When Noemi decided to leave the European office of the company I worked for and follow her fiancé to Japan, I had mixed emotions, as her senior manager. It was typical of her to follow her heart, and head off to a relatively unknown country with her partner, someone she hadn’t known for much more than 12 months, to begin a new life. I was also sorry to lose her, as she had always been a committed member of the team; not always the most diplomatic person, but any faux-pas on her part were always made for the right reasons, and were usually a sign of the dedication she felt to her task. She also worked extraordinary hours – more than she was paid for – when the occasion demanded, as it did frequently in her role as a scheduler in the academic services team. Her job was to make sure every class we ran had a member of faculty to teach it. In a fairly large scale operation, that sometimes meant time crunches caused by last minute changes in student numbers or availability of faculty to teach. However severe the crisis, however, Noemi seemed to manage the problem.
So when she asked me if we could continue to employ her for a period after she had moved to Japan, I had no hesitation in accepting. Although the distance would add a little more difficulty to the task, we employed over 95% of our faculty team remotely – partly the nature of the work – and it would help tide us over until we found a permanent replacement for her. It would allow a period of handover, and help to ensure a smooth transition in one of our ‘mission critical’ administrative roles. There was also precedent for the decision. In a handful of cases in recent years a senior administrator had moved abroad, and we continued their work contracts for a period of a few months to effect a similar smooth transition. Cost wasn’t an issue; her resignation would take effect from the end of her time in Europe, and we would employ her on an agency contract from Japan, in effect cheaper than the cost of her salaried contract in Europe.
The local HR team approved the deal, and developed and agreed the contract, with a term of four months. We began making the arrangements for Noemi’s departure, content in the knowledge that we had made an arrangement that met both her needs, and those of the company. The rest of the team in our European office of course were aware of the agreement and were happy that we had helped a popular employee make a smooth transition to her new life. Everything seemed fine with what we’d done and I thought no more about it.
That is, up to the point that our head office in the US found out about the arrangement, and I received a mail from the President: “it has come to my attention”, it began (I know there was something amiss when I saw that first line on my iPhone…) “that you have offered a contract to an employee moving to Japan. We do not employ administrators in Japan. Please explain how you made this arrangement without informing me first, and stop the contract at once”.
From long experience, I’ve made it a rule not to reply to mail where the underlying communication is emotionally laden. Any manager knows the feeling that get when they’re sent something like this, especially if they believe they’re being overruled or criticised for something they believed to be the right thing to do. It’s a combination of shock, indignance, anger, and a feeling of powerlessness. You want to shout ‘how could you be so stupid’? In transactional analysis terms, it’s the reaction of the ‘rebellious child’ who’s been told off by the ‘critical parent’. So I knew I had to calm down and construct a reply which suppressed such emotions and turned our communication into a discussion of adults.
So I waited overnight, thought about it some more, and did what the textbooks say is a classic ‘adult’ strategy: apologise – not for being wrong, but for the problem it’s caused – and deal with facts only. I explained the reasons why the arrangement suited all purposes – precedent, cost, continuity of operation, minimising risk of disruption, benefit to the individual. The President remained completely unmoved. In my next meeting with her, I spent half an hour going through this again; she repeated her position. The company doesn’t employ administrative staff in Japan. When I pointed out the fallacy of this (not in so many words, of course) her position simply came down to ‘you didn’t tell me’ (true, it had never crossed my mind that such an issue would concern her) and ‘that’s my decision’. In other words, she wasn’t prepared to back down from her previous position, despite being presented with all reasonable evidence to the contrary. After having tried reason, I expressed my frustration, and made it clear that I thought it was the wrong thing to do – all to no avail. She moved on, case closed.
I then wrote to Noemi and told her the news. She didn’t report to me directly, so I made sure her line manager knew first and was able to support her through what, needless to say, was a difficult message to receive. I apologised to her unreservedly for misleading her, and offered my time for a 1-1 if she needed it. Her reply was gracious, and she thanked me for my personal support. But I knew the truth – she was terribly upset.
Organisationally, you may draw one obvious conclusion, and you would be entitled to; that is, I made a mistake by not consulting with head office before agreeing to the contract for Noemi. In my defence I would argue three things. First, I had involved local HR in the process, and therefore assumed that the deal we developed had official sanction. Second, there was nothing in our procedures to indicate that I had to ask permission from head office for this kind of deal. And third, I had assumed – wrongly – that such a clear-cut case which met both organisational and individual goals would be readily approved. Indeed, had there not been a particularly rarefied climate in our company at that time due to widespread restructuring and cost cutting, I suspect I would have been able to make this agreement with no – one from the US worrying about it. What would have happened had I asked permission first? I would almost certainly have been turned down, and it would therefore have been the lesser of two evils, to have declined Noemi’s request immediately rather than have her under the illusion for two months that she would stay on contract in Japan. I do have a suspicion though that part of the reason for the reaction was simply pique, out of not having been informed; with the right approach to begin with, I may have been able to persuade the President to accept the deal, had she been given the chance to decide in the first place, and not had it presented as a fait accompli. Thus I would have followed one of the ‘golden rules’ of managing upwards: no surprises.
This isn’t the aspect of this case I’d like to discuss, however. The case raises the question of whether there is a moral component to people management. Let’s analyse what we mean by a ‘moral component’, in case it isn’t obvious. Corporate Social Responsibility has dominated the organisational landscape since the spectacular crashes at the turn of the current century (Worldcom, Anderson, Enron – Enron, of course, had a well documented corporate ethics policy). Interpretation of what is correct or incorrect activity is determined by Head Office Lawyers and HR teams, and enshrined in a code of ethical behaviour. Rules are clearly laid out for all employees ensuring that no-one has to think through any decision they make if there is a question of ethics involved. They generally encode behaviour toward external parties, especially clients and suppliers, and internal conduct with fellow employees, into all organisational systems.
If we trace the history of ethics codes to their origin, we can recognise their DNA in a certain category of moral reasoning, known as deontological, in which actions are deemed right or wrong independent of their consequences. Teleological ethics determines the opposite; the rightness or wrongness of every action must be calculated on the basis of the harm, or good, that the action results in. Ultimately, the for-profit organisation, left unchecked, would operate simply on the basis of calculating what actions maximise profit, or not. Ethical codes put a legal brake on their ability to exploit resources – people, physical, financial – with no consideration other than whether they contribute to the bottom line.
These are extreme examples of course, and any ethical code will have, to a degree, a combination of both principles. It is easy to see how any organisation is able publicly to espouse its ethical codes in order to improve its reputation in the marketplace, encourage others to do business with it, and therefore ultimately serve the profit motive. Equally, enshrining a precept about treating people with due respect (usually some variation of the golden rule, treat others as you would be treated yourself) seems like a useful moral rule in and of itself with no need to justify it on the grounds of its consequence.
Ethics codes, however, all share one thing in common: they assume rationality. In other words, they are designed to remove any degree of emotional response from decision making. The world-view which is assumed by those who ascribe to the advantages of codes of ethics has no place for the affective – that is, the emotional component. Indeed, the emotional response to a situation is seen as a weakness which needs must is minimised in order to produce the correct outcome. For a manager, feelings of right or wrong simply get in the way of cold, rational judgement, because those feelings relate, more often than not, to the consequences of action for individuals; and it is better to be guided by wider principles, than worrying about the effects of decisions on particular individuals. Why? Because codes of ethics are in place to protect the organisation’s ethical position, not the individual’s, and it would be impossible to manage effectively in a world in which we worried about the impact of our decisions on every individual they affect. A logical consequence of that position is that the good manager is an amoral manager, whose actions are based on a calculation of what is in the best interests of the organisation, and which comply with its ethics codes. Feelings simply get in the way of that.
There are two issues though that complicate this position. The first is that it has long been well known that managers simply aren’t like that in practice. For 50 years, research has shown that they operate under circumstances known as ‘bounded rationality’. Management practice has shown time and again that decision making may be partially evidence-based, but incorporates large elements of gut feel, guesswork, politics, and straightforward stupidity. We also tend to select the evidence that matches with our world-view, and reject, subconsciously, that which doesn’t. More kindly, no manager in the modern world can acquire all possible sources of information, analyse them, evaluate them and make the perfectly rational decision. There is simply too much information out there to do so. Thus, ‘bounded rationality’.
And we feel things, as managers. There’s no getting around the fact. Depending on our personalities, our decisions may be more or less determined by what feels like the right or wrong thing to do. After all, a fairly large part of the enormous corpus of writing on leadership assumes that effective leaders can appeal to the ‘hearts and minds’ of employees to increase their engagement to the organisation, and commitment to the task. The old saw about leadership is that it is about ‘doing the right things’, rather than ‘doing things right’. What is that, if it is not an endorsement of morally-directed action? Well of course it does depend on what the ‘right things’ are; outsourcing production to a country which uses slave labour could be the ‘right thing’ from the perspective of improved cost management, but entirely the wrong thing seen through the eyes of a shareholder with a moral conscience. Somehow, I don’t think Kotter was thinking of that when he first penned that memorable but clichéd phrase 20 years ago. But it does illustrate the point about why ethics codes of practice exist, to ensure the manager / leader doesn’t have to worry too much about what ‘the right thing’ is.
And that brings us to the second issue with the assumption of rationality lying behind codes of ethics, and that is that moral behaviour is intrinsically dependent on whether we feel something is right or wrong – with the emphasis on feeling. The idea of the ‘moral compass’ derives from the idea that unless we’re a psychopath, we innately know when someone’s behaviour is right or wrong. Living freely in civilised society brooks no alternative. And, I would argue- to return to the question I asked above – so does the job of managing people. As in the ‘outside world’ our behaviour doesn’t always come up to the standard prescribed by our ‘moral compass’ – at least round the edges, so as a manager we may not always live up to our own ideals. but that is not to deny that the compass is there, showing us which way is North. Most of the time, I would say, our compass will be aligned with the code of ethics, and with its manifestation in various other procedures that dictate our behaviour. But, in all cases I know, those procedures do not explicitly lay down any code for managing people, apart from the most generic (‘treat people with respect’) unlike the explicit rules dealing with, say, taking bribes or fiddling expenses. Sure, there will be precepts against moral harassment, but that still leaves a range of possible grey areas around the edges of straightforward bullying. Those of us who’ve been in organisations long enough have probably seen most of these grey areas applied really well by our own managers.
This lack of guidance is strange, given that often the most emotionally laden and conflicted part of a manager’s task relates to the decisions made about people who work for him or her; and this is made all the more difficult the closer the manager is to them. A senior manager three levels above the person whose future is affected by a decision can, by definition, distance herself, and make the decision based on rational grounds only. When you know the individual well, you may attempt to make such a rational choice, but in practice, as a moral agent, you will not be able to, whatever ‘front’ you offer to those around you. If you are an effective front line manager, you will know all your people well – again, by definition. Not to take this moral compass into account at all will unfortunately come close to us meeting the definition of psychopathic behaviour.
Looking at Noemi’s case through this lens, I can understand why I felt so strongly that offering her the contract in Japan was the right one, and rescinding it the wrong one. I was close enough to her to be affected by my moral compass; my boss, the President, who didn’t know her at all, wasn’t. My boss wasn’t an intrinsically bad person; it’s just that her position of physical and organisational remoteness meant that her moral compass didn’t come into play, or at least not as much as mine did. I explained above that I don’t believe her decision wasn’t entirely rational, but she was certainly affected more by considerations of rule – following and conformity to norms, than I was. Much as I argued the case based on cost, precedent and so forth, in the end I simply felt it was the right way to treat Noemi, and I took it personally when the decision was overruled.
As managers, we hope (I think) that there won’t be too many conflicts between our moral judgement and what the wider organisation expects from us. That’s because we probably achieve, day to day, and in most cases, something called ‘goal integration’, which is simply to say that what the company wants from an employee – or for our particular group of them – and what they want from the organisation, are pretty closely aligned. If we regularly feel that there is conflict, then we probably should be considering our position; are we expecting too much? Or am I in the right place? Are the compromises I inevitably have to make too frequent and too large for me to be thinking of this as a long term relationship?
Beyond those big questions about our future as managers, however, there will always be inevitably those occasions when we’re made to feel uncomfortable, because ultimately, when ‘push comes to a shove’, the reality is that the organisation’s objectives will outweigh those of an individual. Every time. Just consider restructuring, downsizing, firing people. It’s the circumstance when it’s clearest exactly where the power lies. How to deal with it?
First, we need to accept the premise that effective people management has a fundamentally moral character to it. Second, there is I think opportunity for every manager – especially on the front line – to carve out his or her own set of moral operating principles which guide practice, at least most of the time. It is unlikely that these will ever be written down; they may be discussed with team members, they may well evolve over time, and they will certainly be largely consistent with the ethics codes laid down by the company. But they won’t be the same, and they won’t be exactly like any other manager’s principles. Depending on the level of the manager, and the nature of the organisation, they may also come to affect, or improve on, the informal and formal rules that the rest of the organisation lives by. This seems to me what happens in practice in most reasonably effective organisations. And Noemi’s case will serve to illustrate the point, because the situation I described above wasn’t entirely the end of the story.
About three weeks after informing Noemi that her association with us would end the moment she left Europe, I received a follow up mail from her. The first part of the mail was a shortish description of how unfairly she felt she had been treated by the company in recent weeks, none of which I could disagree with. The second part was another, different, request. Noemi had been studying for the last three years under particularly generous terms provided by the company, which she had not yet completed. The request was to ask whether we would consider extending the deal beyond the termination of her employment.
I knew that such an arrangement would be unprecedented, and furthermore, more expensive than extending her contract. Given my most recent experience, I was initially tempted simply to turn her down in the nicest way possible, knowing that I would be compounding her feeling of injustice, and I believed I had had a better case with the first arrangement than with the second; there was certainly more obvious benefit to the company from extending her contract, than paying for something we would gain nothing from. However, driven perhaps by no more of a feeling than ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’, I checked with HR first who told me a) what I knew already, that it wasn’t company policy and b) how much it would cost. With that information, and a degree of trepidation, I approached Head Office with the request (once bitten, twice shy; I had no intention of granting the request myself this time, regardless of the fact that I was the budget owner).
The request was granted almost immediately. The President said ‘seeing as you obviously consider Noemi to have been a valued employee, I have no problem with allowing her to finish her studies on our preferential rates’.
How to explain that? One initial reaction may be that it simply proves that decisions do indeed have a large degree of irrationality. Perhaps it confirmed my initial assessment of the first decision, and removed an important impediment to approval in the first case; that is, ‘you didn’t ask me’. In the end, I will never know for sure what made the difference the second time round.
A bit like English Law, though, I wonder if there is an element here of decision rules being built on precedent. The first case involved, let’s just say, a fairly intense discussion about the rights and wrongs of the case, which undoubtedly had underlying it the question ‘what’s the right way to treat one of our employees’? When presented with the second case, perhaps that discussion had done enough to trigger a shift in principle, in the President’s eyes. Far from these sorts of decisions being fixed by some predetermined and publicly available code, they’re based on hard – won experience, the recognition of – and permission for – debates about them, and most of all, the willingness of the organisation to evolve its position based on those debates.
I had no illusion, of course, that the case I have described would change our company’s formal rules. In a way, it didn’t have to. But I think it did bring about a shift in the way we thought about the rights and wrongs of managing people in our part of the company – in other words, it placed moral considerations at the centre of our people management practice.