When I worked for a small regional newspaper, I witnessed the head of the ad department get a story pulled.
The story was about a police incident with a citizen. The story got pulled because the citizen was friends with a business owner who spent a lot of ad money with the newspaper. Another time, a reporter quit because his investigation of a politician misusing money got buried for similar reasons.
I bring all of this up because my workstation faced a wall lined with awards for excellence in journalism. Gold, black, and oak. Shiney and honorary. Reminding the newsroom that its employees are valuable contributors to the larger institution of journalism.
The inside of that building was often disrespectful, lacked empathy, and was full of hypocrisy.
I have worked in a number of industries, and they all advertise some variation of being “Committed to excellence, respect, and integrity in our operations and conduct!”
And behind the scenes are people trying to make it happen. A mix of managers and employees contributing ideas, working long hours to make the strategy a reality, educating themselves on their own time, and picking up the slack for other employees when they have troubles at home or with their workload.
The vision of the thing we are striving towards is ahead of us.
And then reality sets in. Strategy melts away because doors are closed, ideas are stomped out of fear of taking action, and then the finger-pointing and gaslighting starts.
Some portion of people jump ship then and there. Others remain, perhaps out of some misplaced feeling of responsibility for how things ended up – nobody wants to leave things in ruins, especially not when you are loyal, caring, and invested in your career and your coworkers.
Over my career, and especially in the past few years, I have heard these messages more loudly: “Loyalty is dead. Your company does not care about you. Stop investing so much into your career. Your coworkers are not your concern.”
And I hate that a lot. I like working with teams of people (remote or otherwise). I enjoy working towards building a successful strategy. I love learning from talented leadership (when you can find it) and taking that with me into each new personal and professional opportunity. And it is a great feeling to see the organization you work for and its people prosper.
Which makes the fall all the harder.
For my sake, I want a world where businesses succeed when leadership, employees, and business practices genuinely reflect shared values in a sustainable way. But I don’t know where we lost that or whether it was never there.
I have at least 40 years of work left. I can do my part, but as of late, with the increasing frequency of news coverage of employees at odds with employers, I wonder if anything we can do will genuinely make things better or if it is true that all of this is just a necessary ill of society until we can replace everything with robots and true AI?
Hypocrisy in Those Good Places
