The Good Ones. Bruce Weinstein
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Sedaka, Norah Jones, and Christopher Cross and has sung the National Anthem at Fenway Park before a sold-out Boston Red Sox game. Mel, a promoter, had impressed Karen with his charisma, high energy, and enthusiasm, so she hired him to handle the logistics of an event where she wanted to perform. When the event wasn’t selling as well as Karen and Mel had hoped, Mel told Karen he wanted to cancel the engagement. “I was shocked he would even suggest such a thing, because I come from a world where the philosophy is ‘The show must go on,’” Karen says. “For one thing, we’d hired a lot of freelancers who would stand to lose income if the event were canceled.”
Karen hadn’t signed contracts with all of the freelancers. “At that time, I didn’t always formalize these agreements. Just shaking hands had always worked for me.” But Mel wasn’t concerned about whether he’d made any promises, even implied ones, so he had no compunction about walking away from the assignment — which he did. As a result, Karen had to cancel the event, because she wasn’t equipped to manage it on her own. She contacted all of the freelancers, explained what had happened, and apologized profusely. She was upset at letting so many people down.
There are two ways of looking at this story through the lens of character. One interpretation is that Karen and Mel simply had different values. For Karen, booking a musical event had both a financial component and a people-centered component. It was important to make a profit, but it was also important to honor the implied promise of hiring the freelancers she and Mel had contacted. Mel’s only concern was financial, so his decision to cancel the gig was simply a pragmatic one.
Viewed another way, however, Mel’s narrow focus on finances wasn’t merely different from Karen’s broader view: it was dishonorable. Dozens of people who had reason to believe they would earn money from the event (many of whom had probably turned down other opportunities in order to commit to this one) lost out.
Looking at the story this way makes more business sense as well as more ethical sense. By walking away from a commitment, Mel damaged several professional relationships. First, he ruined his chances of doing business with Karen again, or getting a good referral from her. Second, he hurt his chances of working with the freelancers he had approached. Third, the venue Mel had booked will not want to do business with him again, for the same reasons.
In some cases, performers and organizers stand to lose so much money from a poorly attended show that continuing with it does not make sense. In this instance, however, the show was imminent, and for Karen, who values keeping her word above all else, cancellation was not an option.
The relationship between a promoter and an artist is a partnership. It is counterproductive for the two parties to have opposing values. Karen now works with another promoter, Tom, whom she has known for years, who shares her values — and to whom she is married. Tom knows he may have to be willing to take a financial hit on occasion so that performers can count on him to keep his promise. In the years Karen has been working with Tom, however, she hasn’t had to compromise her financial well-being to maintain her ethical standards.
“I do still use handshakes from time to time,” Karen texted me recently. “However, I now use contracts and require full payment before live engagements. That has been a massive shift in the way I do business, and it’s very positive. The experience with Mel definitely was a turning point.”
Considering Consequences
Diana Mekota, a recent college graduate, moved back to Cleveland, her hometown, and thought that reaching out to Kelly Blazek, the self-described “Job Bank Mother,” would be a smart move. Since Diana didn’t know Kelly personally, she did what millions of people around the world do every day to connect with people they don’t know: she contacted her through the business networking website LinkedIn.
Most LinkedIn users who get a connection request from someone they don’t know do one of two things: ignore it or accept it. A few ask for clarification. Kelly chose to respond in another way. She wrote to Diana and said, “Your invite to connect is inappropriate, beneficial only to you, and tacky. Wow, I cannot wait to let every 25-year-old jobseeker mine my top-tier marketing connections to help them land a job. Love the sense of entitlement in your generation. And therefore I enjoy denying your invite.” Kelly added that Diana was “a total stranger who has nothing to offer me,” and after several more condescending statements and personal attacks, she ended with “Don’t ever write me again.”
Perhaps Kelly thought Diana was a casting agent for a remake of Mommie Dearest. It’s hard to find any other explanation for such a contemptuous message. Ironically, the Cleveland chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators had chosen Kelly as their 2013 Communicator of the Year. In one sense, they were correct to do so: Kelly certainly communicated her contempt clearly and unambiguously. She set out to accomplish a goal — humiliating a job seeker — and succeeded. However, she didn’t consider the possible consequences.
Diana posted Kelly’s message on other social networking websites, including Reddit, Imgur, and Facebook, and asked readers to “please call this lady out.” The message was linked to Buzzfeed and then went viral on Twitter and other social media. The story was picked up by news outlets, including CNN, Adweek, and the BBC. Many in the Cleveland business community and beyond pressured Kelly to return her communicator award, which she eventually did. She also apologized to Diana and deleted her own Twitter account, her blog, and everything in her LinkedIn account except her recommendations.
The ethical issues in this story aren’t as clear-cut as they might seem. LinkedIn requests from complete strangers can indeed be bothersome, especially if you get a lot of them, as Kelly apparently did. Diana would have shown greater respect for Kelly by asking a mutual friend for an introduction. And Kelly is far from a villain. A Cleveland marketing and sales consultant, Terry Novak, described her as having been “selfless in her efforts to help people in the sales/marketing, PR, and media fields find leads for jobs in Northeast Ohio for a long time.” It’s also troubling that Diana’s revelations made Kelly’s private communication a matter of public record, easily and permanently accessible on the internet.
If Kelly’s email to Diana were the only stain on an otherwise spotless record of supporting job seekers in Cleveland, one might be tempted to grant Kelly a pass and move on. Who among us hasn’t made a colossal error in judgment like Kelly’s? But other recipients of hateful communications from Kelly have come forward, indicating that her mistreatment of people is closer to a pattern than to a single, isolated incident.
As Stefanie Moore, an assistant professor at Kent State University’s School of Journalism and Mass Communications, told the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “This serves as another reminder that we are held accountable for our actions, even more so in our online-driven world. If we’re inconsistent in our interactions with our audiences online and offline, we’ll be called out. It can take years to build your online reputation and only one slip-up on social media to destroy it. Another lesson: Think before hitting ‘send.’”
Professor Moore is right. In a world where work is increasingly conducted online, high-character employees consider the consequences of every text, email, tweet, and online forum post they make at work. Some go further and apply that standard to their online activity outside work.
Back when news was disseminated in physical objects called newspapers, a popular guideline for acting honorably was “Don’t do anything you wouldn’t want to see as a headline in tomorrow’s paper.” The story of Kelly Blazek’s LinkedIn communications suggests an updated rule: “Avoid writing or saying anything you wouldn’t want to go viral.”
This sounds like a standard that allows for communicating only trivialities, but it’s not as stringent as that. It simply calls on us to consider the consequences of what we write. Freedom has never meant having the right to insult anyone at anytime for any reason. The internet is the most powerful communications tool the world has ever seen, and as Uncle Ben told Peter Parker in the Spider-Man saga, “With great power comes great responsibility.”
Some of the Good Ones handle their work-related frustrations by writing an angry response and then deleting it before sending. This tactic offers all of the giddy pleasure of saying exactly what