The Good Ones. Bruce Weinstein
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Several of the HR managers I spoke with in doing research for this book told me, “You’d be surprised how often people will just come out and tell you about the dishonest things they’ve done.” I agree.
From time to time I interview high school students who are applying to the college I attended. A few years ago, I mentioned to Rob, the young man I was interviewing, that I’d written a book called Is It Still Cheating If I Don’t Get Caught? I told him how dismayed I was by news reports of cheating in prestigious high schools and colleges and asked him point-blank if he had ever misrepresented himself.
“Yes,” he said. “My friends and I have done it more than once. School is so competitive now you have to cheat to get good grades.”
Rob got an A for being honest with me and a “Do not admit” recommendation from me on the college evaluation form.
There are two downsides to asking a direct question about dishonesty. First, it immediately strikes fear in the candidate’s heart, even if the candidate is fundamentally an honest person. I don’t like the idea of making a job candidate squirm. The second is that the question seems to present a no-win situation for the candidate. She may reason that if the she admits to having cheated, she won’t get the job (as happened to Rob); but if she lies, she’ll be worried about being caught in a lie and rejected for that reason. Only candidates who have never cheated have nothing to worry about (except being believed).
But the savvy interviewer will not reject a candidate simply because he has admitted to cheating. What bothered me about Rob wasn’t so much his admission of cheating but the fact that he exhibited no remorse for having done so and even attempted to justify it.
The smart employer looks not for perfection but for an explanation of how the consequences of a dishonorable act affected the candidate and others. It is probably also helpful if the dishonorable act in question occurred a long time ago!
Discerning Honesty in Current Employees
“No company would evaluate honesty in a current employee unless it were already a part of its core values,” an HR director told me. “If a performance reviewer is thinking about honesty at all, he or she is more likely to conclude, ‘I have no evidence that this employee is dishonest, so he or she must be honest by default.’” In other words, we should assume that people are honest unless we have good reason to believe otherwise.
But why shouldn’t honesty be an explicitly stated core value of every company? There isn’t a business in the world that could survive for long if most of its employees routinely lied, withheld the truth, or engaged in other dishonest acts. (Insert joke about politics here.) Even for organizations that don’t formally recognize honesty as a value, however, managers should still be on the lookout for exemplary honest conduct. When an employee like Brenda Harry does something praiseworthy like returning the $3,100 she found at work, that action should become a part of the employee’s record, just as a dishonest act would be. It reveals high character and reminds managers of how vital the employee is to the organization.
Too often, we think of ethics in terms of what people shouldn’t be doing and how unethical behavior hurts organizations. That’s part of the story but not all of it. Companies already prohibit employees from acting dishonestly, but they need to go further and actively promote honesty as a core value. This means letting dishonest employees go and hiring and promoting honest ones. Honesty isn’t the best policy. It’s the only one.
Managers charged with promoting employees are misguided if they believe that employees ought to be acting honestly to begin with and therefore don’t deserve to have such behavior officially noted. Putting the information in an employee’s record tells the person, “We applaud what you did. You helped us, and we won’t forget about it.” Also, management does change, so noting actions like Brenda Harry’s can help the employee during a performance review conducted by a future manager.
SUMMARY
Of the ten crucial qualities of high-character employees, honesty is the most important. It doesn’t matter how knowledgeable or skilled an employee may be if he or she is dishonest.
Honest employees are deeply passionate about the truth and have the courage to act on their convictions.
Employers who fail to evaluate the honesty of job applicants and current employees do so at their peril.
The price of greatness is responsibility.
—Winston Churchill
Harvey is a senior manager with an electronic stock-trading company. One of his direct reports, Lisa, was having performance issues. She had a habit of texting friends while she was at work, and this sometimes made her slow to return calls, respond to emails, and attend to other duties. But her mistakes didn’t have serious financial consequences for the company or its clients. Because she was a personable, well-liked employee who had a positive effect on employee morale, Harvey struggled with how to handle her shortcomings.
Eventually it came time to manage Lisa up or out. Because of his concerns about Lisa’s performance, Harvey put her on probation for two months. He explained that if her work did not improve, she would be fired. During the probationary period, Lisa’s performance was excellent. Harvey was startled to see how well she did her work when she set her mind to it. After the two-month probationary period, Harvey told Lisa that she was on track for a promotion, as long as she could focus on her work and represent the company well.
A few weeks later, Lisa made a serious technical error that caused several hundred customer calls to be dropped simultaneously. The company spent tens of thousands of dollars compensating these customers for deals that were affected by the error. Lisa had gone back to texting on the job, and her distraction had led to the technical glitch.
Lisa was fired immediately, but Harvey felt personally responsible for the dropped calls, even though no one could have foreseen that Lisa could have caused a problem of such magnitude. “If I had fired her instead of putting her on probation, none of this would have happened,” he told a few of his colleagues. The day Harvey fired Lisa, he went to his own boss, Suresh, and submitted his resignation. But Suresh wouldn’t accept it. Instead he did something completely unexpected: he promoted Harvey.
“What Harvey did showed a lot of accountability,” one of his colleagues told me. “He took responsibility for what one of his direct reports did, even though Harvey had nothing to do with it directly. Although Lisa did have performance issues for a long time, she shaped up during the probationary period, so Harvey had no reason to let her go. In fact, she’d improved quite a bit.”
Harvey is one of the Good Ones, because he took responsibility for a mistake that one of his team members caused. His honorable conduct resulted in a promotion that his colleagues felt was well deserved.
What Is Accountability?
Accountable employees do four things consistently:
• They keep their promises.
• They consider the consequences of their actions.
• They take responsibility for their mistakes.
• They make amends for those mistakes.
Let’s consider each of these characteristics in greater detail.
Keeping a Promise
“I’m going to do what I say I’m going to do, and if I don’t do it, I’ll let you know,” Karen Jacobsen says with great passion. Karen, who is known as the GPS Girl, is the Australian female voice of Siri on the iPhone and on some GPS car-navigation devices. An associate who didn’t care about keeping promises changed the way Karen conducts her