscience, I’d shoot him.”

Your gut feelings come from how your mother raised you, and Mom didn’t explain the choices I’d have to make as a manager. An anecdote to illustrate the point:

Several years ago, one of my staff had to insist that a vendor replace a project manager on an installation. Our complaint ended up getting the project manager fired. My staff felt understandably bad about the impact on this guy.

Here was my response: “You knew the guy who got fired. A total stranger now has an opportunity. Your knowing someone personally doesn’t make him or her more deserving.”

After reading the earlier column, my friend Steve Nazian reminded me of a character in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, who recommended: “Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”

Proving, once again, the value of science fiction to your career.

Comments

|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

In graduate school, while I monitored electric fish, my friend Henry McDermott watched prairie chickens mate.

Male prairie chickens congregate in an area the size of a suburban lawn called a “lek”. The highest-status male grabs a territory the size of a kitchen table in the middle. The others array themselves outward from there, in larger but more peripheral chunks of turf, doing the prairie chicken dance. Female prairie chickens wander through the lek, most mating with the central male. Success declines with distance from the middle. It’s disco.

Biologists erroneously figured the biggest, meanest male owned the middle. Henry discovered something different: over the years, those males who survive drift to the middle. It’s a seniority system.

In 1980 I stopped torturing fish, entered the business world, and spotted the similarity of prairie chickens and executive succession. Executives achieved power by avoiding decisions and their attendant risks. If they survived they progressed toward the center, though their companies stagnated.

The prairie chicken strategy no longer works very well – it will only get you to middle management, where stress is highest and security nonexistent.

In the 1990s, management power has a stronger tie to creating the company’s success. That doesn’t mean you will thrive by viewing one as the inevitable consequence of the other. Assuming you have a management title, you’re playing the power game every day. You can’t quite the game, any more than you can ignore the laws of thermodynamics. You can, however, decide how you choose to play it.

Machiavelli, the second-most maligned individual in history (the Sheriff of Nottingham was first, as the real Robin Hood was apparently a thug) wrestled with this, the main conundrum of power: can you achieve it and keep it while practicing the morality you preach?

Power has its own logic and morality. A leader who fails to do what’s necessary to maintain power will lose it others. If, at times, this means the execution or exile (or corporate equivalent) of an influential rival, that’s preferable to that rival’s executing or exiling you.

Do you have to sacrifice your principles to rise in your career? Not sacrifice. Rethink. Do you want to accomplish something? You think you can do a better job than those currently in authority? If you can’t gain and hold onto authority you won’t accomplish your goals. It’s a poor code of ethics that celebrates the failure to do good, and yields power to those who want it most.

And if acquiring and maintaining power requires unethical behavior? That’s Machiavelli’s paradox, and it’s intellectually lazy to think you’re somehow more noble by “refusing to play the game”. That’s how power ends up in the hands of those with the fewest scruples.

Am I advocating you start practicing ruthless, backstabbing politics? Not at all. I’m suggesting that if you ignore the realities of power you’ll never understand the behavior of those who embrace them.
Most of us operate under a shared system of mores we’ve all agreed to live within. We assume shared limits to each other’s behavior, experience shock when someone violates those norms, and expects society to impose sanctions to punish that behavior and prevent a recurrence. Charles van Doren calls this a state of law.

Those with both the most and least power live closer to a “state of nature” with fewer societal restraints. Punishment is a natural expression of success or failure in this system, not an expression of societal norms. This is the kind of system that evolves according to more Darwinian rules.

Which is why we can learn a lot from watching animals.

—————————————————-

Bibliography: My thinking on this subject has been heavily influenced by two books: Management and Machiavelli, by Anton Jay, and A History of Knowledge by Charles van Doren, which describes the evolution of Western thought and culture.

Comments