Allowing Bad Behavior

Joe,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts regarding my big question related to why so many companies seem to be doing so many bad things yet reaping good rewards.

You make good points relative to the delayed impact of human capital practices like training and leadership and certainly it's difficult to find causal relationships between those practices and organizational outcomes. But, I don't think that's enough of an explanation for me. When we are pressed for an answer on this question, it can't be that our best response is that:

• It won't pay off for a long time (and you may not ever know that it does) and
• You probably can't measure it if or when it does.

That doesn't mean that these aren't important issues to be aware of, it just means that there has to be more to the story.

The more I think about this issue, there are a couple of dimensions to this question that maybe we aren't considering on the surface.

1. Personal accountability of the employee seems to have disappeared in this discussion. I think that as employees, like in many areas of our lives, we've been happy to hand over the responsibility for our happiness and satisfaction to someone else--in this case, our employer. One of the reasons that bad management persists, in my opinion, is because we lack courage to confront it. I know that this may be easier said than done, but at some point, we have to take responsibility for shaping how we want to be treated at work.
2. People increasingly expect to do work that matters, that has purpose. So, perhaps what we are talking about is not simply a business issue, but a moral issue. Clearly, there are multiple different ways to achieve productivity at work. But maybe there's an emerging moral responsibility on the part of organizations to create workplaces where people can both do work with purpose and that allow people to grow and flourish as individuals. So, maybe what we tend to discuss isn't necessarily the "best" way, but the "right" way.

What do you think?

Jason

Personal Responsibility #5

Jason-

I have been struggling with the idea of whether some or all or none of this comes to us naturally. Still not sure where I am at on that, but I would add a different perspective to what you have already outlined. I like the three components you have pointed to and I think that those are all things that can be intentionally baked into an organizational culture and especially into professional and leadership development programs.

In addition to the individual work, which is probably the most important, I think we also have to get out of the way of people. I think that we have to let people fail.

I believe we do a poor job of preparing, supporting and developing leaders in most organizations and there is far too much micro-managing...too much stepping in and interfering, both when things are going well and when they are going poorly. People are not often enough allowed to truly succeed and truly fail from their own efforts.

I think that it gets hard to have a sense of personal responsibility if you start to expect someone else is always going to get involved before long anyway. We need to remove space and buffers (within the organizational setting) between people and the consequences of their actions.

I hate to take the issue of "personal responsibility" and turn into another rant against the man, but I do think this is part of the issue. I have a two year old daughter at home and if I do not let her bust her chin or her knee up from time to time, she is probably just going to keep doing more daredevil stuff.

I think that people need to brush directly up against those consequences from time to time.

-joe

Personal Responsibility #4

Joe,

I think that you are right when you said that we may have a crisis of personal responsibility on our hands. I've seen the symptoms of this manifested in a number of ways. When I think about this issue, I quickly jump to the question, "How did we end up like this?"

I don't know if we've even had a culture or time in history when personal responsibility was not a challenge. The big question is why? It seems that it is part of human nature to reject responsibility and accountability as a way of protecting ourselves. Accepting responsibility for our actions and the consequences of thos actions can lead to some pretty uncomfortable, sometimes downright painful, conclusions and outcomes. It's easier and safer psychologically to believe that it's some one else's fault that I failed. Or that someone else holds the key to whether or not I succeed. It's for this reason that I think organized religion has such broad appeal. When you "give yourself over to God," and put your life in God's hands, it relieves you of a large degree of personal responsibility (in many religions). Whatever happens, good or bad, is God's will; not the direct consequences of our own choices or behaviors. It's a very comforting feeling to know that someone else is watching over you and making things happen. Now, before I start a riot, I know that not all religions are the same. My point is that human nature seems to drive us towards opportunities to avoid or transfer responsibility for our actions and that religion is just one place that I believe you can observe this.

So, this leads me to conclude that accepting personal responsibility is a set of learned skills and behaviors, that most of us don't come by these naturally. So, what are those skills/behaviors and where should we be learning them? That seems to be the next question and it seems like a pretty complicated one.

Here are a list of some of the mindsets that I think people must learn in order to accept personal responsibility:

1. The only thing you control are the choices you make and how you respond to what happens around you. We tend to focus on changing things we can't control (i.e. "If only my manager would stop treating me this way, I could do a better job."). I can't control what others do, I can only control what I do and how I think.

2. Every choice has a consequence, positive or negative. There are no neutral choices. Every thing you eat or drink has a positive or negative effect on your body. Every word you speak has either a postive or negative effect on those who it was spoken to. If we begin to understand this idea, we will think more carefully about the choices we make every day. When you own this concept, you own that what happens as a result of your choices is your doing. Hence the birth of personal responsibility.

3. It's okay to want things, even big elaborate, crazy things. It's critical to have goals and dreams. These things will give you a reason and a context to make choices. It also gives you a reason to care about the consequences of those choices because you've made the stakes higher for you personally. One of my personal goals is to attain financial independence for my family. That means that we can live well and have the things we want and not have to work for anyone else to have or maintain them. This is a loftly goal, but it definitely shapes my choices. When I make a choice professionally or financially, I deeply care about the consequences of that choice because of my goals and dreams.

Well, I'm not sure if this gets us any closer to a way to help people learn personal responsibility. What are your thoughts on how to teach or build personal accountability in people?

Jason

Personal Responsibility #3

Jason-

A couple of quick points that I forgot to include in my original response to your original post…and I hope you had a good weekend and all that other small talk stuff that is supposed to happen between normal people.

One- The Responsibility Disconnect

Regardless of what the issue or the context, there is almost always a fundamental disconnect in discussions of responsibility, as we each tend to focus on the responsibility of the other. Employees are concerned about whether their employer will “take responsibility, act responsibility,” etc., while the employer is primarily focused on whether the employees will be “personally responsible.” I think that this is just one of those ticks of human nature.

It is significant though, as it commonly stands in the way of solution finding. I think that one of the things that does not often happen is that employees and business leaders sit down together to talk not about how the other could be more responsible, but how best we can work together to meet this challenge (cost of healthcare insurance, employee engagement, changing economy, etc.).

This seems to be one of the things that a new and improved human resources could facilitate...without purchasing any new software.

Two- Hidden Costs and Fuzzy Math

One thing that organizations may overlook when they set more specific boundaries on who can be a part of their organization and who cannot be a part of their organization, is that they are also decreasing the size of the pool of potential talent they can draw from.

If you work for an organization that has a policy against hiring anyone with visible tattoos, then you are decreasing the number of talented people you can compete for. The hiring policy may be right for your organization and your culture, but it does come with its own cost in its impact on the size of your talent pool.

Even if an organization is making changes to its hiring practices to reduce its healthcare insurance costs, it is at the same time incurring these other costs. Until organizations get serious about managing and measuring actual productivity rather than activity it is not even possible to say for sure that decisions based on health related expenses are good business decisions, because there is no measure of what we may lose with our reduction of expense.

This also seems to be an opportunity for human resources to make a difference.

For what it is worth on a Monday afternoon in late July.

-joe

Personal Responsibility #2

Jason-

Good and timely post...big topic. Really big topic. I am guessing that we will spend some time on this topic, so let me just attempt to respond to your two direct questions with this post.

1. How do you feel about employers mandating healthy behavior (such as company that will not employ smokers)?

I have no problem with employers mandating evidence-based healthy behaviors, and I think it would be wonderful if that included some yoga and meditation time as well as mandated healthy working hours and a living wage for all employees...but that might be for another blog post.

One thing that comes to mind immediately is the actual capacity for effective and sustainable change. I tend to think that employers have a tendency to "mandate things" poorly, regardless of their good intentions. Mandating certain behaviors as part of the initial hiring expectations is generally much easier to do than to introduce new mandates for existing employees. It can be done, I just do not see much of it done very well.

I used to work for a healthcare system that decided to go "tobacco free"...no smoking or use of tobacco products at any of their locations (for employees, patients or visitors) and no smoking or use of tobacco products during working hours for employees regardless of location. Might seem like a no-brainer for people working in healthcare, but this was highly unpopular with many employees. The organization did a very good job of implementing this change though...they started talking about it at least a year in advance, they pushed out a lot of information about the change, why the change, when the change, etc. including good, authentic use of internal blogs for real and candid dialogue. They also provided extensive smoking cessation programs for employees and spouses and other incentives.

So, I think this was an example of an organization doing a really good job of implementing a new mandate, but I think it is rarely done that well. Organizations are not good at change in general, and I think that most will really struggle with new mandates, especially mandates of this nature.

We also do not like to be told what to do or what is good for us. Even if we know it to be true, we do not like others telling us what to do. I used to be a smoker. I never had any confusion about the negative impacts of smoking, and I knew that I needed to quit. I also hated being told this by others. Not sure if it is a cultural thing or a human thing, but we are very resistant to the direction of others.

2. What do you think is going on as it relates to personal responsibility and the behaviors impacting our health?

Hmm...that is pretty complicated I think. Part of it is simply the fact that this is one of those things that has a big choice-consequence gap. For example, I may know that eating a quadruple cheeseburger wrapped in bacon and smothered in ranch dressing (I think my cholesterol just went up from typing that) is not "good for us" in the long run. But I can eat it, get some immediate gratification with the consequences being several years away. It is not likely to cause me any great hardship tomorrow or next week. It is hard to work against that delay. It is easier to get serious about our personal health after some of that has started to catch up with us. But even then behavior change is really hard. I have seen data on people who have had life-saving heart surgery showing that one year after surgery, the majority of them have not changed their behavior in any way to reduce their risk for future problems. Behavior change is hard and poorly understood.

I also think that we are failing our children in this area right now, I think that the fast food industry is not our friend and we have tip-toed, and continue to tip-toe around the issue of smoking. I think that we are just beginning to educate ourselves on what is actually healthy and what is not healthy. And businesses lead with what is profitable, rather than what is best for our wellbeing. If I can make a killer profit on the super-jumbo-mega-supreme nacho platter, I am less likely to push apples and oranges...which limits choices and it is a vicious cycle.

And, maybe...maybe there is something bigger going on with personal responsibility in this country. I have seen some pretty horrible data about personal and family debt in this country. I have seen data indicated that many and possibly most Americans are not really happy with their job, yet do not do anything about it. Maybe part of what we are facing is actually a crisis of personal responsibility.

-joe

Personal Responsibility

Joe,

Lately, as like most of my corporate HR peers, I've been spending a lot of time working on the problem of rising healthcare costs and the resulting impact on the cost to insure our workforce. As we look for solutions that would help us in this effort, it seems that the best approach is an agressive wellness (health management) strategy. Most of the research suggests the a vast majority of healthcare costs flow from medical conditions that are behavior related (i.e. they are caused by choices the individual is making) and are largely preventable.

If that's the case, then the best way to control healthcare costs for comapaies (and our country) apprears to be to incent and mandate healthier coices on the part of each individual. This could mean higher health insurance premium costs for smokers or the overweight. It could mean mandated health behavior interventions programs.

The things that strike me about this entire issue is 1) how quickly and fervently many people reject that an employer (or anyone else) should be able to tell them how to make lifestyle choices and 2) how little responsibility people will accept for their own health. On the one hand, most people will agree that smoking is a choice made by the individual that can or should be penalized. However, when you start talking about weight or physical activity, the excuses start to fly. It seems that we can somehow rationalize that we shouldn't be penalized for eating fast food for lunch every day.

If someone drinks too much and makes the choice to get in their car and drive, most everyone I know would agree that the person should be held responsible for their actions and punished for that decision. If another person makes a choice (like leaving their child in a car on a hot day) that endangers a child, we'd want them held accountable and punished as well. So, why aren't we willing to be responsible for decisions that are affecting our health (particularly considering how high the stakes and the costs are)? Why don't we feel that the over-eater should be held accountable?

I have some theories, but I was interested to get your opion on a couple of topics:

• How do you feel about employers mandating healthy behavior (i.e. the has been at least one company that will not employ smokers)?
• What do you think is going on as it relates to personal responsibility and the behaviors impacting our health?

I look forward to your thoughts.

Jason