Outside The Spin Room
Being raised by a West Point colonel father; there was no shortage of preaching about right and wrong. The rules (and resulting judgment) about stealing, lying and cheating were absolutes. But it was not until I attended West Point that the shades of grey relative to integrity were more highly defined.
West Point is famous for the strictness and the no-exceptions severity of its honor code. You are immediately dismissed if you are dishonest, or even deceitfully misleading. But, in addition, you are not allowed to tolerate others that violate the code. If you turn your head to others’ actions you also violate the honor code, even if you had no part in the deceit. To have 18- to 22-year-olds dismissed publicly by an honor code violation is traumatic and highly feared by all. It teaches you the different ‘shades of grey’ in interpreting integrity.
When I joined the business world, frankly, it was a struggle as I watched seniors interpret their individual honor code in what fell into the ‘shades of grey’ category. And as I rose to become a manager of others, I was consistently given problems that were too late to fix at that particular time, but I needed to make sure those same problems wouldn’t be repeated in the future. I found myself obsessing on if the problem represented incompetency and inexperience or was caused by malicious non-reporting at an earlier stage. Making mistakes is a part of the learning curve of a profession, but covering them up felt more like a character flaw that could likely reoccur.
I was always willing to invest in teaching subordinates who were honest and forthright, but lack of transparency and intentional deceit was not fixable in my […]