Everyday Ethics

Here’s what the business world doesn’t need: Another high-sounding “code of ethics.”

Some of these read like a cross between the The Night Before Christmas, a smarmy pre-school set of rules about “being nice” , and the Ten Commandments with all of the reality stripped out.  People are urged in a lofty way to “be good for goodness’ sake.”  Whether captured in an actual “code” or in a vision/values statement, the words have the interesting dual capacity of being both too high-brow to relate to actual life on the ground and too nitty-gritty to relate to all of the ways in which things can go south.

Often these are captured or expanded upon in policy and procedure manuals, an ever-growing volume (or set of volumes) that attempt to cover all of the ways in which people can do wrong (or careless, or stupid, or whatever).  When the government does it, it becomes 250,000 people engaged full time in writing rules and a thousand or more pages added to the Federal Register every year.  Whoever does it, the more the volume the less the meaning, expecially since a lot of the effort involves making and justifying exceptions to the code/policy/procedure/rule.

This is why we at Luma talk abou everyday ethics.  What are everyday ethics?  They’re ethics that address things that can happen every day, violate people’s sense of right every day, waste resources every day, destroy the possibilities of the organization every day, produce mediocrity every day.  Things like focusing on the wrong (or even bad) priorities, drowning people in distractions, allowing internal warfare and destructive competition, burying truth (top-down, bottom-up, side-to-side), letting greed prevail over serving people successfully.  I addressed these and more in my book High-Performance Ethics, where the main guideline was to talk about ethics that are critical to having team integrity that leads to better results. 

There is a place for lofty prose, but too often the prose is all we get.  Talk is cheap.  Action is the proof of the pudding.  Is this ethic something that relates to real human beings with real strengths and weaknesses, living in organizations with real opportunities and challenges?  If so, it’s worth talking about.  If not, we should save it for the next conversation we have with a cleric or philosopher.

Even they would do better talking about everyday ethics.

High “Satisfaction” Scores, Low Results

We’ve been saying for a long time that “employee satisfaction” isn’t a bad thing, it just isn’t the right thing.  It measures things that are largely irrelevant to the main reason why we even have an organization – to achieve results, preferably at a high level.

We’ve seen this over and over again with our clients.  We’ve even had them start meetings about “how to have a passionate organization” by saying something like, “You know, we’ve had great employee satisfaction scores for years.  We score in the 90+% ‘satisfied’ or ‘very satisfied.’  We thought that would make a difference for our organization, but it obviously has not.  Our results haven’t improved, and in some areas have actually declined.  What gives?”

The latest proof coming from a major organization that is not a Luman client is from United Healthcare.  In a recent survey of many organizations from a variety of industries, they reported both the highest employee satisfaction scores and the poorest results.  To us, that shows no correlation between satisfaction scores and results – or worse, that there might even be a negative correlation. 

How can that be?  We’ve worked with some clients who had become “entitlement,” even “welfare” states.  Employees were “satisfied” – they had great working conditions, great pay and benefits, extras like fitness centers and onsite restaurants and daycare, the whole magilla.  What we often found as we dug in was that people were not only not grateful and working hard because of this, they were complaining that there wasn’t even more, or that a few trinkets had been removed or cut back a bit.  And they were not infrequently facing very low or no expectations, and were because of all of this lazy and apathetic.

Our conclusion?  If you want a Passionate, Pure-Performance Organization, one of the things you can’t be is “satisfied.”  You need plenty of people who are positively discontented and constructively disengaged.  If passionate people are working on something meaningful, it isn’t very important to them what their work conditions are – you could put them in a cardboard box as long as you don’t kill their passion.  We teach and assess on the 10 key elements you have to have if you want a passionate organization.  If you want a “satisfied” organization, you’ll have to go somewhere else.