The Law of Small Things by Stuart H. Brody

Author:Stuart H. Brody
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publisher, Inc.
Published: 2019-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

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YOUR COWORKER’S IMPENDING LAYOFF

Do you warn him or obey the boss and keep quiet?

Counting promises in the workplace is not necessarily difficult because the promise of truthfulness is usually obvious. But keeping the promise is often very hard because it is frequently overridden by the apparent demands of loyalty. That’s why practicing integrity in the workplace requires extraordinary skill at discernment. This part of the book will help you develop the skill of discerning the promises and fulfilling the duties of truthfulness and loyalty simultaneously.

Imagine that your boss takes you aside one day and confides that management is planning a layoff of several employees, including a coworker and friend named Fred. You realize that getting laid off will spell disaster for Fred, who is about to close on a house with a huge mortgage. As you ponder how quickly you can contact Fred to tell him, your boss reminds you that an orderly rollout of the layoff requires complete silence until the formal announcement is made. He orders you to keep the information confidential—“No exceptions!”

Employment implies a promise of loyalty to follow a boss’s order. Similarly, friendship implies a promise of truthfulness to disclose facts critical to the conduct of a friend’s life. Your boss and your coworker each have a reasonable expectation of you, but the promises are competing and, at first glance, irreconcilable.

To gain insight into resolving tough dilemmas like this, I often turn to my students. Like most decision-makers, they tend to view the solution as an either-or proposition. Some students say they would follow the boss’s order; after all, he’s the boss. Others insist they would warn a friend no matter what because they would never let a friend down in a tight spot. They see integrity as fulfilling one duty over another rather than as a skill in designing a solution that fulfills both.

I ask them to reimagine the practice of integrity as the simultaneous fulfillment of apparently irreconcilable duties. Are you skeptical that it can be done? They are, too. So I then ask them to pair off, script an imaginary conversation with their coworker/friend, and play-act it.

It’s always fascinating to watch these student actors find ingenious ways to lead their coworker/friend to doubt the wisdom of taking on the mortgage through hints, humor, body language, fluctuations in intonation, and other indirect clues, fulfilling their promise of truthfulness, but without violating the boss’s order.

Of course, this is a classroom exercise. You may be thinking that the real world is more demanding, with much less room to maneuver and with costlier consequences to one’s livelihood. That would be true. We only need to look at the real-life drama played out with devastating national impact during the 2008 financial meltdown.

As a result of banking law changes in the late 1990s, commercial financial institutions, such as stock brokerage firms, were permitted to engage in speculative stock trading. As these firms bought stock, and lots of it, they turned to their brokers to peddle it. This created

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