Now that we’ve considered better and worse ways of dealing with people largely at the same level of power and influence as you, let’s look at how you might make the most of your relationships with those who wield less power. We ’ll examine these issues:
• Giving criticism
• Downsizing and firing staff members
• Handling unpaid internships
It was the weekly team meeting, a Friday no different from any other. My friend John; his boss, Cheryl; and John’s assistant, Minsun, were planning their work for the following week. John made a casual remark about the prestigious grant he’d recently been awarded, when suddenly Cheryl exploded.
“All I’ve been hearing about for weeks is your grant!” she blurted, which apparently was quite uncharacteristic of her. John had never seen his boss show any anger, let alone say something like this, and the two had been working together for years.
Cheryl stopped yelling, and John became uncharacteristically quiet. This anger had obviously been simmering for a while, and it erupted violently. John confessed to me that he had indeed been talking a lot about the project for which he’d been given funds. It was valuable to his career, and he had worked really hard to get it. He also admitted that even though the organization had agreed to give him some time off each week to work on the project, he was probably spending too many hours on it. Cheryl was right; John had his priorities in the wrong order.
Nevertheless, Cheryl could have presented her criticism in a more respectful manner. John was embarrassed to be dressed down in front of his assistant. Surely, Minsun didn’t have to be in on the bloodletting.
Cheryl did prompt John to rethink his priorities, but her style of criticism wasn’t ethically intelligent.
There are lots of reasons you may feel compelled to criticize various people on your team:
• They’ve done something work-related that they shouldn’t have done.
• They haven’t done something work-related that they should have done.
• They have unpleasant or obnoxious personal habits.
• They get on your nerves.
• You just don’t like them.
Accordingly, there are several things you might accomplish through criticism:
• Help the people in question get back on track.
• Make them feel bad for what they did or didn’t do.
• Remind them of your power or authority.
• Inspire or motivate them to do better work.
• Let them know that you don’t like them.
• Display how clever, smart, witty, or perturbed you are.
• Blow off some steam.
Not all of these goals are consistent with ethical intelligence. Flaunting your power does nothing to improve the situation and is thus a violation of principle 2, Make Things Better. Instilling guilt, fear, or other negative feelings simply because you can, or because it makes you feel better, is a violation of principle 1, Do No Harm. (This isn’t to say that it’s always wrong if someone feels bad after being criticized. In fact, feeling guilt or shame in the appropriate degree is a good sign — namely, that one has a conscience, a sense of pride, or a commitment to being responsible.)
Shouting in anger, launching into creative invectives, or cutting someone down to size doesn’t honor any of the five principles of ethical intelligence. In fact, the Buddhist monk and author Thich Nhat Hanh argues persuasively that venting actually makes one feel worse.1 Criticizing someone merely to feel better about yourself doesn’t accomplish that objective. Nobody wins.
The only kind of criticism that is consistent with ethical intelligence is criticism that seeks to bring out the best in people. It is the quintessential way to apply principle 2 at work (or anywhere else, for that matter). When one has power over someone else, the ethically intelligent thing to do is to use that power imbalance constructively and seek to make things better, not worse. In the scenario at the beginning of this section, Cheryl’s outburst was more about her own frustration than about helping John get back on track. It’s understandable to be frustrated when a subordinate isn’t doing his or her best work, but ethically intelligent criticism is given, first and foremost, with an eye toward improving the other person, for that person’s sake and the sake of others, too.
Here is how to give criticism that brings out the best in others — and yourself.
1. Find the right setting. Cheryl was right to criticize John, but she shouldn’t have done so in front of John’s assistant.
2. Start with something positive. Surely there is something praiseworthy that the person has done recently, and it’s a good idea to start the criticism with it. Cheryl might have begun by saying that she was glad John had gotten the grant he had worked so long and hard to earn. Starting with praise is good from both an ethical and a psychological point of view. Ethically, it upholds principle 4, Be Fair, since it gives others their due. Psychologically, it makes them receptive to what you’re about to say.
3. Focus on the behavior, not the person. The most effective way to elevate, to inspire, and to promote excellence is to narrow your field of vision to the problem before you. A good visual metaphor is a shrinking circle, like the kind you see in old movies to transition from the end of one scene to the beginning of the next one (which, in moving from praise to criticism, you are in fact doing). If you’re troubled by a team member’s work ethic — coming to work late, leaving early, goofing off on the job — calling him or her lazy, selfish, or a goofball is more hurtful than helpful. It’s also probably untrue; presumably there were good reasons to hire this person, he or she has done good work in the past, and outside of work, you’re likely to find the person full of energy and commitment.
For example, instead of saying, “You’re a goof-off,” you could say, “You’ve been coming to work late too often, and when you’re here, you spend too much time on personal matters.” The first is an insult; the second is a valid complaint about specific, inappropriate behavior.
4. End on an inspiring note. If this is a first offense and it’s not especially egregious, there is no point in giving an ultimatum, which is really nothing more than a threat. Instead of an explicit or implicit “You’d better get your act together, or else,” it is better to give your vote of confidence. People rise — or sink — to the level expected of them. The ethically intelligent critic seeks not to frighten but to inspire.
If you find yourself in Cheryl’s position someday, the ethically intelligent response would be to speak privately to the troublesome employee, praise that person’s contributions, mention specific concerns you have, and affirm your belief in him or her. More than likely, the employee will make changes for the better.
One thing life has taught me is that people will pleasantly surprise you if you only give them the chance.
A friend of mine who works at a large bank told me that some of his coworkers found out that they’d been downsized when they couldn’t log on to their computers in the morning. Is this an ethically intelligent way to let someone go?
Of course not. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a less compassionate way of giving someone bad news. Terminations by phone and email are not uncommon, and surely by now at least one person has been let go by a text message.
Managers who use these techniques claim that it’s easier than having a messy, unpleasant person-to-person conversation. It is easier — but for whom? Certainly not the employee on the receiving end. Recall the discussion in chapter 2 about better and worse ways to apply the Minimize Unavoidable Harm corollary to Do No Harm in the dating arena: there are better and worse ways to let someone know you’re not interested in going out with him or her again. The ethically intelligent person who decides not to pursue a romantic relationship with someone takes the Minimize Unavoidable Harm rule to heart and acts accordingly. The same is true for ethically intelligent managers who must end someone’s term of employment.
People who have been downsized have told me that they bristle at the term fired and don’t believe it’s applicable to their situation. They have a point. To be downsized is to be let go from an organization for reasons other than one’s performance. Usually, the justification is the state of the economy, but there are other possible reasons as well, such as changes in the nature of the business itself. Thousands of employees at the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York, were let go when the digital revolution made traditional photography less popular and much of the work associated with the older model was no longer necessary.2 The Kodak employees lost their jobs through no fault of their own, so the term downsizing seems fitting for this unfortunate turn of events.
Firing, on the other hand, implies fault, and there is a continuum of blame to consider. On one end of the spectrum lies poor or inadequate performance. At the other extreme is criminal and flagrantly unethical behavior: fraud, theft, sexual or racial harassment, and the like. There is an ethically relevant difference between an employee being let go because the company has phased out his job and the company letting him go because it discovered that he used corporate funds for whiskey-soaked junkets to Vegas.
Let’s now consider how managers can use the principles of ethical intelligence effectively when they are called upon to downsize or fire an employee.
The following techniques for downsizing and firing both minimize unavoidable harm and, as with ethically intelligent criticism, bring out the best in the people who use them.
1. Do it in person whenever possible. As uncomfortable as it is to end someone’s employment, the right thing to do is to have a private conversation with him or her in person. An in-person conversation upholds the third principle of ethical intelligence, Respect Others; emails, phone calls, and other mediated forms of communication do not. Also, the fifth principle of ethical intelligence, Be Loving, calls upon you to treat others with kindness and compassion, and a face-to-face meeting is the best way to apply that principle when you must let an employee go.
Of course, there are situations in which it is impractical to do this. The head of sales for a company I know had to lay off three people who lived in different parts of the country, and it simply wasn’t possible for her to meet with each employee. In this sort of case, a conversation by phone or Internet video is, by default, acceptable. It’s better than downsizing by email or text, because the Minimize Unavoidable Harm rule still applies.
2. Do it privately. To show respect for a person — that is, to apply the third principle of ethical intelligence — is to honor that person’s values and preferences. It’s reasonable to assume that most people would prefer to have troubling news delivered in private. This means that if you’re the one giving the bad news, you do so in your office, with the door closed. I’ve heard of managers who made their move at the employee’s cubicle within earshot of everyone in the vicinity. Isn’t this simply a matter of common sense and decency?
3. Give the person your full attention. Interrupting the conversation to take phone calls, check your BlackBerry, or engage in other distractions tells the other person that the matter at hand isn’t all that important to you. That’s yet another violation of the principle of respect. The impulse to turn your attention to less troubling matters is understandable; but along with the privileges of being a manager come responsibilities, and one such responsibility is having integrity when you must let an employee go.
4. Be honest, but not brutally so. Must you always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? We considered this important question in chapter 2. Yes, if you’re giving sworn testimony in a legal deposition or court of law, you must be completely truthful, but beyond these situations, the duty to tell the truth is constrained by the duty to minimize harm. In practical terms, this means being forthright with the employee but also choosing with care the words, tone of voice, and demeanor you use. Compassion is an aspect of the fifth principle of ethical intelligence, Be Loving, and it literally means “suffering with” someone. Showing compassion both honors the dignity of other people and speaks to the better part of your nature. Finally, consider the first principle of ethical intelligence, Do No Harm. We can’t always make things better, but we shouldn’t make things worse.
For example, if you have to let Joe go because his sales performance was in the bottom 10 percent, you should mention this, but there’s no reason to add that his jokes are lame, his laugh is annoying, or his hairpiece is horrendous.
5. Don’t rush. A shock takes time to absorb. Imagine that your physician says you have a serious illness. Wouldn’t you expect him or her to allow the news to sink in rather than to summarily dismiss you and call for the next patient? Being let go isn’t as serious as getting a diagnosis of cancer or heart disease, but it is still a major, life-changing event. You owe your employee the time to absorb the information, and you may have to explain more than once what is happening and why. You would demand nothing less if it were happening to you, and you would be right to do so.
The five rules presented in the previous section assume that your organization has good reasons for downsizing. But what if you don’t see things this way? Suppose, for example, that your company believes it’s necessary to shift its customer service jobs overseas, and you believe that doing so is both unethical and bad for business. In this case, you not only have a right to object; you have an ethical obligation to do so.
Does this mean that you should be prepared to give up your job to make your point? Not necessarily. Depending on your personal circumstances, your duties to your family or to yourself might justifiably override the value of making a statement by quitting. Even if you are committed to keeping as many jobs as possible in your community, this goal will take time to achieve, and it may be easier to do so from within the company than from the outside. One person can make a difference, but when the obstacles are formidable, as they are here, you might be more likely to bring about the change you seek by remaining an employee of the organization. Doing so also allows you to honor your financial responsibilities to your family or yourself.
Revenue is important, but so are the values of respect, compassion, and simple decency. The ethically intelligent manager takes all of these into account — always.
In a key scene from the film The Silence of the Lambs, FBI agent Clarice Starling interviews the serial killer Hannibal Lecter in prison and asks him for help in solving a case that concerns a crime similar to what Lecter committed.
“Quid pro quo,” Lecter tells Starling. He’ll help her on the condition that she reveal something intensely personal about herself.
The Latin phrase that Lecter uses means “something for something.” It applies not just to the kind of relationship he wants with his interrogator but to any sort of arrangement between two people in which each wants or needs something from the other. One such arrangement is that staple of summer work across the country, the unpaid internship. Is it wrong not to pay the interns who work for you? Let’s take a look.
In chapter 5, I argued that office romances were generally inconsistent with ethical intelligence because of the dangers these relationships present to colleagues, clients, the organization, and the lovers themselves. Of special concern is the office romance between a boss and his or her subordinate since this type of romance raises the possibility of sexual harassment. One type of sexual harassment recognized by the law occurs when a boss offers a subordinate employment benefits in exchange for sex. This is a quid pro quo arrangement at its most blatantly unethical since it is both exploitative and illegal.
But some quid pro quo relationships are ethically intelligent. Consider this exchange between you and your spouse:
YOU. Let’s go to the football game on Sunday.
SPOUSE. You know I don’t care much for football.
YOU. Tell you what: if you’ll go to the game with me, I’ll see that movie you’ve been wanting to see. Deal?
SPOUSE. Deal!
This quid pro quo agreement is in accordance with the principles of ethical intelligence. Each person is free to accept or reject the offer that the other one makes. There is a balance of power between the two parties, and neither one is taking advantage of the other. The arrangement is both respectful (because neither party is being treated merely as a means to an end) and fair (because each person is getting his or her due).
Unpaid internships are a form of quid pro quo arrangements. A business or other organization offers experience to someone and in turn receives help from that person. It’s the kind of experience the person gains that determines whether a particular unpaid internship is ethical or not. If what the intern does is integral to learning about the enterprise (for example, setting up appointments and then attending those meetings), this is valuable to the intern and is thus ethically appropriate. If, however, the intern is acting essentially as unpaid labor (for example, by stuffing envelopes, making photocopies, or fetching coffee), such work may constitute exploitation and is therefore to be avoided.
Note that it isn’t the lack of payment or the imbalance of power per se that makes some unpaid internships ethically questionable or flat-out wrong. When an organization offers a useful experience to a young person that he or she might not be able to get any other way, the knowledge or skills that are gained may legitimately take the place of a paycheck, college credit, or other tangible benefit.
I speak from experience. During the spring break of my junior year in college, I spent the entire week as an intern for a physician at the University of Pennsylvania. Although I had little contact with the doctor, I had my first taste of doing professional research, and I loved it. I didn’t mind that I wasn’t being paid, or even that my week was spent in a library rather than at the beach. The passion I discovered I had for doing such work continues to this day. If I had simply been answering phones, without any exposure to the substance of the physician’s work, I wouldn’t have learned anything relevant to the practice of medicine, and the arrangement would have been unfair.
If you’re considering bringing interns aboard and not paying them, here are some guidelines for doing so with ethical intelligence.
1. Make sure the intern is going to gain something genuinely useful. Going on sales calls, learning how to use public relations tools, and being part of discussions with you and other managers about your business are just some of the things that can be meaningful to someone who is considering going into your line of work.
2. Don’t have interns do menial labor if you’re not going to pay them for it. Having your interns do nothing but refill the coffee pot or run errands takes advantage of your power over them and may even be illegal. According to B. David Joffe, an employment law expert at the law firm Bradley Arant Boult Cummings, “Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the U.S. Labor Department generally takes the position that it is not permissible for an individual to volunteer his or her services to a for-profit employer.”3 Joffe also notes that in certain circumstances, students obtaining training are not considered to be employees and thus are not covered under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Payment generally isn’t necessary for students and others who are being trained, but menial labor provided to a for-profit employer does ordinarily require financial compensation.4
3. Express your gratitude — often. It’s always the right time to say thanks. Even if you can’t pay your interns, you can still do something nice for them, such as take them out to lunch from time to time, give them gift cards, or something else along these lines. Of course, such gestures apply to everyone on your team. And the best form of gratitude, for most people, is still a paycheck.
4. Resist taking on a friend’s son or daughter. As we saw with one of the quiz questions in chapter 1, dual relationships are sticky, and you may find your friendship compromised if the internship doesn’t work out. Nepotism is common, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for business or good for you. Just because a practice is accepted doesn’t mean it is acceptable.
5. Make it clear to the intern early on what he or she can expect to accomplish through the experience and what won’t be on the agenda. The saying “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is a cliché because it’s true. There aren’t likely to be misunderstandings between you and your interns later if you explain up front what the internship is going to entail.
Bottom line: Unpaid internships have gotten a bad rap and, in many cases, for good reason. But by the example you set, you can show the business world not only that it is possible to do these the right way but that everyone wins when such arrangements are founded on the ethical principles of respect and fairness, two pillars of ethical intelligence. The imbalance of power between you and your intern need not result in exploitation, and if you follow the guidelines above, it won’t.
Here’s how to be ethically intelligent with the people who work for you.
Ethically intelligent criticism helps the person being criticized and does not flaunt the power of the critic. It focuses on specific things the person in question can do better and includes recognition of what that person does well.
Downsizing with Dignity, Firing with Finesse
When you’re called upon to let employees go, whether or not their performance is the cause of their being terminated, the ethically intelligent way to do so is in person, whenever possible. Giving employees the time to absorb the shock is both compassionate and essential.
When you believe the termination isn’t justified, the principle of fairness requires you to speak up and consider other ways of helping the organization move forward.
It is ethically intelligent to bring interns aboard and not pay them, as long as the interns get something of value from the experience and are not there merely to provide free labor.