The Good Ones. Bruce Weinstein
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book Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better, she might have thought twice about communicating in this hurtful way.
Taking Responsibility
The head of the marketing department was furious. “I want Brad fired — now!” he yelled to Geri, a human resources director with a large pharmaceutical company. Brad worked in the mailroom, and, during his rounds delivering the mail, he had made a threatening remark to an employee in marketing. Brad’s career could have come to an abrupt end that day, but Geri didn’t want to move so quickly.
She invited Brad and two witnesses to come to her office to discuss the matter. “Did you really tell someone, ‘You better watch your back?’” she asked. Brad denied it several times. After several uncomfortable moments of silence, he asked, “Um, can you please open the window?” Geri could see that he was troubled by the proceedings. “OK, yes, I said it, but I didn’t mean anything by it,” Brad admitted. “I wasn’t actually going to hurt the guy I said it to.”
Geri came from a sales background and prided herself on being able to read people well. She believed that Brad was sincere and that letting him go would be a mistake. She told him, “Maybe you didn’t mean anything by what you said, but you have to understand that saying ‘You better watch your back’ can seem threatening to the person on the other end. You can’t talk like that if you want to work here.”
“You’re right,” Brad said. “I take full responsibility for what I did.” But he went further than that.
Making Amends
Geri told me that Brad had come from a troubled background but that she saw him as “a sweet fellow underneath a gruff exterior.” The reason the head of marketing wanted Brad fired, Geri believed, was not so much the remark Brad had made as the way he looked — like a guy who’d had a hardscrabble life. Geri’s success in HR is due in no small part to the fact that she refuses to judge a book by its cover.
Brad volunteered to apologize to the person he’d scared and vowed never to repeat the behavior. He pleaded with Geri to be allowed to keep his job. Geri agreed on the condition that Brad take an anger-management course. That couldn’t have been an easy thing for Brad to do, but he did it. Now, every time he runs into Geri, he thanks her profusely for helping him become a better employee — and a better person. Recently, Brad was voted Employee of the Month, and he views the incident that set all of this in motion as a turning point in his professional and personal development.
By taking responsibility for his actions, making the necessary amends, and growing from the experience, Brad has demonstrated that he is one of the Good Ones. But so is Geri, who had faith in Brad and knew that it would it be a mistake to let him go. Too many of us take others at face value. Fortunately, people like Geri are willing to fight for employees like Brad who accept responsibility for their mistakes and take steps to move beyond them.
A Strong Work Ethic
“Action-oriented” is the first listing in Ken Sundheim’s Forbes.com essay “15 Traits of the Ideal Employee.” “Stagnant employees won’t make your company money; action-oriented employees will,” Sundheim writes. The top item in Kevin Daum’s article for Inc. online, “5 Desirable Traits of Great Employees,” is “accountability.” “Employees can be smart, likeable and talented,” Daum writes, “but, if you can’t trust them to do what they say they’ll do, you and everyone else will constantly waste time and energy checking up on their work.” Who is right?
They both are. A strong work ethic is a component of accountability. If there’s some confusion about this, it’s because we talk about work ethic in psychological or emotional terms. A person with a poor work ethic is called “lazy,” while someone with a superior work ethic is a “self-starter” or “highly motivated.” This is a mistake. Having a strong work ethic fundamentally means keeping promises to one’s employer. That’s why it’s an issue of character.
Some of us take our work ethic too far, however. Let’s consider why high-character employees appreciate the difference between working hard and being a workaholic. We’ll then address a question that older workers are asking a lot these days: Do Millennials (people born between 1980 and the early 2000s) lack a strong work ethic?
Workaholism and Work Ethic: What’s the Difference?
Hubert’s life revolves around his job. He sleeps with his smartphone next to his bed, and it’s always on. The first thing he does in the morning is check his email and answer as many messages as he can. It’s also the last thing he does at night. In between, Hubert never stops. But Hubert has missed, and continues to miss, important milestones in his personal life. He rarely goes to his children’s birthday parties or school band concerts. He frequently interrupts dinner with his family to take a call or send a client a document. When he has a cold, he comes to work because he doesn’t want people to think he’s a slacker. He’s overweight, doesn’t exercise, and eats a lot of junk food.
Marie works hard, too. She is at her desk promptly at the start of the work day, and she is highly focused at staff meetings, on the phone with clients, and at her computer. She’s not a robot: Marie loves to doodle on a notepad when she’s at a meeting (a habit that may enhance retention and promote creativity). She watches what she eats, goes to the gym several times a week, and on the rare occasions when she comes down with a cold or the flu, she stays home until she’s well enough to be productive at the office. Marie, by her own admission, isn’t perfect. Like Hubert, she checks her smartphone for work-related email at home from time to time. But unlike Hubert, she knows this compulsion is neither healthy nor necessary.
Marie has a strong work ethic. Hubert is a workaholic. I know both people, and it’s difficult to imagine that Hubert is going to have a long life. He’s in his early fifties but looks ten years older. He has developed a chronic illness that, even if it’s not caused directly by his workaholism, isn’t being made any better by it. One look at Hubert, and you know this man is in trouble. But he doesn’t see it that way.
Hubert is defined by his work. His constant preoccupation with his job isn’t a sign of a strong work ethic: it’s more akin to an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Marie works hard for her clients, but she also makes time for valued relationships outside work. She establishes and maintains healthy boundaries between her work and the rest of her life.
“Kids Today!” Do Millennials Lack a Strong Work Ethic?
A few years ago, I had a Q&A video series on Bloomberg Businessweek online called Ask the Ethics Guy. Thomas Lanis, director of the Oscar L. Parker Center for the Advancement of Ethical Standards in Business and Society at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma, submitted the following question: “Are there generational differences in ethical values? Some of our local employers and some of my business school colleagues seem to think that young people lack the work ethic of their parents and grandparents. What do you think?”
A study conducted at Bentley University showed that 89 percent of the Millennials surveyed said they have a strong work ethic; 74 percent of non-Millennials saw Millennials this way. The latter group was composed primarily of older people — business decisionmakers and corporate recruiters among them — but also included some people younger than Millennials. On the basis of this survey, Professor Lanis’s associates aren’t the only ones who believe Millennials avoid working hard. But what’s striking about the Bentley finding is that almost three-quarters of non-Millennials claimed that Millennials take their work seriously. That’s the takeaway message from this extensive survey.
Do young people really exhibit “luxury, bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect to elders, and a love for chatter in place of exercise”? This quotation comes from Kenneth John Freeman’s 1907 dissertation at Cambridge University. Freeman was summarizing ancient views of young people, and his words are often misattributed to Socrates (a blunder I made myself in my video response to Dr. Lanis’s question). Senior members of society have been complaining about the habits of youngsters for eons, but it’s time to label those complaints for what they are: prejudice.