Jim Nortz, BridgeTower Media Newswires
Have you ever wondered, “When is honesty the best policy?”
Honesty—a concept that makes everyone’s short list of paramount moral virtues—was a major issue in the 1977 presidential election contest between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. The Watergate scandals, and a nation’s yearning for a trustworthy president, fueled unprecedented press scrutiny of Jimmy Carter and his family.
One story that arose from that time was of a reporter who arranged to interview Jimmy Carter’s mother, Lillian. Lillian extended a warm greeting to the reporter on the porch of her Plains, Georgia home by saying, “Thank you so much for coming to talk with me. It’s such a pleasure to meet you.”
After inviting her into her home, Lillan responded graciously to a series of questions about her son and his upbringing. Then, motivated by a transparent desire to make some news, the reporter asked Lillian whether she ever told a lie. Lillian cast her eyes downward and after a thoughtful pause said, “Well, I must confess, I have lied on occasion.” The reporter, ears pricked, pen at the ready, asked for an example of such a moral lapse. Lillian responded by saying, “Well, when I told you it was a pleasure to meet you—that was a lie.”
As this tale illustrates, there are occasions when the general moral imperative to be honest is trumped by other considerations. In fact, such circumstances are quite common. Legal mandates and social custom often make courtesy, diplomacy or confidentiality greater ethical imperatives than honestly communicating the truth. The ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct command that lawyers maintain client confidentiality, even in circumstances where disclosure would benefit society at large or prevent financial harm to others.[i] This is, perhaps, one of many reasons lawyers are generally not held in high regard for their honesty.
But, lawyers aren’t the only ones who withhold information or dissemble in the face of unambiguous questions. When corporate executives are in the process of actively selling all or a portion of their company, they are compelled by prudence and the need for confidentiality to do some fancy verbal dancing when employees ask whether a sale is in the works. And, if you’ve been able to hold onto a job for any length of time, you’ve likely done the same. Consider, for example, the occasions when you truly believed your boss was an imbecile. More likely than not, you judged it imprudent to indulge an impulse to honestly convey this assessment to your superior.
The fact is, there are countless times when we face a choice between complete candor and a legitimate desire to get along with our colleagues and not jeopardize our chief source of income by appearing disloyal or, worse yet, being labeled a “whistleblower.”
On the other hand, honest communications are essential to a business’ success. A company’s performance is closely tied to stakeholder trust. Honest communications are an indispensable antecedent to earning such trust. A company’s performance is also dependent on the level of freedom employees have within the corporate culture to candidly express their assessment of business-critical issues.
In their book “Absolute Honesty; Building A Corporate Culture That Values Straight Talk and Rewards Integrity,” Larry Johnson and Bob Phillips warn against the disastrous consequences of the “Kumbaya Syndrome” characterized by company employees who “embrace all decisions, no matter how stupid or unethical; smile and sing the company campfire song.”[ii]
As with most ethical decision-making, the difficulty lies in striking a principled balance between competing moral virtues; candor and courtesy, full disclosure and confidentiality, truth and loyalty. Virtually all the corporate scandals of the past several years are related to fundamental failures to strike the right balance. Even in those instances where scandals arise from the deliberate and calculated criminal activity of a few senior leaders or so-called “rogue employees,” there are often many other “honest” employees who facilitate wrongdoing by their failure to call into question or disclose unethical or illegal activity that they observe or suspect.
Traditionally, in corporate America, we have taken for granted that our leaders and the employees arrive at work with the requisite ethical awareness and reasoning skills to make sound decisions about when to tell the truth and when to hold their tongue. We teach employees the law, explain the consequences of non-compliance and presume that this knowledge alone suffices to avert illegal activity. The breadth and depth of corporate scandals that have come to light in the past decade are a stark illustration of how wrong this assumption is.
Just as we invest in leadership and employee education necessary for business operations, we must, as Johnson and Phillips suggest, also invest in internal training programs specifically designed to establish “a standard of communication that encourages open discussions and healthy debate; tells the truth; doesn’t mince words; and, most of all, is guided by a moral and ethical sense of right and wrong.”[iii] To do so, we must get over the notion that teaching moral virtues is the exclusive purview of families and religions and recognize that ethical training is just as critical to business success as the financial controls companies have spent millions to develop and implement.
We must go beyond merely exhorting employees to aspire to the “highest ethical standards.” We need to develop and implement training programs calculated to assist employees in understanding the practical implications of such a mandate in what has always been and always will be a complex moral landscape.
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[i] ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct, Rule 1.6 (2002).
[ii] Larry Johnson, Bob Phillips, Absolute Honesty: Building a Corporate Culture That Values Straight Talk and Rewards Integrity, Inside Book Jacket Cover (AMACOM 2003).
[iii] Id. at p.5.
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Jim Nortz is Chief Compliance Officer for Carestream Health. He also is a former Board member of the Rochester Area Business Ethics Foundation (‘RABEF”) and the Ethics and Compliance Officer Association (“ECOA”). The opinions expressed in this article are his alone and may not reflect those of the RABEF, the ECOA or Carestream Health. Nortz can be reached at jimnortz@gmail. com.
