NORMALITY: Expect values conflicts so that you approach them calmly and competently. Overreaction can limit your choices unnecessarily.
Even though so many respondents to the Aspen student attitude survey expected to encounter values conflicts in the workplace, and graduate students who have had four or five years of business experience before matriculating appear to have no problem generating examples of such conflicts, our interviews with managers and our observations suggest that often people do not see ethical or moral challenges as a natural or integral part of doing business. We think of ourselves as just working along, minding our own business, when all of a sudden a values conflict inserts itself into the flow of our professional lives. It threatens to derail us. It feels as if it is somehow getting in the way of our “regular” or “real” work. It feels unusual, extraordinary, different. It’s an intrusion into the way things ought to be. We often feel or say, “I never expected to encounter this,” even when the conflict we are facing is a classic business ethics problem.
Framing the situation as extraordinary in this way can sometimes have a disabling effect. We feel as if we have stepped out of our competent, action-oriented work identities and a more personal part of ourselves is somehow being engaged. This kind of compartmentalization—between our work selves and our personal selves—can mean that even if we typically have no problem articulating a contrarian position on a business decision, we may silence ourselves when it comes to ethical arguments.
Precisely because the ethical conflict is perceived as something separate and apart from business as usual, we are more likely to think in terms of just getting through this challenge so we can get back to business. Framing the challenge as exceptional can mean that we view our actions as not really expressions of who we are. Instead, they are aberrations that we just need to “get past” somehow.
Describing an ethical challenge, one manager interviewed expressed it this way: “In retrospect, this problem really wasn’t that overwhelming once I figured out what I wanted to do. But before I had done that, I lied— instinctively I lied—hoping that it just wouldn’t happen again. Now I realize such choices are an inevitable part of our business journey and it doesn’t seem so huge.”1 Note that this interviewee is not saying that violating his values is normal; rather, he is saying that facing values conflicts is inevitable.
The first time he was confronted with the particu-lar conflict, he was taken off guard and his default position was to lie and try to quickly move on. In retrospect he realized that if he was going to continue in his line of work—as a consultant to facilitate mergers and acquisitions—he was going to encounter this particular challenge repeatedly. That is, he would be asked by someone with whom he had developed a personal as well as professional relationship from one firm to reveal information that would have an impact on that person’s career but would also be considered confidential by the other firm the consultant represented. He realized that he had to decide whether he was going to just keep lying—either to his employer firm or to the individuals who requested information—or whether there was a better and more honest way to handle the situation.
By accepting the fact that this was an expected and predictable type of situation in his line of work, he could deescalate the emotion and develop a kind of script that was both honest and also respected his duty of confidentiality to his employer. He would tell such individuals, straight out, that he could not share that information even if he had it, thereby not revealing whether he knew or not. But then he would go on to talk to them about what he had learned from similar situations in the past, how he would think about and prepare himself for any eventuality if he were in the questioner’s situation. In this way, he offered the best counsel he could without violating his duty of confidentiality.
The fact is, the script he developed was not “magic” in any way; it was just so clear and unequivocal that it would serve to end the conversation before it got into sticky territory. He could acknowledge his concern for the other person without interpreting that to mean he was required to violate his assessment of his professional obligations, and he could also offer truly helpful insights and advice. In the same way that the other individual was appealing to friendship to request confidential information, he would appeal to their friendship when asking the other to understand his position and his need for discretion. The trick was that he normalized the situation and prepared himself for it, thereby reducing the emotional charge and pressure.
One of the most striking lessons learned from talking to managers who had, in fact, found ways to voice their values is that their approaches and their arguments, although sometimes quite clever, were rarely the types of scripts that any of us could not have thought of ourselves. (Witness the script developed by our consultant above.) What is striking is that these managers believed in the arguments and were comfortable enough with them to actually say them out loud to their intended audience. Too often we fail to express our arguments because we fear they are not bulletproof, but they do not need to be. In fact, the reasons that another person may give us for not voicing our values are just as imperfect as our arguments for doing so, if not more. Although the consultant above tried his best to give good advice to his colleague, the fact is that he did not give him the single definitive piece of information that was requested. However, that did not mean that his script was not appropriate and useful. The experience of actually collecting stories of times when folks have voiced their values successfully has taught us that the search for an unassailable argument can be the enemy of success. It becomes more important to normalize the act of expressing our values, and we can do this via practice.
If we approach our business careers with the expectation that we will face values conflicts and have anticipated some of the most common types in our intended industry and functional area, not only can we minimize the disabling effect of surprise, but also we will likely find ourselves framing attempts to speak about these issues in a less alarmist or emotional manner and more as a matter of course. Such an approach can have the effect of normalizing and defusing the topic for ourselves as well as for the individuals with whom we hope to discuss it.
Similarly, it is useful to become familiar, if not comfortable, with the inevitable risks that come with values conflicts. The idea is to normalize the stakes. We all recognize that any business decision—any life decision—comes with the risk that it will not turn out as we hope. Our choices come with no guarantees, and that is also true of our choice to voice and act on our values.
In an interview with Linda Hill in Harvard Business Review, Franco Bernabe, CEO of Eni, a major energy-focused industrial group in Italy, comments on the lessons of leadership that guided him through not only a dramatic corporate transformation and turnaround but also a recovery from widespread corruption and public scandal. In particular, he describes the process of normalizing the risks that accompany a choice to respond to values conflicts:
Leadership requires a willingness to take risks. I took many big risks. But I had two psychological parachutes. First, I was young enough that being fired for pursuing the right ideas wouldn’t hurt me—it would be to my credit. I could have worked somewhere else. Second, I never used the paraphernalia of the position. Being the chief executive of a company like Eni, and one of the top managers in the country, you have offered to you a number of perks that can make your life different. I didn’t take them. … If I had lost my job and gone back to something more subdued and less glamorous—well, it wouldn’t have changed my life. So taking risks didn’t seem that frightening to me. I didn’t have anything to lose.2
Bernabe’s two “parachutes” bear a bit more examination. The first one—that he could weather being fired because he was young enough to find another job—is particularly interesting because it runs counter to one of the usual reasons given for not acting on one’s values: Often people say they could not act on their values because they were too young, too junior in the organization, and that they would have to wait until they were in charge to actually make a difference. Bernabe takes this argument and turns it on its head. This is an example of one of the rationalizations for failing to address values conflicts in the workplace, and the kind of reframing that enables us to counter it, that we will address in more depth in subsequent chapters.
Bernabe’s second parachute—the idea that he did not allow himself to become attached to the perks of the job—is more familiar. For example, at the end of a Harvard Business School case study, as the protagonist, Donna Dubinsky, considers taking a controversial stand, she recalls some advice a business school professor gave her six years earlier: “He had told students that the first thing to do after graduating was to start pulling together their ‘go-to-hell money.’ Dubinsky took that to mean that she should never put herself in a situation from which she could not walk away.”3
By anticipating or normalizing the idea that we will have to take risks—even career-threatening ones—in service of our values at some point in our work lives, we expand our vision of what degree of freedom we have in our decision making. The explicit decision to prepare for that eventuality—whether it means saving some amount of go-to-hell money or forgoing certain lifestyle perks or, as we will discuss later, understanding our own particular risk profile—again makes this kind of choice both easier to imagine and more practical to enact. This is not to say that such a choice will never be painless but, rather, that looking at such choices in this way—as normal and survivable—makes them seem possible.
Finally, viewing values conflicts in the workplace as a normal and expected part of our professional lives enables us to more easily understand, identify with, and communicate with those who place us in these challenging situations. If values conflicts are a normal part of our work lives, then those who present these conflicts don’t have to be seen as villains. They may well be just like us. Commenting on Roy Baumeister’s research on evil, Jonathan Haidt explains: “When taking the perpetrator’s perspective, he [Baumeister] found that people who do things we see as evil… rarely think they are doing anything wrong. They almost always see themselves as responding to attacks and provocations in ways that are justified. They often think that they themselves are victims.”4
Although this research focused on human cruelty and aggression rather than the kinds of workplace transgressions we’re talking about, it usefully suggests that all people can benefit from recognizing not only their own tendency toward self-justification but also the concomitant tendency to view others as entirely wrong. Diminishing the perceived distance between us and the individual or individuals who present us with a values conflict can make voicing our concerns less daunting, because we can more easily find some common ground.
Perhaps another story can be helpful here. Frank was delighted when he was promoted to controller for the regional sales unit of a leading chemical producer where he had been employed for the last three years.5 It was a big boost in responsibility and enabled him to participate in the incentive compensation program. As he faced the first end-of-quarter crunch, however, he wondered what he had gotten himself into.
A major customer placed a large order just one week before the end of the quarter, but did not want delivery till the middle of the next quarter. The sales director of Frank’s group wanted to recognize the revenue at the time of the order, thereby ensuring the maximum bonus for his group for the quarter. This would mean processing the order, shipping the product to a warehouse, and bearing the carrying costs until shipment to the customer in the following quarter.
Frank felt pressure on all sides. When he sat in the accounting organization, he saw the costs of such revenue recognition problems: the cost of sending messages to all levels of the organization that it was acceptable to game the system; the loss of information and distortions in expectations that jeopardized effective decision making; the cost of records cleanup when the distortion eventually came to light; and so on. He still reported to his old team in the internal control office, and he knew they were counting on him to make the right decisions on this kind of thing. On the other hand, he wanted the sales director and his new unit’s general manager to consider him one of the team. He wanted to earn their trust and respect.
This is a classic GVV situation, because Frank is convinced about what he thinks is the right thing to do and his own values are clear even though he himself would benefit financially from a higher quarterly revenues report. Therefore his challenge is not so much to decide what is ethical—he has already done that—but rather to effectively communicate his perspective.
As in the mergers and acquisitions consultant’s example above, Frank’s problem is nothing new or extraordinary in an organization like his. In an effort to create incentives for the sales force, the firm creates the temptation to distort internal reporting. So right off the bat, he can recognize that as long as he pursues his chosen career path, he will likely encounter such situations. The trick becomes figuring out how to normalize this challenge in a way that reduces the stress and disabling effects of surprise and social pressures, without normalizing the actual abuse itself, because that might create cynicism and reduce his sense of the importance of voicing his values.
One way of normalizing Frank’s conflict without normalizing the abuse is to think about the broader nature of his work as controller and the way it can be seen by managers outside his area. Managers sometimes bring conflicting assumptions to the function of internal financial and sales reporting: a simultaneous belief and disbelief in “the numbers.” On the one hand, they see themselves as governed by the rules and regulations of financial reporting (both intra- and extra-organizational), unable to act without a version of the numbers to back them up; on the other hand, they see themselves as autonomous agents who manipulate the reporting tools to their own ends. This contradiction is succinctly summed up in the often-heard query: “Can you make the numbers work?” Implicit in this question are the twin assumptions that the numbers can be manipulated and that they are the ultimate arbiter. Sometimes simply naming—and thereby normalizing—this contradiction gives us some common ground from which to begin a conversation about the uses and the integrity of reporting.6
Another way to normalize the values conflict—again without normalizing the abuse itself—is to consider what is actually at stake for each party in the situation. So for example, Frank might conclude that the stakes for the internal control group and for his company in general include compromised information for decision-making purposes; the costs of cleaning up the data and records if (or when) the actual situation becomes clear; the negative impact on company behavior norms when playing with the numbers becomes the unstated expectation; the actual carrying costs for warehousing the product that was shipped prematurely; and, depending on the nature of the distorted reporting, any potential legal or regulatory sanctions. For Frank and his colleagues in the regional sales unit, the size of their quarterly bonus is at stake. The general manager and the sales director want to maintain their group’s performance levels and to save face, since Frank may presume that they have approved this sort of reporting distortion in the past. And for Frank, the stakes include his confidence that he has acted in accordance with his own values; his long-standing reputation with his accounting colleagues; and his new relationship with the sales team.
By identifying the potentially conflicted perspective that managers may have on the function of internal reporting, as well as the varied and sometimes conflicting stakes for all decision makers, Frank can gain insight into how company processes can encourage the reporting distortions he is observing. This reduces his need and tendency to view his new colleagues in the regional sales department as wholly unethical. Their reactions become predictable (“normal”), although not acceptable.
This insight can also point the way to his best methods for arguing against the abuse. In addition to explaining the broader and longer-term organizational costs of the distortion, Frank might explore and agree to pursue systemic changes that might reduce the temptation and pressure to distort reports and better align financial incentives with accurate reporting. We know that there are a number of specific factors that can contribute to the prevalence of fraudulent reporting, such as “a low belief both in the analyzability of information and in the measurability and verifiability of data,” and recognizing these factors can provide Frank with a place to start in addressing them.7 Finally, although there is no easy way to tell his peers their bonus will be reduced this quarter, he can certainly look for ways to make the longer-term costs and benefits more tangible to them, and he can lead by example since his own compensation is on the line as well. This positions him as “one of us” and gives his arguments more credibility.
By taking a step back and viewing his conflict in broad organizational and functional terms, and by identifying what is at stake for all, Frank has shifted an exceptional—for him—and emotional problem, fraught with blame, into a predictable and organizational challenge that draws on his professional expertise in the design and implementation of internal control systems. It is not that the audience he needs to address will necessarily be any less opposed to his arguments, but rather that he will be speaking from a position of clarity, substance, and even empathy and he will have positive options to propose rather than only a negative one to impose. His position can move from “thou shalt not” to “let’s try”—and whether his audience is persuaded or not, Frank feels as if he has stronger ground to stand upon. This is just part of his job; it’s only normal.
Sometimes the impact of normalizing values conflicts can sneak up on us. In Chapter 1, I shared how developing and teaching a course on diversity enabled me to more naturally, more frequently, and more effectively respond to examples of identity-based bias and insensitivity in my consulting experiences because I was so accustomed to their manifestations and the possible responses to them. Once we recognize these impacts of normalization, we can actually pursue this phenomenon intentionally. The tools for this normalization include recognizing that values conflicts are going to be a regular and predictable experience in the work we have chosen; intentionally putting them into a wider context, reflecting on functional and organizational factors that contribute to or might mitigate the conflict; and explicitly identifying the stakes in the situation for all parties. The goal here is to reduce the emotion and surprise around the conflict itself, as well as to reduce the need to vilify the individuals with whom we may need to disagree. We can understand and normalize their temptations without accepting their actions as appropriate. And we can thereby identify, in advance, the kinds of arguments that will enable us to calmly and effectively respond to the situation and voice our values in the most easily understood and accepted forms.