The choices we make
I never cared for the band Rush. Maybe it was because they were the preferred band of a racist moron I had to work with at my first Radio Shack, but I think it was their music. Still, one of their most popular songs, “Freewill,” contains one of the best lyrical lines ever: “When you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” There’s an even better choice-related quote from Jerry Garcia, the iconic leader of The Grateful Dead, who said, “Choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.”
Every day, many times each day, we all make choices. In the context of work, these choices include where to work and – once in the workplace – how to do our work. Despite lots of information and what I hope is generally a well-intentioned mindset, the choices we make often, well, suck.
I’ll start with myself. About three and a half years ago, I made the choice to join a large consultancy after years of working for smaller companies, including two of my own. I rationalized the heck out of it, but it was a bad choice.
A couple of weeks into my tenure at this large consultancy, I shared some positive feedback with a new colleague – I really liked the way he’d led a team call that I was sitting in on in preparation for taking over that client’s account management. This was unequivocally a complimentary communication. He offered no initial reaction. A few days later, he invited me to walk across the street for “coffee.” The quotation marks should be your clue here, because – while he did buy me a beverage – it was all a ploy to get me out of the office to ream me out for having the temerity to offer ANY feedback to him at all. We weren’t peers in his eyes. I’d say he made a bad choice. Then, soon after our “coffee,” he learned that the client in question was likely to do some more work with our firm – work he’d not foreseen, and I had uncovered. Suddenly, I was told that we weren’t going to transition that account to me. Another bad choice, this time with the sanction of the head of our office.
Two and a half years after joining this well-respected organization, I left. I’d made the decision to leave after about four months. Good choice. I’m an experienced professional who’s provided high level human capital counsel to some of the world’s largest companies, and I’m a certified “master” coach…and I made the choice to move in the exact opposite career direction of what I knew to be right for me. With apologies to my wife who endured a lesser me for over two years, I made choices that impacted me. What I find disturbing in what should be a significantly more enlightened work world are the choices made by senior leaders of organizations of all kinds that impact their people negatively…when they should know better or at least do something about it.
Learning from my choices
In the work that I do every day and as the parent of a newly minted professional, I see and learn about all sorts of organizational behavior that simply should not exist. When it does exist it’s because of the choices being made to hire people who don’t fit with an organization’s values. There is an outstanding behavior to promote people into positions requiring skills they’ve yet to acquire or demonstrate, and even to tolerate and excuse inappropriate, counter-productive, and in some case outright illegal behavior. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not the PC police; I’m just an informed businessperson. To riff on something the author of the book Zombie Loyalists: Using Great Service to Create Rabid Fans, Peter Shankman, says the standard of service we can employ to favorably distinguish ourselves: just do things “one level above crap” and you’re business will be great. By separating your business in terms of the employee experience you create through raising your game just a bit is low-effort and high-reward. I offer you a couple of examples of the level of current employee experience “crappitude” in the hope that you’ll better recognize your opportunities to do better and be motivated to do better.
• Big 4 audit firm – A managing partner learns that someone who’s been on the job for a few months and received no direction from at least two layers of management has performed part of the work that is needed well and has failed to perform part of the work needed to complete a major client project. The managing partner’s choice, at this point, is to publicly shame the most junior employee, including raising his voice and using insulting language. There’s so much wrong with this scenario it’s hard to know where to start. The main thing here would have been to use this opportunity as a teaching moment – mostly for the two levels of management that failed to do their part…and likely as something the entire office could benefit from. Instead, the choice he made most likely already has created a lack of engagement in several people, damaged the likelihood of people working even harder (beyond the 12-18 hour days), and increased the likelihood that people will leave and accelerated their timeline for doing so. Bad choice.
• Family-owned search firm – A small company hires a young, proven search professional with promises of benefits and professional growth. The benefits don’t materialize in the allotted time, at which point, excuses are made and the timeline is adjusted. Every day, family drama ensues with various actors bad-mouthing one another directly to or within earshot of their new colleague. Accounts are horded and the environment is toxic. Amazingly, the young professional sticks it out for months, outperforming her goals, and – eventually – getting some benefits. Then she leaves. In fact, she’d decided she’d leave after just a short time there. Imagine what she could have done if the company merely a) had delivered on it promise of benefits initially, and b) its owners required their people (aka their family members) treat each other with respect directly and when spoken about to others. Bad choices.
• Not-for-profit organization – A global organization committed to and doing great work to promote better health and healthcare desires to be an employer of choice but has a number of hiring practice issues that include making candidates wait for long periods of time without hearing anything. Though some progress is being made, there’s a lack of standard selection criteria and no uniform process to structure and conduct interviews or manage recruitment. Some of the awareness about the lag time issue comes from the few people who’ve chosen to, in fact, wait it out. There’s less certainty about the number of candidates lost in the process who may have been great additions to the team. For those who do stick around and eventually join the organization, they maintain a slightly jaundiced view – understandably forming an expectation that matters well beyond recruitment and selection will be handled at a similarly sloth-like pace. The result is that, rather than bringing in new people with fresh perspectives to be agents of change for the better, the organization’s process creates agents of same. The bad choice to allow the hiring process to drag on for too long feeds to bad choices that sustain the status quo.
We each possess the power of choice. What we choose has impact. If we choose not to decide or choose the lesser of two evils, those are bad choices. When we select options that align with who we are, who we want to be and – through those choices – we take responsibility for contributing to better work places and better worlds.
Those are good choices. Make them!
