I’ve learned a lot of hard lessons in my many years as a boss and manager, and here’s one of them: You’ll never go wrong betting on the certainty of top executives to show off their hubris, arrogance and ego at exactly the worst possible time.
It takes a lot of confidence—some have less charitable terms for it—to be a big-time executive, and in all too many cases, that confidence/arrogance can run amok.
So it is with Goldman Sachs chairman Lloyd Blankfein. According to The New York Times, “A little more than a week after Goldman’s chairman and chief executive drew fire for saying the Wall Street giant was ‘doing God’s work,’ the bank said Tuesday that it would spend $500 million—or about 3 percent of the $16.7 billion it has so far set aside to pay its employees this year—to help thousands of small businesses recover from the recession.”
Wall Street banks “doing God’s work?” You can say a lot about the business practices on Wall Street, and a lot has been said over this past year. However, no one in their right mind ever considered it “doing God’s work”—except an over-the-top arrogant bank executive, of course.
But as the Times story also noted, “Lloyd Blankfein also showed a bit of humility, acknowledging at a conference in New York that Goldman had made mistakes, and that it was sorry. ‘We participated in things that were clearly wrong and have reason to regret,’ he said. ‘We apologize.’ ”
OK, my dad always used to tell me that confession was good for the soul, and an apology is simply a public confession. That’s usually a good thing, especially in a business setting, and in fact, there can be solid business reasons for being contrite and apologetic, as we pointed out in this classic Workforce Management article on “The Art of the Apology.”
But the head of Goldman Sachs apologizing for some of the practices that have made Wall Street the target of so much anger from average Americans? That’s a big story, but only if the apology was truly sincere, contrite and represented a clear and honest change in past practice.
As Atlanta-based attorney and consultant Stephen Paskoff said in our “Art of the Apology” classic, “Apologies can be a powerful tool for conflict resolution, but only if they’re part of a cultural change. You need your corporate leaders to say, ‘If we make mistakes, we fix them. If someone says there’s a problem, you need to listen to what they have to say. And if you have a problem, you need to bring it up, because we’ll listen.”
And that’s where I have a hard time swallowing an apology from the head of Goldman Sachs. It doesn’t sound sincere, and more to the point, I don’t see Goldman’s Lloyd Blankfein touting any cultural changes at his bank that are flowing out of the transgressions he now feels compelled to apologize for.
“Blankfein’s apology might ring truer,” Gilbert wrote, “if he hadn’t been named CEO of the year by the magazine whose conference he was gracing with his presence. The fawning adoration for the multimillionaires who run the banking industry has only been diminished, not destroyed, by the damage their actions wrought. … Goldman and its peers need to practice humility and contriteness for an extended period, rather than seeking image-buffing headlines with token gestures.”
I don’t know if I could have put it any better, because Blankfein’s apology flunks the basic sniff test when it comes to public apologies: If it doesn’t sound humble, genuine and heartfelt, it probably is just a PR device to momentarily divert attention away from something else—like $16.7 billion in employee bonuses for an industry that had to be bailed out by the American taxpayer.
Dealing with bullies in the workplace is one of those management topics that never seems to grow old, mainly because bullying behavior is probably as old as the workplace itself.
According to the AP, “Moira Cameron—a veteran of long military service—was named a warder at the Tower two years ago. Hers was supposed to be a happy story about how a bastion of male supremacy could become a place where women, too, could serve queen and country. [But] on Monday, embarrassed Tower officials conceded that Cameron had apparently been subjected to a campaign of bullying and harassment conducted by some of her resentful male colleagues. They said two male warders have been suspended and a third is under investigation for suspected harassment of Cameron.”
What constitutes bullying in the ranks of the British Beefeaters? Britain’s Sun newspaper reported that “Cameron’s uniform had been defaced and … nasty notes had been left in her locker.” In addition, the newspaper said that Cameron’s entry in the online encyclopedia known as Wikipedia had been defaced as part of the campaign against her.
I’m sure that it was tough being the first woman to join an all-male group like the Beefeaters, but Moira Cameron seemed to be a great choice to break the gender barrier given that she had served in the British military for more than 20 years, with stints in both Cyprus and Northern Ireland, and, because she doesn’t seem willing to take too much crap from anyone.
“I’ve had some comments,” she said early in her tenure as a Beefeater. “ I had one chap at the gate one day who said he was completely and utterly against me doing the job … I said to him, ‘I would like to thank you for dismissing my 22 years’ service in her majesty’s armed forces.’ ”
It will be interesting to see how the British deal with this incident—who handles HR issues for the Beefeaters, anyhow?—especially since the decision to bring women into what had long been an all-male bastion like the Beefeaters must have been made at a very high level by people who knew the potential for something like this to happen.
Dealing with bullies is always tricky, as we noted here at Workforce.com in this article on “Tips for HR: Dealing With Workplace Bullies,” mainly because “the HR professional must be able to distinguish a bully from an earnest but perhaps difficult or even troubled supervisor.”
It’s hard to imagine anyone being earnest about the abuse being directed toward Beefeater Moira Cameron, but I suppose that’s possible. What is clear, however, is that every manager must be prepped and ready to handle bullies in the workplace because it is a problem that is never, ever really going away.
Bullying, unfortunately, seems to be one of those quirks of human nature that you can’t stamp out. And no matter how much you do to solve the problem in your own workplace, I guarantee that it will pop up again when you least expect it—even at the Tower of London.
Steve is a former EEOC trial attorney and management law firm partner. His Atlanta-based company, ELI, provides “a variety of programs and services that teach professional workplace conduct, helping our clients translate their values into behaviors, increase employee contribution, build respectful and inclusive cultures, and reduce legal and ethical risk.”
He also writes a blog that gets into a lot of legal issues in the workplace, and I found this blog post he wrote this week to be especially insightful given the explosion in social networking and modern communications. I’m happy to share it with you because readers tell us that they always need good workforce legal information, so take a read on this and let me know what you think:
“I’ve wondered when it would happen—for years there have been stories of athletes, proxies for other celebrities, who say and do what they want while their behavior is ignored, minimized or attributed to ‘locker room’ humor or conduct. But the doors of locker rooms, operating rooms, broadcasting booths and boardroom suites are wide open these days; conduct that used to be tolerated in the bastions of such resident ‘untouchables’ is now falling prey to general workplace standards, publicity, business harm and personal penalties.
“Also, ESPN suspended Bob Griese for making on-air disparaging comments about a Latino racecar driver. Almost before I’d finished reading that online scoop, another story broke about Larry Johnson, a Kansas City Chiefs running back who used a homophobic slur on Twitter and while addressing reporters. At the time of this writing, Johnson has been told to stay away from the team while the NFL and the Chiefs complete their investigation.
“What’s happening here is that the transparency of modern communications is preventing such behavior, no matter who the offender, from being swept under the rug, or bed, as the case may be. So the message is simple and direct, not just for those at the middle and bottom but also for organizational leaders and ‘high’ performers.
“As we have taught in Civil Treatment, ‘Guard your words and actions.’ The more public your role, the more cautious you must be. There is no invincibility when conduct is outrageous, unprofessional and uncivil. What’s increasingly obvious is that the issue involving such conduct is not simply legal risk. ESPN’s brand has been harmed by its broadcasters’ actions, and the careers of those involved have been tarnished if not ruined, in Phillips’ case.
“Whether lawsuits are filed and ultimately dismissed or settled is almost secondary. Business and irrevocable personal harm has been done, and all of it could have been avoided if standards of professionalism and behavior had been in place and understood and applied by everyone, at all levels.”
Yes, I’ve heard people prattle on about how it’s unrealistic to think that people won’t get involved with others they work with given how much time they spend on the job. And yes, I also know that just about everyone can point to an office romance that ended up in marriage and true love.
Those things DO happen and I have seen them too, but in my long experience as a boss and manager, the office romances that ended well are few and far between. In fact, I can count the ones that worked out on the fingers of one hand.
“ESPN [baseball] analyst Steve Phillips had a fling with a 22-year-old production assistant,” according to the New York Post, “who, after being dumped, taunted his wife with ‘Fatal Attraction’-like phone calls and a letter that bragged about her sexcapades with Phillips while taking pot shots at their ‘loveless marriage.’ ”
Phillips is a former general manager of the New York Mets who, according to the Post, “admitted having multiple affairs with women while working for the Mets.” Yes, he’s got a track record for fishing in the company pond, and it caused him problems back when he was a baseball executive too.
The current “developments come 11 years after Phillips took a brief leave of absence as the Mets’ GM after admitting to having sex with a team employee, Rosa Rodriguez, who sued him for sexual harassment, a case later settled out of court.”
I won’t go into the details of Phillips’ latest workplace sex scandal (the New York Post does a great job of that), but in the end, it not only got Phillips suspended for a week by ESPN, but he “is now being sued for divorce by his 40-year-old wife, the mother of his four sons,” the newspaper added. In addition, Phillips has deeded the family’s five-bedroom, multimillion-dollar home to his wife as well.
How many stories like the ones surrounding Steve Phillips and David Letterman do we have to hear before the light bulb goes on and people realize that sexual relationships with co-workers are fraught with peril and not worth the trouble and collateral damage they can cause for the rest of the workplace, and the families on the outside too?
And here’s the irony in all of this: You don’t get to be a Major League Baseball general manager, or network analyst, or famous late-night talk show host, unless you have a lot of skill and talent. Both Phillips and Letterman are smart guys who, somehow, outsmarted themselves and ended up doing some dumb things.
I love David Letterman. His late-night talk show is clearly the best of the bunch, and in my mind, he’s followed along in the footsteps of his mentor, the great late-night king, Johnny Carson.
It’s clear to me that David Letterman, highly paid late-night comedian and CBS talk show star, never heard (or conveniently forgot) one of the most basic managerial rules of all—don’t fish off the company pier.
Although many of the details are sketchy, there’s nothing that says what Letterman did was anything but consensual. One CBS Radio report I heard said Letterman was having sex with female staffers in his office, and as bad as that sounds, it’s still legal for consenting adults to engage in such behavior should they choose to do so.
That’s what catches me up, however. Why would any thinking, rational person—particularly someone of Letterman’s stature—choose to put themselves in a compromising position like that?
“While Letterman seems to be in no immediate risk of losing either his family or his job (ratings from last night’s telecast will likely be stratospheric), his troubles may not be over,” Time magazine says. “Having sex with people who were his employees or whom he managed could leave him, or CBS, open to a sexual-harassment lawsuit. It’s certain the comedian has given the network’s lawyers plenty of reasons to be up at night.”
Bosses getting involved with those who work for them is a trend that’s probably as old as the workplace itself. However, it’s fraught with peril and, in my long experience, is almost never worth the risk.
In fact, if you looked at this as a smart businessperson and examined the risk-reward potential, or the ROI of such a relationship, you probably wouldn’t get involved in such a deal at any level. But, that’s applying rational thinking to something that’s clearly an irrational decision.
Letterman has had a lot of drama and bad stuff to deal with in his life, but this is one that wasn’t foisted upon him; it’s trouble that’s self-inflicted. Even if the foiled extortion attempt turns out to be the worst of it, he’s left his many fans wondering just how someone who seems so smart and snappy on the surface can engage in such foolish (and some would say terribly bad) behavior when the office door is closed?
As someone who makes his living skewering other people and joking about their foibles, Letterman’s now going to become the punch line for a lot of manager and workplace jokes.
Who wants to be that guy? No manager that I know of. Yet Letterman, the guy who has publicly reveled in zinging Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer and many others for their sexual high jinks, is now going to become the poster boy for bosses behaving badly. That’s called karma, I believe.
And the jokes and zingers about this have already started. As Time magazine solemnly notes: “Letterman has also probably given truckloads of material to other comedians—or even his own writers. Let’s just say he may come to regret calling his company Worldwide Pants.”
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