|
|
|
It is not enough to do good. Let me repeat that. Doing good is not enough. Many people do some good in this world, by which I mean achieve some positive outcome, but too often we achieve that outcome by doing bad, which is not good enough.
Yes, this is a piece about how the ends almost never justify the means spiced up with a dash of the Golden Rule. To start, I will readily concede that sometimes the ends may indeed justify the means. But rarely. If we agree that killing people is bad, we may still conclude that killing a bad person before they can harm an innocent is okay. Great. That is a pretty exotic scenario, though. More commonly, you may have experiences where you determine that being mean or loud or harsh or blunt or rude or even flagrantly dishonest will achieve your positive end, but doing so begs key questions: Is the choice to behave badly worth it? Is it the only or even the best option for achieving that good end? And don’t rationalize. It is all too easy for us humans to rationalize doing bad when the outcome is positive even though we have made no exertion of integrity. After all, while much good in this world has come from those who seek laudable goals such as freedom, truth, virtue, progress, and even love, how many atrocities have been committed in the pursuit of freedom, truth, virtue, progress, and even love?
A Handy Three-Part Test
To help us along, here is a three-part test for determining just when the ends justify the means. All three standards must be met in order to pass the test.
First, is the outcome truly good?
Second, does the good of the outcome completely offset the bad of the means, including foreseeable repercussions?
Third, if the outcome both is truly good and absolutely offsets any bad associated with the means, can you be sure that there was no other reasonable way of achieving your purpose?
Failing to meet any one of these three admittedly lofty bars is enough to sink the integrity of the whole project and you must conclude that the ends do not justify the means.
These sorts of dilemmas come up all the time for mission-driven organizations. Assuming that your mission is truly good (the first test), what negative or harmful means are allowable for you to achieve that good? Hopefully none, but for some reason that conclusion seems perpetually out of reach for so many decision-makers and organizations. As I have mentioned numerous times, I spent decades in higher education as a faculty member and as an academic administrator. Every institution of higher education, no matter its type or size, is exceedingly complex and has a tremendous impact on its students, its staff, their families, and the community. Therefore, the brand of moral dilemma I sketched comes up all the time. In my experience, though, rarely is that three-part test applied in any rigorous or honest way. I certainly failed to apply it many times myself in decisions both large and small. To make matters worse, the complexity of many scenarios sometimes can obscure the ramifications. From that experience I learned that it is all too easy to convince oneself that because the overall mission of the institution is good, the actions of the institution in pursuit of that mission must also be good. Sadly, that is infrequently the case. I have seen administrators and faculty rationalize away all sorts of egregious behavior by assuming that since the first test is met (that the outcome is truly good), the other two tests may be waived. Some Handy Rules of Thumb
Here is a rule of thumb for visionary, beneficent, and mission-driven organizations to apply to help avoid such pitfalls:
Not following this rule is tantamount to instant and de facto failure.
If your mission is to educate students to be successful in life while upholding ethical and professional standards (a common intention in university mission statements), then do so throughout the institution. Treat students, faculty, and staff they way you expect your graduates to treat others. This is golden-rule-level stuff here as well as plain good educational modeling. The same is true for any mission-driven organization. Consider your mission. Ask yourself, what does it mean? What does it really mean? What are its implications? What assumptions does it make about ethics and behavior? Does your organization live up to those standards every day and in everything? Do you? Of course not. We all screw up. But do you habitually correct course when you are astray and then learn from your errors, or do you just thinkingly or unthinkingly rationalize flaws away, thus compounding or repeating them? If your organization strives to achieve some standard of human decency for your clients or society, a broad goal of many nonprofits whatever the specifics, do you apply that same standard to how you treat your workforce? Do you tolerate and rationalize low pay or a stringent work culture because you think the good you do for clients offsets it (test 2)? Is there another way (test 3)? And, please, never assume the answer is no because of past practice, culture, or (shudder) tradition. I offer another rule of thumb:
Now What?
None of what I have written here is simply to apply.
To summarize: The ends do not justify the means except when they do, which is not very often yet does happen although so infrequently that you probably should doubt yourself when it does but not every time, so it is best to just not look for it. See? Easy-peazy. As a public service, I offer here an algorithmic take on my three-part test: 1. Is the end truly good?
2. Does the good of the end offset or overmatch the harm of the means?
3. Is there any other way to minimize harm while still achieving the end?
Applying this test to every decision that involves a moral or ethical dimension (and don’t they all?) sounds like a lot, but it quickly can become a habit. Two more rules of thumb may help:
It is great to do good. Please, keep doing good, but be very sure you are doing good the right way. Otherwise, what is the point?
DON'T MISS A NEWSLETTER FROM JIM
HAVE THE LATEST SENT DIRECTLY TO YOUR EMAIL BOX
1 Comment
A TRUE Tale with three morals J'accuse! = Gotcha! Years ago, when I was a university dean, I was given the additional job of overseeing our study abroad program. How I ended up saddled with this extra duty is fodder for another day, but my only compensation, aside from the warm-and-fuzzies gained from knowing that my efforts enhanced student learning, was the fact that I got to travel to a few cool places. One May, we sent 36 students and faculty to South Africa for five weeks. We were very familiar with this trip and its ins outs, and I had twice traveled there myself, once with students. This time I delayed my departure to handle some business stateside, but I planned to join them mid-trip. The second day of the excursion, a phone call awakened me with the horrific news that our travelers had been highjacked at gunpoint on a bus and robbed. They were now all safe and sound, but they had been in real danger. To compound the situation, one of the students texted home to tell mom, and mom then contacted the media for whatever reason. Since one of the faculty chaperones on the trip was the recently retired police commissioner of Baltimore, media interest was piqued, and so we were off to the races. I won’t distract you with the details, but I convened with a group of university vice presidents to decide what was next, and we agreed it was best to bring everyone home. None of these vice presidents had any experience with study abroad, and some of them had never been abroad themselves. In fact, I am pretty sure, one had never even been on plane. Their inexperience confounded their ability to assess and anticipate distance, geography, logistics, and the basic protocols of international travel. Study abroad professionals typically visit student destinations in advance to preempt just this sort of disorder. Since as a mere dean I was the lowest-ranked person in the room, my perspective was dismissed out of hand despite my personal knowledge of the travel conditions, the topography, the people, and the local challenges. Thus, arrogance and power, as always, proved a noxious combination and hampered our ability to reach conclusions and communicate clearly. As a result, we missed several opportunities to resolve the matter expeditiously, alleviate parent fears, and manage the media. Since the press had taken an interest in the story, the VP for communications, the only VP who was not using this crisis as an opportunity to posture and preen, arranged a press conference with the four local television stations for the next day and tapped me as the university’s spokesperson, a job I neither sought nor had any training for. Even as we worked to extract our travelers, television reporters and news crews arrived on campus and lined up their equipment in a designated area. While all this was going on, we were having trouble making arrangements for our travelers to get from Pretoria to the Johannesburg airport in part because of the VPs’ antics. Their stupidity peaked with someone’s suggestion that the Pretoria police should use their vans to transport our travelers and all their luggage to Johannesburg. “I looked it up. It’s only 30 miles,” this VP boasted, the one who had never flown. I had to counter that in my experience, the police in any country are generally not willing to commit their vehicles and officers to transport tourists unless it’s to the pokey. He, in his infinite arrogance, was not convinced.
No matter how much I explained that the trip leader was at the police station armed with only a flip phone and had no access to email, they would not relent in their anger at him. They were looking for someone to hang, and he would do nicely. (I don’t hesitate to point out that he is Black and they are all White.) They also were furious that he had not already secured a bus to get everyone to the airport at a moment’s notice. I pointed out that even in the U.S. he would have been hard-pressed to have arranged a bus so quickly and to have it wait on-call. I also explained that, although the Tambo airport was only thirty miles away, it is a large and difficult airport to navigate, that it often had long lines, and that clearance to fly to the States included individual pat-downs of every passenger by security. All this delay would have to be factored into the timing of any departing flight. The VPs were having none of it. One of them speculated that given the special circumstances, the airline would certainly suspend security checks! I just cannot make this stuff up. The three kept hammering away as I tried to reason with them and protect the trip leader. Our words grew heated. At one point, one of the VPs, the one who was afraid of flying, yelled, “You sound defensive!” To this day, I do not know how I refrained from yelling back, “And you are being highly offensive, you ignorant racist jackass!” Anyway, that’s what went screaming through my mind. All the while, through the window I could see the camera crews outside adjusting their equipment. They were almost ready for me. The VP for communications came to the office door several times to get me ready, but the other VPs shooed her away. Eventually I realized that the only way for me to get out of this was to let the bully VPs take it out on the Black employee in South Africa. As we called his cell by speakerphone, I anticipated that they would rip right into him when he answered. Instead, they all looked at me. Cowards. They expected me to do their filthy work. I greeted him and then sternly but without raising my voice, chided him for neither magically arranging for a bus to appear nor somehow commandeering all the police vans and drivers in the city of Pretoria. He and I were friends, and he knew me well enough to read my tone and put on a show of indignity to make it sound good. The VPs were satisfied, or at least that is how I read their smug expressions. That deplorable task out of the way, I was free to go talk to the media now without any preparation. Later on, when I was done with the press, I called the trip leader to apologize for my earlier sternness. He knew the players and had grasped the situation but appreciated my call nonetheless.  I tell this story as an example of the peculiar propensity to point fingers overwhelming the need to solve problems. We had to resolve a crisis, a real crisis. “Crisis,” by the way, is a word I never use lightly because it is deployed far too readily to describe even routine challenges. With the additional strain of the press breathing down our necks, having three VPs chew me out and then compel me to chew out my colleague (from 8,000 miles away) was not a good use of our time or energy. Even if he had screwed up (and he most certainly did not) or I had screwed up (nor did I), there was no reason to indulge in this little power play cum game of gotcha. I suspect much of this nonsense was because I was chosen to be the spokesperson and not them—pathetic jealousy. Also, they were all veteran bullies and could not pass up an opportunity. The remainder of their motivation, though, seemed nakedly racial to me. Whatever their excuses, it was unreasonable to point fingers when a problem was at hand. On rare occasions, assessing blame may be necessary to solve the problem, but, almost always, doing so is a massive distraction. Furthermore, I have often found that, after the dust has settled, the need to assign blame becomes blunted anyway. In this case, the immediate stakes were particularly high. Not only did we have to get our travelers home, but if these arrogant VPs had been successful in rattling me, I may have flubbed the press conference and created a new mess. Perhaps that was their goal all along, to set me up for failure. If so, they blew it.  Fortunately, the press conference went fine—almost. For the broadcast, one TV station juxtaposed my statements with contrary claims from a lying secret source whose voice was electronically distorted (cannot make it up!), but I was later able to correct the record during a post-return press conference. The journalistic malpractice on display was astonishing. We eventually got everyone home safely albeit several days later than necessary due to delays spawned by finger-pointing tantrums. As for the bullying VPs who ambushed me, they just crawled back under their bridges to troll another day. Moral 1: The more you are pointing fingers, the less you are solving problems. Solve problems first. Point fingers later--and then only if doing so serves some useful purpose. Moral 2: Just because you have a big title does not make you the expert. If you think that is the case, you are dead wrong. Moral 3: Avoid the press if you can. The press, like the troll, is not likely to be your friend.  Salvucci with faculty after 2nd press conference  Queens Stylin' My title promises that this essay will discuss when it is proper to KISS in the workplace. Apologies if you are looking forward to a thoroughgoing discussion of the accusations against New York governor Andrew Cuomo and his alleged workplace behavior.* If the native of Queens is guilty, then he must face the music, and perhaps that music will be performed by another product of Queens, the rock group KISS. Unfortunately, if you were hoping for a paean to those spandex-clad, make-up-laden hard-rockers who dominated the 1970s airwaves, I am afraid this essay will still disappoint. No, this essay is about the virtues and value of applying a well-known but frequently overlooked heuristic. If you are still with me, a heuristic is a fancy way of saying a problem-solving method. Some time ago I wrote a piece extolling the efficacy of Occam’s razor, a superb tool for reaching conclusions with consistency and rationality. When analyzing conundrums, Occam’s razor cuts through the nonsense by eliminating all extraneous explanations in favor of known evidence. Often, Occam's heuristic is articulated as “the simplest explanation is the best one,” a reductive but acceptable interpretation of Occam’s razor.
Have you ever excitedly purchased a product that turned out to be so daunting to operate that you just wanted to chuck it out? Of course you have. In fact, the very device you are reading this piece on may fit that description. Do you click once or twice? Do you swipe up or down? Do you command the machine, or is the machine commanding you? Perhaps you have owned an overly elaborate coffee maker that beeps every hour on the hour no matter what you do. Why would anyone want a coffee maker that beeps the hour? What kind of diabolical design is that? Or, do you ever wonder about that weird lever behind the rear seat of your SUV? You know, the one you are afraid to pull in case it releases the seat from the floor. How will you reinstall the seat? Best to just leave it be and admonish the kiddies to “never ever pull that lever!” See. It even rhymes. Sigh. Chances are, you possess many such devices and some you've even abandoned to moulder in a dank corner of your domicile because they are, well, just too much. Don’t you wish that the engineers and designers behind these Rube Goldberg devices had stuck to the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid?
In one room, Gulliver finds “a most ingenious architect, who had contrived a new method for building houses, by beginning at the roof, and working downward to the foundation." Another groundbreaking innovator uses hogs to plow and manure fields but only after he has planted acorns “at six inches distance and eight deep” to get the hogs to root. One reformer authors an attempt to refine the art of conversation by requiring individuals to lug large sacks of objects. When they encounter another so-encumbered acquaintance, they communicate wordlessly by presenting items from their sacks “since words are only names for things.”  The writing machine The most voluminous invention in Lagado is a large frame filled with words written on blocks. Three dozen boys spend six hours a day turning iron levers mounted to the frame. Each turn of the levers reveals random sets of words, and if any coherent phrases emerge, they are recorded. Later, these phrases will be assembled into sentences that will eventually form “a complete body of all arts and sciences.” By describing all these crazy contrivances, Swift is spoofing the excesses of the Royal Society, England’s premier association for scientists and inventors, but there are lessons here for us. Each of Lagado’s innovations takes a well-established but potentially involved task (building, plowing, speaking, and writing) and attempts to simplify it. The upshot is that the very cleverness of the new and supposedly improved processes renders them more laborious than the original processes. If the denizens of the Grand Academy of Lagado had instead applied the KISS principle, they would meet with much more success. To be fair, though, that outcome would make for a less entertaining book. As Swift demonstrates, it is all-too tempting when trying to complete a complex task to get caught up in the procedure and lose touch with the most important elements. Decades ago, I used to build theatre sets for a living, and I could really drive my boss nuts. Sometimes when I had a difficult piece to work on, I would take time to concoct a custom tool or a jig to make my job easier, and my boss would hit the roof. Most often, he was right that my time would be better spent just getting to work on the project, but I was too enamored of my own cleverness to refrain from designing and creating these one-use tools. I was further encouraged by the fact that every now and then, a little gadget of my invention would turn out to be most advantageous. Once, we had to build a set with eccentrically curved steps that diminished in size as they ascended. It was difficult to replicate the curve precisely for each step, so I created a device that would trace the curve of one step onto the next one no matter the size. My boss, as per usual, was seething as I crafted my novel tool, but it worked so efficiently that he eventually resorted to using it for this and other tasks. When I left that job, my curve-tracing tool hung on a pegboard next to the hammers. My boss and I never spoke of it. I relate this saga to indicate how, regardless of the occasional success, I failed to engage in the art of KISSing. Whenever I was tempted to make another new tool, my choice should have been governed by a basic calculation balancing time spent making the tool against time saved by using the tool. Far too frequently, my self-regard overran my ability to make an honest assessment. Truth was, I just loved making those stupid tools. If I had instead applied the heuristic of Keep It Simple, Stupid, the calculation would become even clearer: Would making the tool save more time than it would waste, stupid? In most cases, the answer would have been "nope." In our everyday, we face this dilemma time and again and make the wrong choices with alarming frequency. Some people, though, are masters of the art of KISSing.
 Detail of The Kiss (1908) by Gustav Klimt Keeping it simple is a powerful antidote to inefficiency and waste. KISS is not a call to reduce every process to its most basic elements or to ignore necessary complexity, but it is a discipline that allows us to strip away excess from projects and processes. Whenever you start a complex project (and throughout the span of designing and executing that project) you may want to remind yourself that at times there is nothing wrong with KISSing some tasks to get things done. *Since I first wrote and posted this piece, further allegations against Governor Cuomo have emerged. My irreverence on the subject is not intended to make light of or condone such behavior.
 My first administrative position at a university was as the founding dean of a School of Humanities and Social Sciences. My education and professional background is in the humanities, so I had much to learn about the social sciences and how they relate to the humanities as I stitched two disparate academic areas together. For those whose have not been anointed as academic cognoscenti, the humanities are fields such as philosophy, religion, English, and often history. The social sciences consist of such fields as psychology, sociology, economics, political science, and sometimes history. This being academia, there are many other fields I could list as well as more overlaps, underlaps, interlaps, metalaps, and burlaps, but you get the idea. Academic fields can be surprisingly territorial and unaccountably competitive. Take, for instance, the sometimes factious relationship encapsulated in the common phrases “soft sciences” and "hard sciences." The behavioral or social sciences are designated "soft" (read: inadequate, facile, insubstantial) while the natural sciences are regarded as "hard" (read: formidable, challenging, consequential). As strange as such hierarchies may seem to nonacademics, there are more. The humanities are often dismissed as not serious (read: just plain soft without even the patina of scientific hardness, mushy). Further down the pecking order, you may find the fine and performing arts, which are cast as softer still, (read: squishy). These are just some examples of the disciplinary caste system that bedevils academia. Despite these distinctions and hierarchies, commonalities among these fields are evident. The natural sciences and the social sciences share research methodologies and even terminology. Meanwhile, although humanistic methodologies allow for far more fluidity than do the natural and social sciences, the social sciences and humanities share a common set of questions and inferences regarding the human experience. For their part, humanists themselves sometimes look down upon the arts as not being serious or scholarly enough even as they rely on the arts for much of their subject matter and much of their way of knowing, among other things.  For those keeping score, then, the traditional and entirely unreasonable pecking order of academic disciplines in the liberal arts is 1. Natural sciences (hard) 2. Social sciences (soft) 3. Humanities (mushy) 4. Arts (squishy) To be sure, most competent academic professionals eschew this silly disciplinary caste system, which is largely the stomping ground of the arrogant and the ignorant. Solid academic professionals readily bridge the gaps between fields, capitalize on their similarities and synergy, and exploit their differences in order to collaborate on better serving students and scholarship.  What Are Soft Skills? I recount all this as an oblique approach to the question of softness. Just as the social sciences were dismissed by some as soft sciences, the arts, the social sciences, and the humanities are sometimes dismissed as basic training in mere soft skills. There is a pronounced pliability at play in these fields that is allegedly not so important to other fields such as the natural sciences or business. Soft skills, though, involve a mastery of the plasticity of human nature while hard skills are needed to perform particular tasks in a specific field. For example, the ability to persuade would be a soft skill in the workplace while the ability to utilize a database would be a hard skill. Both skills can be learned, but soft skills can be quite slippery while hard skills are often (not always) more readily grasped. Importantly, despite the negative implications of the term “soft skills,” when employers are surveyed about what abilities they most value when hiring, the response invariably focuses on these very soft skills, such as communication, critical thinking, leadership, teamwork, problem-solving, creativity and on and on, with the implication that hard skills can be mastered on the job. Note that all these skills are difficult to define and yet are transferable across most professional fields. What Are Human Tools+Paradigms? I prefer to think of soft skills as “human skills" or “human tools and paradigms,” which, by a wild coincidence, is almost the title of this very blog, where I develop and offer a kit of tools and paradigms for leaders to understand their organization’s mission, their employees, their colleagues, and their role in the whole scheme. My essays don’t simply recite and describe the skills that need to be mastered. For that, just Google "soft skills" to get lists of "The 7 Soft Skills," "The Top 10 Soft Skills," or the 120 soft skills. Each of the tools and paradigms I elucidate, being rather challenging, demand contemplation, analysis, and sometimes demystification.  A kit of tools On my website and blog, I use a header image of mechanic’s tools, which most immediately evokes the hard skills but suggests that the soft skills I tout, the human tools and paradigms, are at least as materially relevant as the hard skills. They also require the most training, practice, and maintenance. This differentiation is represented by the glowing lamp that lies on top. Those who possess and have mastered the use of an array of these human tools and paradigms, a fulsome kit, set themselves apart from the herd of the merely competent. They stand out as the extraordinarily accomplished among their peers and, not for nothing, make the most successful managers and leaders. Continued proficiency in these skills requires ongoing development, improvement, and refinement. No matter the context, these human tools and paradigms have proven to be, again and again, the hardest skills of all, the soft ones.  Let’s start with a wooden chair. For the chair to be an excellent chair, it must have integrity. If I present a wooden chair to you and suggest that it lacks integrity, you would wisely be wary before you sit down. What does it mean, though, to say a wooden chair lacks integrity?  A chair that lacks integrity is missing some key element and/or is not solidly built. Perhaps it is missing a leg, or the legs are all different lengths. Perhaps it is well put together, but the wood is fragile, like balsa; or, perhaps the wood is sturdy, like oak, but the chair is poorly constructed. The screws are not tight and the joints not properly glued. It could be that the seat and legs are solid, but the back is flimsy. Whatever you do, don’t lean back! Any one of these qualities would be evidence that the chair lacked integrity. To be clear, physical integrity has nothing to do with the fact that the chair’s size does not suit you or that the color is all wrong or that the chair is out of style. Integrity is not a matter of aesthetics or personal preference. Additionally, an uncomfortable cushion does not mean the chair itself lacks integrity although it could mean the cushion does.  Physical integrity, as with our wooden chair, is a combination of wholeness, solidity, and reliability. If the chair is not whole or not solid, it is not reliable and lacks integrity. Indeed, the chair in question is entirely unexcellent. You should consider standing. In contrast, when we talk about the integrity of a person, we usually do not refer to physical integrity. For instance, we would not say that a football player who is easily knocked down lacks integrity any more than we would say that the solid build of another player is an indication of his integrity. When we refer to integrity in humans, it is not physical but moral integrity we are citing, and moral integrity must be held internally as well as practiced regularly. Moral integrity, lived day in and day out, builds resilience and leads eventually to the achievement of excellence.
Moral integrity has to do with the practice and application of personal principles, values, and ethics rather than material qualities. It is a matter of a person’s inner choices and guideposts, which may develop from or be informed by a number of sources, such as parenting, religion, school, philosophy, or society. Human or moral integrity is not unlike the physical integrity we expect from a chair in that moral integrity too is marked by wholeness, solidity, and reliability. Integrity in a person must be complete. It must extend to every aspect of a person’s daily behavior and choices. To be whole, integrity cannot be compartmentalized: practiced in this situation but suspended in that other one. Moral integrity must be solid, able to withstand the buffeting it will face in daily practice. And it must be reliable, available to confront every challenging situation. A Breaking Bad Interlude  The popular television drama Breaking Bad is as much about moral integrity as about drug dealing. It starts with nebbishy high school chemistry teacher Walter White moving through life with an enhanced sense of his own integrity, having sacrificed a lucrative career for a life of normality and professional ignominy. But his is not a solid integrity. A health crisis and related financial distress cause him to break with his own moral code. It turns out that all along his integrity was just a mask for stubborn pride. He even resents and rejects an offer of help from his former business partners who struck it big after he pulled out of their endeavor.  What is his workaround? He turns to cooking and selling crystal methamphetamine and adopts a ruthless persona he names "Heisenberg." He is so far gone that he starts wearing a pork pie fedora and sporting a hipster goatee. The man clearly has no bottom. Certainly a man of more solid integrity would swallow his pride for the sake of his family and accept the money from his well-to-do friends, not turn to a life of crime. His personal abhorrence of and moral objections to the meth he manufactures and sells are immaterial. Indeed, his overweening pride in his abilities, which masquerades as integrity, transmogrifies into an insistence that he produce only the very highest quality meth. Walter White does indeed achieve excellence but only in a most vile domain. White’s integrity is also not whole. Even as he rises to become a drug lord, he tries to maintain a modicum of integrity in his interactions with his family, but this effort, of course, fails. His commitment to integrity is just too compromised and compartmentalized. Soon, White’s reliability as a husband and father dissipates as he sinks into the morass of corruption borne of his own poor choices. Even his wife gets caught up in his dealings, and his DEA agent brother-in-law ends up dead. White inevitably abandons his family but, in a perverse burst of paternal devotion, extorts his former business associates to assure that his wife and kids are financially secure. Finally, he sacrifices his life to save that of his drug-dealing partner and surrogate son, thus demonstrating that, in truth, there is honor among thieves, but it is really, really twisted. Walter White's brand of integrity is a grotesquerie.  White’s lawyer, Saul Goodman (nee Jimmy McGill), is cut from a different cloth when it comes to integrity. In the Breaking Bad prequel series, Better Call Saul, Saul/Jimmy starts out life with a severe integrity deficiency, stealing from the till of his father’s store as a boy, only to mature into “Slippin’ Jimmy,” an inveterate con artist and grifter. He eventually straightens out, becomes a lawyer, and tries to stay in the moral lane, but the inchoate nature of his newfound integrity renders it weak in the face of temptation. His integrity lacks solidity.  By contrast, his brother, Charles, also a lawyer, adheres to a strict interpretation of the law and the legal profession and regards himself as a paragon of integrity. Unfortunately his commitment to integrity, while solid as it comes, is not whole as it does not extend even to his brother, whom he undermines at every turn. In fact, it is a conceit of the show that Charles’ spiteful exertions of professional and personal jealousy repeatedly undercut his brother’s attempts to establish and maintain his own sense and commitment to integrity. When Charles' integrity finally fails altogether, he can imagine no other resolution than to end it all. Saul/Jimmy’s integrity is not solid. Charles’ integrity is not whole. Neither of them are reliable. These shows are fictional, of course, and dramatically hyperbolic, but they offer good examples of the perils of weak and incomplete integrity as well as good television viewing. While moral integrity must be whole, solid, and reliable, like our chair, it is not merely a static intention. It is a practice, a continuous course of action within the guidelines of principles that must be attended and adhered to. As Albert Camus said, “Integrity has no need of rules," and thus these guiding principles, whatever their derivation, must radiate from within. Integrity is not subject to a set of external regulations or protocols but is intrinsic to the person. Integrity is the application of strength of character. Integrity is marked by neither stubbornness nor rigidity, which is why Walter White and Charles McGill lack it. They are too rigid: White in his personal pride and Charles in his professional pride. Their hubristic inflexibility causes them, when faced with challenges superior to their strength, to break. In contrast, real and constant integrity builds resilience, that inner quality that enables one to snap back from adversity—even when that adversity is itself the result of a failure of integrity. Ultimately, integrity is a fount of many virtues. As Lennie Bennet said, when integrity is so ingrained that it is a habit, excellence will ensue. Cutting corners, deceiving, shirking, evading, gaslighting, bullying, and bullshitting are all anathema to the habit of integrity. Anything built using these means and other fraudulent or facile methods, even if it succeeds, will be substandard, far less than it could have been. Have no illusions: applying and maintaining integrity is difficult, and, like any human effort, it can sometimes lead to unintended consequences that must be addressed. The advantage is that anything pursued or built with integrity in mind will, at its core, always be solid and whole. You can rely on it. 
Remember way back when, when you could reminisce about the good old days without some wise guy coming along and telling you that much of your memory is just a fantasy. Yeah, that way back when never existed. Humans have a tendency to look on the past with warmth and even longing. This is true when reviewing history as well as when reviewing our individual experiences. You have probably heard someone say something like “My family had it rough when I was coming up, but we always had each other.” The person then goes on to wax wistfully about how they were desperately poor, surviving paycheck to paycheck and occasionally living in the car or a shallow ditch, and yet they were ever so much the richer for how their nightmarish existence drew them together. I am indulging in hyperbole, of course, but you recognize the pattern. As we move away from the past, we tend to start smoothing the rough edges of memory. Sometimes, our new perspective allows us to see things we could not see before or recontextualize our experiences or recorded history to understand them better. But too often, we are just selectively editing the real picture. It is like observing a rock, first up close with all its coarseness and jaggedness and then at a distance as a smooth surface. I don’t know if it is because our memories are inherently faulty or we just have a desire to idealize the past, but having no training as a psychologist, I haven't the expertise to consider this phenomenon from a clinical standpoint. Instead, my approach will be more prosaic and pragmatic. Nostalgia is a longing for a version of the past that is imbued with a great deal of sentimentality. Of course, there is much to admire and even desire about the past, but nostalgia erases the undesirable or clads it in a shiny new veneer. Certainly, we need to comprehend the past to better understand our present and even our future. The problem with nostalgia is that notion of sentimentality, though, which is like seeing that rock from across a field and admiring its flawlessness despite an awareness that up close we would easily recognize its coarseness, cracks, fissures, edges, and pockmarks. Nostalgia works much the same way, and it is fraught for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it is simply wrong. It is a distortion and misapprehension of our past, and if we cannot grasp the past, we certainly cannot fully grasp the present or anticipate the future. Second, in eradicating or editing the reality of the past, nostalgia can lend itself to delaying or even denying righteousness and justice. Those who long for a greatness in America that allegedly marked the period of the 1950s and early 1960s peer through a narrow scope that eliminates the oppressive circumstances that minority populations of every type and women lived under. To pretend otherwise is just not factual. Nostalgia, though, smooths all those sharp edges like a cultural opioid. Our nostalgic minds tell us that white men back then were all epitomes of masculinity, which they lorded over their paragons of femininity, who in turn enjoyed carefree lives. Blacks, in this fantasy, occupied some space in the background, but they put up a noble fight for justice, which everyone except really bad people supported. All this is absurd, but, worse still, it necessarily casts any present-day fight for justice as wrongheaded, counterproductive, and quixotic. Third, nostalgia is inherently pessimistic. The hyper-nostalgic phrase “make America great again,” implies three falsehoods about time: that there is some sort of greatness endemic to the past, that we no longer can experience greatness, and that we are on a path that leads us even further from the achievement of greatness. This last falsehood is the nature of nostalgia, to idealize the past while implying that the future is bound to be bleaker. The “again” in “make America great again” may promise some ability to recapture past greatness in the future but only by fabricating a past that never existed outside of febrile minds. Left to its current path, the “carnage” that the proponents of making America great again claim marks the present can only culminate in a dismal future. The phrase itself offers not hope but a sense of a lost cause, a noble defeat that must be revenged. In reality the past is, like the present, neither all or largely good nor all or largely bad. It is a mix. People love depictions of, say, eighteenth-century Europe as a world of fancy clothes and beautiful people, but whatever beauty and nobility existed then was offset by the reality of the age. The massive issue of class and the disregard for most life aside, even the upper crust had no running water. Until you are willing to conquer the matter of the close stool, spare me your desire to live in the past. If you doubt me, read Jonathan Swift’s satiric poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1732) for a fine example of the difference between illusion and reality, and remember, “Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia, shits!” And if you are up for even more fun read Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s rejoinder “The Reasons that Induced Dr. S. to write a Poem called ‘The Lady's Dressing Room’” (1734), which offers an alternative perspective: "You'll furnish paper when I shite." To be transported to that time, as one romantic television portrayal fantasizes, and to thrive, you would have to start by radically adjusting your attitude about basic hygiene.
My apologies if my tiny foray into eighteenth-century hygiene left you a little nauseous, but any queasiness you may experience reminds me that nostalgia itself was first identified as a disorder among soldiers who were suffering a sort of amped up homesickness. Nostalgia is a malady.
Nostalgia, because it erroneously rewrites the past, leaves us wallowing in error, injustice, and pessimism. Nostalgia is a stew of retrograde fecklessness. Although we are all prone to nostalgia to varying degrees, those who wallow in a fanciful past in lieu of facing current realities and their consequences undermine society’s ability to forge a new and bold future. Our current lot will not improve, howsoever fleetingly, unless we squarely and honestly face the past and present in order to foresee or even forge the future. Learning the past, the true past, stripped of fantasy and undo sentiment can help us see through the romance of lost causes and such. Only then can we achieve true unity in our future. 
Several of my recent blogposts have offered examples of behaviors, particularly among bosses, that are considerably less-than admirable. Now, I am a firm believer that one should acknowledge, own, correct, and learn from one’s mistakes as a matter of course. Doing so requires strength of character and mind. In contrast, dodging mistakes is a mark of cowardice and fecklessness. Still, it is not enough to learn just from one’s own mistakes. There is another rich vein of error to mine for lessons: the mistakes of others, particularly those that manifest debilitating habits of mind or reveal adverse patterns of action. Chronic error can be a great teacher.
It stands to reason, then, if positive paradigms do not always simply transfer one-to-one from person to person, then learning from and applying negative paradigms will not necessarily be a matter of just doing their opposite. Just because x is wrong doesn’t necessarily mean that negative x is correct. Life is way more complex and much more fun than that.
After all, his belief is one of our most powerful and enduring cultural assumptions: that work, any work, is inherently virtuous. I started imitating him. Soon I too was too busy for anything. I came in early and stayed late, just like him. I worked on holidays and fretted about taking vacation, just like him. Think about that. I stressed over taking a vacation. How perverse is that? I lost perspective. Over time, I started to see that while he was a hard worker, he was miserable and, worse, all his striving actually produced little of great value. I then reflected on what I was missing in life due to to my budding workaholism and how my own efforts generated little of value. In fact, after a certain point, value decreased the more I worked. I resolved to make better choices and started prioritizing more judiciously. Soon, although I was working less, my output improved, as did my outlook on life. The behavior and habits of my boss had served as a wonderful negative paradigm, but if I had just done the opposite of him, I simply would have stopped working. Instead, I took what I learned from his errors and applied it to myself, adapting it to my style and the needs of my position. To be sure, I worked plenty hard, but I also began, as they say, to work smart. As this story suggests, negative paradigms can be just as and even more instructional than positive paradigms. They not only offer models to avoid, but they can give one perspective that is not readily accessed otherwise. Negative paradigms offer powerful insights when we perceive how things are done wrong and can inspire us to reconceive how to do them right, but negative paradigms are only one tool for self-awareness and improvement. My own practices have evolved as I have paid heed to a mix of negative paradigms, positive paradigms, candid introspection, and research to determine how to best achieve my own goals while adhering to my principles and values. Applying each of these elements, these tools and paradigms, is critical to formulating an effective approach to one’s distinctive success. In this way, even the negative can be a positive. 
The television drama Mr. Robot requires one to follow plot threads and characters that have been filtered through the mind of Elliot Alderson, played by Rami Malek, a man who is, on his best day, wildly delusional. The plot consists of misdirection, hallucinations, time jumps, multiple identities, and deception, so I naturally find it extremely engaging and compelling. It is just my sort of narrative. In addition, the dialogue frequently drops shards of wisdom, for instance when season-two character, Ray, played by Craig Robinson, lays this insight on Elliot: "Control is about as real as a one-legged unicorn taking a leak at the end of a double rainbow." Truth. What is it about control? I suppose it is only natural that we want control in our lives. Otherwise, our existence would spin into chaos. But moment-to-moment, day-to-day, week-to-week control is enticingly ever-elusive. It is a bar of wet soap in your hand. The harder you squeeze the more likely the bar will shoot away. Yet, many of us persist in seeking to maximize control over every aspect of our lives and the lives of others. In the workplace, many bosses assume that it is their sacred duty to control every employee and every aspect of the job. If you have ever worked for one of these control-freak bosses, you know what a miserable disaster that can be. Most often their behavior takes the form of micromanagement or perfectionism. Whatever the case, the controlling boss eventually finds it maddening as full control slips out of grasp over and over, and, all too often, instead of adjusting to failure and choosing a different strategy, the boss tries to squeeze each bar of soap all the harder with the predictable outcome. If you have a boss who regularly says something along the lines of “we should do the same thing but just more of it,” you know you are in deep trouble.
I am not suggesting that bosses should cede authority or give into chaos, of course. Instead, wise bosses recognize and embrace the limits of control and learn to manage in the rough and tumble of daily existence and even in the midst of chaos, which we all inescapably must confront. In contrast, those who resist chaos the most zealously fare the worst in the end.
Okay, enough of the soap analogy. If you are stuck on it, go buy a bottle of body wash or a good ol' soap-on-a-rope. Exerting just the right amount of control requires constant appraisal and adjustment, which is why it is so tempting just to squeeze harder and pretend that you will retain your grip (sorry). Some people, particularly some bosses, feel the need to get involved in everything in order “to make sure it is done right.” To shift my metaphor once and for all away from bathing products, they want to stick their thumb in every pie. But, it is axiomatic that if you stick your thumb in every pie, all you end up with is a bunch of ruined pies. It’s a simple formula, really. If you feel obligated to get involved in everything, you only guarantee that you will wreck almost everything. If you are such a boss, it is also axiomatic that your employees will find your interference demoralizing and will react accordingly. Years ago, my wife, who is an attorney, had a boss who was precisely this kind of control freak. Stephen felt that if he did not insert himself into every detail of their work, his staff would screw it up. He fancied himself the ultimate in quality control, I suppose. Stephen was a good guy outside of work and wasn’t a tyrant otherwise in the office, but morale was abysmal. For some reason, he was particularly proud of his writing ability, which indulged in florid language and 50-cent words even when he was writing to their clients, many of whom were victims of inadequate education. Whenever my wife wrote anything at all, Stephen had to see it before it went out. As it goes, that is not a bad idea. Writing is best when you can get as many eyes as possible on it, and a good boss will check important written matter for tone or quality before it leaves the office. Still, Stephen thought he wasn’t doing his job unless he was revising heavily. No matter how polished my wife’s writing, Stephen would liberally replace lucid phrasing with tangled wording, alter punctuation, and rearrange sentence structure. My wife complained to me bitterly about it. At her first annual evaluation with Stephen, he took her to task specifically for her writing. He chose one piece she had submitted to him, and he humiliated her by reviewing all the alterations he had made. If that were not enough, at the end of their meeting, he told her that she should take a writing class at the local community college. Let’s put this in perspective. My wife is, in fact, a community college graduate who went on to earn a JD from a respected law school. Furthermore, she won her law school graduation award for the quality of her writing, and by the time she met Stephen, she was no novice. She was a lawyer with years of experience. Imagine someone like her being told she would have to go back to her beginnings. As luck would have it, though, her husband had some knowledge of just what she would learn in that community college writing course, given that I had started my career in academia tutoring and teaching writing at just such a school. She asked me to look over the piece that Stephen had viciously critiqued. No surprise, aside from two small typos, her original was clear and impeccable. On the other hand, Stephen’s attempt at revising it resulted in several sentence-structure errors, distorted diction, and misused punctuation. In short, Stephen, despite a formidable lexicon, was a lousy writer, a really lousy writer. His revisions betrayed no mastery of the basics of grammar and mechanics. Simply put, he would have benefited greatly from my beginning composition course. My wife, though, concluded that she could not win with him. While she neglected to follow up on his suggestion that she go back to school, she also stopped revising her writing. Instead, she just submitted slap-dash first drafts to Stephen, reasoning that, since he would tear apart anything she gave him, her time could be better spent on other aspects of her job. Of course, having to review her slipshod work only further convinced Stephen of her ineptitude. Demoralizing. I tell this true story because I enjoy its irony, certainly, but also because it is a great example of the inherent failure of control-freakdom in the workplace. Stephen wanted to minutely control all the material produced by his office and did not realize or accept the fact that my wife was (by far) the superior writer. Instead of trusting in her skills, which she had developed over years, he flattered himself that he was the better wordsmith and went on to ruin her perfectly fluent documents. He just had to go and stick his thumb in that delicious pie. Worst still, certainly without intending to, he belittled my wife and thus encouraged her to submit shoddy work, which only resulted in more effort from him. To control is stupid, to manage divine. The deeper insight here is that the need to exert excess control is very often (maybe always) the result of ego run amok. It suggests that oneself is exceptional and that others are inferior. The truth is, though, that everyone is superior, inferior, and equal in a variety of ways. Workplaces that feature healthy teams acknowledge this fact and use it to their advantage. They encourage team members to share their abilities with one another and offset their shortcomings in order to achieve collective success. The leader of a team is not necessarily the most skilled at any, let alone all, of the team’s tasks. The team leader should be the one who is most skilled at bringing out the best in the team by striking the right balance. In other words, the team leader should simply be the one who is most adept at leading. Now, in all honesty, I can certainly conceive of the existence of some sort of genius who is superior to everyone in everything. I can also recognize how such an extraordinary individual would be best left to perform in his or her preferred manner. This brainiac would be a paragon of efficiency, a one-person productivity machine, and must have as much leeway to perform at his or her top capacity to be as effective as possible. Of course, my ability to conjure such a mastermind is entirely the result of an exertion of my imagination. The human imagination is a wonderfully versatile tool and allows me to envision a host of scenarios that are as equally outlandish as the existence of a supergenius master of all trades, a boss who can and should have total control. For example, I can also just as readily imagine a one-legged unicorn taking a leak at the end of a double rainbow. Can you? So, I promised in my title to let you know how to maximize control in one easy step.
 |
Jim Salvucci, Ph.D.I am a former English Professor and academic administrator with experience at several institutions in the U.S. and Canada. I have a broad background in management and leadership and have mentored countless faculty, staff, and students, by offering them Tools+Paradigms to help them rethink their assumptions and practices. The Human Tools+Paradigms I present in this blog capture what I have learned from working with them and from my experience and research. You can read more about me here.
Jim Salvucci, Ph.D.
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed
