Don’t lie to me!
Posted on June 10, 2009
Filed Under Business Culture, Strategy |
Reliable sources inform me that the giant Nokia is currently laying off about 50 workers a week. Silently. Worldwide. That makes a total of 2,600 a year. Not too many if compared with the 59,000 of Citigroup, 35,000 of Bank of America or 24,500 of HP. But still, many more than the 600 they forecasted for 2009 about 6 months ago, or the 170 job cuts announced barely two weeks ago. Is this lying? Is it omitting? Does it really matter that they say they are in fact laying off a fourth (or an eighteenth) of the people they are actually kicking out?
The answer is: yes, yes, yes!
Like Nietzsche said two centuries ago,
The visionary lies to himself; the liar only to others.
Communication and clarity lead to loyalty. And, in order to achieve this, a company must keep their channels open, both internally (to its own employees) and externally (to press and masses in general). As we usually say, it is easier to catch a liar that a cripple.
This is equally important in expanding companies, those who are still going out of the egg. If a business is able to build trust among its stakeholders, all processes will benefit.
In this line, I recently found myself in an interesting situation, in my current company, in which one of the co-founders and right hand of the general manager dissappeared from the organization from one day to the next. No previous warning, no clarification after the event. A week after this has happened, the rest of the management team (aside of the general manager) still do not have a clue of the reasons behind the leave(was he laid off, did he resign, is he alive?) creating suspicions and triggering a lack of trust toward the organization. What if I am the next of… whatever happened here?? One thinks.
In the case above, it looks as if the person has dissappeared from the Earth. All his meetings have been cancelled (not postponed or taken by someone else) and we are not even allowed to contact him to ask what’s going on. Interesting. Is that offering an image of a solid and structured company to existing and potential customers and suppliers?
In the same line, many times it seems for managers to be a titanic effort letting someone leave the company in peace. While roaming through different employers, I have always crashed with the same situation as soon as you announce your resignation (typically 4-8 weeks before actually leaving): managers lose trust in you, slowly resources are put away -without warning- and you find yourself trying to do your work for the missing weeks while others are putting obstacles to you trying to find information needed to finish your tasks. That, or you are directly put aside. Your field of work is smaller than you can think… thus, I wonder why do managers stop realizing that they will eventually have to deal with you, while doing business with a partner/customer.
Keep things clear. Be open. If you cannot trust somebody, say it instead of applying evasive techniques. In a mid-term it will definitely help.
In truth, this could be understood as a way of respecting business ethics, a well discussed subject this year. While Harvard has recently created their MBA Oath, through which alumni have to pledge respect for integrity and ethics, and INSEAD has multiplied by three the time invested in their ethics-related subjects, for MBA students, the discussion here mostly bases on Normative ethics. In any case, Meta-ethics, part of which are the ideas mentioned above, are usually more difuse, less concrete. Everyone knows one has to be nice to others, but what does that exactly mean in business?
In conclusion, trust, proper-and-all-time communication and morality are concepts that, somewhat we hear about daily but where managers (and workers) still have difficulties grasping, understanding and, specially, putting in practice. Something to work on in most businesses. Otherwise, everything becomes deception… and we know to where that leads, don’t we?
I stopped believing in Santa Claus when my mother took me to see him in a department store, and he asked me for my autograph.
Shirley Temple (1928 - )
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