Moral Ethics: Performance-Enhancing Drugs of Today’s Ultra-Competitive Office

admin | Friday, July 31st, 2009 | No Comments »

Moral Ethics Performance Enhancing Drugs of Todays Competitive Office Moral Ethics: Performance Enhancing Drugs of Todays Ultra Competitive Office

Employees everywhere are doing it. Some are doing it dozens of times a day. Most have it done to them once every eight minutes. Sometimes it’s done face-to-face. Other times it’s done behind the back. It’s done out of habit. It’s done out of pure malice.

Employees everywhere are lying through their teeth.

An Epidemic of Deception

Millions of North Americans are sick and tired of wondering “Am I being lied to?” And for good reason. Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report coined the term “truthiness” to describe the ever-increasing tendency for people to express concepts or facts that they wish to be true, rather than concepts or facts that they know to be true. More and more, we’re on the receiving end of the “truth improved” and “truthful hyperbole.” Who knows what to believe today?

Believe this: When deception reaches epidemic proportions in society, no one and no place is safe. As in any epidemic, everyone is at risk of being taken advantage of and having their trust betrayed. And it can happen anywhere, including the workplace.

A Bumper Crop of Lies

The workplace isn’t just a location where people come together in the common pursuit of commerce and profits. It’s also a Petri dish for growing a deadly crop of big, bald-faced lies. Any competitive environment where performance dictates success and advancement is a potential breeding ground for mendacity.

Now, it’s not that any one particular workplace is full of especially conniving or devious people. Deception simply comes naturally to all creation:

* Birds will fake injury to lead predators away from nesting young.
* Octopi walk on two tentacles, strutting all gnarly on the sea floor, pretending to be algae (or Jessica Alba’s hairdo in Sin City) to escape their enemies.
* Pint-sized male green frogs lower the pitch of their croaks to sound bigger than they are and scare off rivals. (Hey, it beats working out at the gym!)
* Wolves dress in sheep’s clothing.

Nature’s deceivers are rewarded by longer life — which means more opportunities to reproduce. And while lying may no longer be necessary for human beings to procreate (though it can help in many cases), the spinning of a last-minute yarn to avoid responsibility for not completing a critical project has certainly preserved the quality of many an employee’s work life.

Need a Boost in Performance?

Lies, you see, have become the performance-enhancing drugs for the competition known as life.

Think I’m lying? Well, here’s an analogy. Consider an elite cyclist who’s set to race in the pinnacle of his sport: the Tour de France. If ever there was a competition that’s rife with doping, the Tour is it. In 2006, Ivan Basso, Jan Ullrich and a number of other star riders sat on the sidelines instead of their bike seats after being implicated in a doping investigation. Floyd Landis, the eventual winner, was himself pinned beneath a media microscope when an abnormal epitestosterone-to-testosterone ratio was uncovered in one of two post-podium urine tests. The jury’s still out in Landis’ case, but these sorry examples represent only those riders who were “unlucky” enough to get caught. Others in the field undoubtedly doped away and managed — through luck or better planning — to dupe the testers.

So, here’s our elite cyclist, hitherto clean and sober, preparing to partake in a competition he knows is biased toward dopers. And our hero wants to win. Badly. So badly, in fact, he can already taste the fame, glory and fabulous endorsements that come with wearing the yellow jersey on the podium. What do you think he’ll do? To dope or not to dope?

If he’s human and wants the win badly enough, he’ll opt for doping and its boost in performance. Unless he’s blessed with one-in-a-billion genetics, he must dope to have any hope of winning. Racing clean in a field of dirty competitors means he’ll be lagging the peloton before the race even starts.

The Place Where the Rubber Meets the Road

It’s no different for employees competing in the workplace. Performance matters. It might not be the ticket to fame, glory and fabulous endorsements, but workplace performance is certainly the ticket to advancement, promotions and a bigger paycheck. Poor performance, on the other hand, comes with another set of “rewards.” For most employees, it means stagnation, demotion and an eventual pink slip.

Any competitive environment that is characterized by deception — whether the deception comes in the form of blood doping or bald-faced lies — forces every competitor to use dishonesty if they want to win. A single liar in the workplace, hidden among the cubicles, can be the catalyst that triggers a chain reaction of fibbing, embellishments and wholesale fabrications. Hitherto honest employees, sensing a cheater in their midst, are compelled to “sweeten” their own efforts and accomplishments, lest they be left “lagging the peloton” when it comes time for management’s quarterly performance reviews.

Sweetening performance, however, isn’t the only byproduct of the competitive workplace environment. When the imperative to perform is so high, fibs to cover up shortcomings or mistakes are sure to follow. Deception becomes a Teflon coating, assuring negative perceptions don’t stick. After all, everyone else is doing it, right?

Operating a business today is challenging enough without facing the daunting task of sifting fact from fiction among your prospective and existing employees or co-workers. And employees deserve to compete against each other on a level playing field, free of the performance-enhancing drugs of deception.

It behooves (there’s a word you don’t see often) everyone — regardless of their position in the office hierarchy — to promote an atmosphere of openness and honesty. And everyone can do just that once they understand the reasons why we lie so easily and so often in the workplace. That, however, is the subject of another article.

Stay tuned for “Understanding Why We Lie in the Workplace … Or How The Dog Ate My Profit-and-Loss Statements.”

Conner O’Seanery is a self-admitted serial liar and an expert on detecting deception in any situation. Author of You Won’t Get Fooled at Work Again: 40 Timely Tips for Recognizing Deception in the Workplace and You Won’t Get Fooled Again: More Than 101 Brilliant Ways to Bust Any Bald-Faced Liar (Even If the Liar is Lying Beside You!), O’Seanery is a popular media guest whose insights have been featured on City TV’s Breakfast Television, Global Television’s NewsHour, CBC Radio, Westwood One Radio Network, USA Radio Network and hundreds of radio stations. His books have been featured in the New York Post, National Post, Seattle Times, Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen and other newspapers. Conner is also a respected speaker who uses a blend of quick wit and well-earned wisdom to entertain as much as inform audiences. To download free excerpts from You Won’t Get Fooled at Work Again and You Won’t Get Fooled Again visit Conner’s website at this site.

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Tags: ethics, performance, enhancement, behavior, conduct

Tags: Business, enhancement, Ethics, Performance
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Ethical Performance: Avoiding Managemeng Malpractice

admin | Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 | No Comments »

Business ethics are rare in today’s world of rampant organizational abuse and management malpractice. According to recent surveys, such as the National Business Ethics Survey, more than 50 percent of all employees in the United States observe misconduct or unethical behavior at work, but most of them do not report it because they fear retaliation from management or coworkers.

As reported in Business & Legal Reports, the Gartner Group, Inc., claims, “70 percent of enterprises that do not recognize and minimize employee dissatisfaction will have to fend off legal actions and public relations disasters caused by poor service, poor quality and poor business practices. Enterprise executives, especially those in high-pressure technology and knowledge-based companies, should understand the correlation between employee mistreatment and business disruption.” According to Diane Tunick Morello, Vice President and Research Director at Gartner, “Executives and managers who see their companies engaging in mistreatment of employees should raise a warning flag and begin to quantify and qualify the risks to attracting staff, maintaining service, building a customer base and broadening business. Executives who ignore or downplay the connection between employee mistreatment and business turmoil put their employees, customers, partners and shareholders at risk.” Malpracticing management represents a HUGE RISK that most executives and organizations today don’t fully recognize.

So why does management malpractice and organizational abuse occur so often in today’s organizations, despite the high price? Here are five reasons why it has become so prevalent:

First, people in organizations are, at times, biased, egotistical, narrow-minded, thoughtless, dogmatic, insensitive or otherwise flawed. Okay, so we’re all prone to malpractice management even though we all suffer from it. Yes, which is why it’s going to take a widespread revolution to stop this growing epidemic of management malpractice—it happened to me, so I might as well do it to others.

Second, management is malpracticed because it’s easier, cheaper and faster to malpractice management than it is to well-practice management, especially during times of crisis and extreme change. Tyrannical, authoritarian, command and control approaches to management are always easier, cheaper and faster in the short term but they destroy freedom, creativity, motivation and organizational cultures in the long term. Vigilantly practicing great management principles takes time, effort and commitment; but the pay-off is huge—take a look at the results delivered by Fortune’s most admired companies. Why are they so admired? Because great organizations don’t persist in malpracticing management. When malpractices do creep in, as they always do, they are quickly addressed and eliminated.

Third, because of the heightened stress and strain associated with today’s business environment–extreme complexity, radical change and savvy competition–managers and leaders too often lose their focus on fundamental principles and core values because urgency overshadows importance, hard drives out soft and information obscures interpretation. In other words they get distracted, sidetracked and diverted from one of the things that matters most—i.e., the ongoing motivation, performance, creativity, satisfaction and well-being of their people. A crisis comes along and all of the so-called great management principles and excellent organizational values get thrown out the window or are temporarily ignored in favor of hard-edged, results-at-any-cost management—whatever it takes to get the crisis resolved is a common excuse for management malpractice.

Fourth, people in organizations are continually growing, developing, and, to one degree or another, striving to become more effective, complete and balanced as managers and leaders. Consequently, most managers and leaders are still incomplete and unbalanced in their discharge of management responsibilities—e.g., heart, mind and body are often out of balance or fail to function as a complete whole, either there’s too much rational analysis at the expense of heart-felt empathy or vice versa or there’s too much talk and not enough action or vice versa or too much preoccupation with the short-term at the expense of the long-term or vice versa and so on. Becoming more complete and balanced as a manager or leader is vital to seeing, exposing and preventing management malpractice. Organizational cultures either hasten or hinder managerial and leadership development.

Five, managers and leaders in most organizations don’t take the time or make it a priority to really listen to their employees, discuss management principles that are frequently malpracticed, or develop the managerial talents of their direct reports. They let urgent matters overshadow more important matters.

Management malpractice has become accepted as “standard operating procedure” in far too many organizations today. Sadly, leaders and managers in such organizations are expected to demean, manipulate, deceive, oppress, abuse and injure their people. When they don’t, their employees are surprised. How sick is that? People are becoming increasingly distrustful and cynical about their organizations because too many of their leaders and managers either unconsciously allow or openly foster management malpractice in their organizations and because not enough of their co-workers are willing or able to stand up against it.

Overcoming management malpractice will require more than new laws, regulations, rules, systems, penalties, punishments and remedies, because management malpractice thrives in highly structured and disciplined hierarchies. Only senior executives, middle managers, first line employees, entrepreneurs and professional service providers who develop an awareness to see it, the courage to expose it and a firm resolve to prevent it from happening again and again in the workplace have a chance to eliminate management malpractice in their organizations. Once exposed, management malpractices can never have the same smothering and stifling effect upon you and your organization that they previously had. In fact, ongoing exposure of management malpractices fosters a transparent working environment where individuals, teams and leaders can work together more openly, honestly and collaboratively to prevent malpractice in the future. Time and attention to people–their performance, their satisfaction, their ideas, their motivation, their insights, their sense of meaning and fulfillment, their disappointments, their match with their jobs, their growth and development, their sense of belonging, their contributions, their dreams, their fears, their needs, their desires to create value, their struggles, their weaknesses, their yearnings and strivings, their personal lives, their interactions with coworkers and customers, their teamwork, their results, their well-being — that’s the key to preventing management malpractice in organizations.

Craig Hickman is the author or coauthor of a dozen books on business and management, among them such bestsellers as Creating Excellence; The Strategy Game; Mind of a Manager, Soul of a Leader; and The Oz Principle. After receiving his M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School, he worked in the areas of strategic planning, organizational design, and mergers and acquisitions for Dart Industries and Ernst & Young. In 1985, he founded Management Perspectives Group, a consulting and training firm that helped companies implement the business strategy, corporate culture, and organizational change principles set forth in Creating Excellence and Mind of a Manager, Soul of a Leader. His clients have included: Proctor & Gamble, American Express, Unilever, AT&T, PepsiCo, Honeywell, Amoco, Nokia, and the U.S. government. He has lectured throughout the world for the U.S. State Department as part of its American Participant Program and is currently CEO of Headwaters Technology Innovation Group, a subsidiary of Headwaters Incorporated (NYSE: HW).

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Tags: ethical, performance, index, corporate, organizations

Tags: Business, corporate, ethical, index, organizations, Performance
Posted in Business

Ethical Performance, Management Malpractice Is A Reality

admin | Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 | No Comments »

Business ethics are rare in today’s world of rampant organizational abuse and management malpractice. According to recent surveys, such as the National Business Ethics Survey, more than 50 percent of all employees in the United States observe misconduct or unethical behavior at work, but most of them do not report it because they fear retaliation from management or coworkers.