CHAPTER 5

THE ELEMENTS OF DECENCY AND HOW THEY WORK TOGETHER

Common decency is not necessarily the term most associated with the business world today. If news headlines are a guide, a case can be made that decency is one of the less frequently used tools that leaders have in their management toolbox.

News reports and headlines tend to focus on the negative. Indecency creates conflict, and conflict attracts viewers. There is no news value perceived in headlines such as “Business Leader Handles Difficult Situation with Decency.” But when a CEO is caught cheating, overstepping his or her authority, or acting indecently, the headlines are all over it. It’s appropriate for CEOs and other business leaders to be held accountable when they make mistakes. It’s also appropriate for CEOs to be recognized when they act with integrity. Accountability flows both ways.

Leadership is about motivating people to do what must be done, achieving results through the coordinated efforts of others. Our experience demonstrates that despite all the negative news, business leaders around the world have concluded that a culture of decencies creates favorable conditions and outcomes. The outcomes are easily measured. Colleagues, employees, and partners who are treated decently and respectfully are much more engaged in the mission of the enterprise than those who are not.

Higher levels of employee engagement have been associated with bottom-line outcomes, such as lower turnover, increased innovation, fewer failures, a more resilient culture, and superior financial performance. A practice of small decencies can be defended on the basis that it is the “right thing to do,” and it can be justified by the bottom-line impact it has on the outcomes most important to any organization.

Small Decencies

Small decencies are individual gestures that help define the larger environment and thereby become the building blocks of an ethical culture. Regulatory approaches to making corporations more law-abiding and ethical were supposed to restore investor confidence through greater transparency, increased accountability, and improved governance. However, evidence shows that the unintended consequences are ham-fisted responses by companies reacting to heavy-handed regulations. Regulations or appeals to command and control by themselves can’t move the needle to create well-behaved companies. Effective leadership supported by a culture of decencies can.

The impact of small decencies can be large. An example may help.

Before his current role as partner at Score Recruitment (great motto: “Where Aptitude Meets Attitude!”), Rick Klein was president of TMP Worldwide, a leader in national directory/search programs. While he was at TMP, Rick introduced one of the most inspiring decencies we’re aware of. He called it “Fulghum Days,” and every TMP worker received one as an extra day off. Rick’s only request: employees could do whatever they wanted with their Fulghum Day except anything related to work or TMP Worldwide.

Rick got the idea for Fulghum Days by reading Robert Fulghum’s All I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, a 1988 book that came to be enormously popular. The book begins with a list of practices—decencies, really—emphasized in kindergarten that the author suggested could serve people well in all walks of life. You probably recognize some of the lessons:

•   Share everything

•   Play fair

•   Don’t hit people

•   Put things back where you found them

•   Clean up your own mess

•   Don’t take things that aren’t yours

•   Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody

•   Take a nap every afternoon

•   When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together

Thanks to decencies like this, TMP’s employees cherished their boss and worked harder than ever to be worthy of Fulghum Days. TMP clients recognized the enthusiasm of the employees and responded with more assignments. Revenues increased and turnover decreased. One employee was so touched by Rick’s gesture that he wrote a letter to the author requesting that Fulghum sign a copy of the book and send it to Rick. The author not only signed a book, he wrote Rick a personal note expressing his appreciation for so well understanding the real meaning of the book. Rick framed the letter along with the inscription on the book and displayed it for years in his office. It may still be there.

The Bubble Wrap

Small decencies are the “bubble wrap” that keeps a corporate culture intact. They fertilize the playing field for innovation. They may represent only 2 percent of what we do, but 98 percent of who we are. They satisfy the ultimate test of cultural health: How does it feel to live in this environment and be shaped by it? “Organizations have a feel about them,” says Charles Handy in The Hungry Spirit, “. . . a feel which the visitor picks up as soon as he or she enters the building or, often, merely encounters one of the people who work there.” Small decencies release that feel.

In the current labor market, some companies think they can afford to skimp on what they mistakenly refer to as “niceties.” They are mistaken, though, because every economic cycle eventually turns, and there is always competition for the best talent. Company leaders need to treat job candidates like customers. A Stanford University case study found that some companies get this concept.¹ They recognize that employment candidates also have a dual role as customers.

Telltale Signs

Look for the telltale signs of small decencies. We talk of decent acts, a decent wage, a decent fellow, or “are you decent?” The thesaurus is helpful: “Considerate, courteous, gracious, honest, honorable, thoughtful, appropriate, tasteful, respectable, helpful, civil.” In the corporate setting, decency has a vital place in giving shape and sustainability to a culture.

As seemingly trite and sentimental as these examples are, they are an apt prelude to vivid examples in corporate life. When one corporate executive made sure his receptionists displayed their own business cards with the title “Director of First Impressions,” he understood the power of decency. When the founder and chairman of the Wegmans food chain created the “Hardship Fund” for employees in unexpected need, he understood the power of decency.

The role of decency has little to do with softness or indecisiveness. Rather, it’s a form of “goodwill banking,” an accumulation of institutionalized gestures that help pave the way for a business to make it through the inevitable tough times.

“Sometimes it’s the smallest acts that influence other people months or even years later,” suggests Joseph L. Badaracco Jr., author of Leading Quietly. These are the behaviors that in a post-compliance world will lead to good citizenship, stewardship, profit, and success. By fertilizing the ground of corporate cultures with decencies, legal compliance initiatives can more easily take root. The decencies described in this book can help ready an organization to adhere to regulatory requirements in a hopeful context. They can serve as a tonic that may relieve the counterproductive effects of our commercial dynamism. When combined with the necessary laws, regulations, and governance, the result can be organizations we can be proud of.

Choose Another Path

Sometimes decency is best represented by what CEOs and other leaders reject doing. In this regard, Jim Lukaszewski’s Civility and Decency Manifesto is celebrated as a concise, specific series of actions that will avoid crossing the line to incivility and indecency:

•   When your words, deeds, or actions turn to vilification, stop.

•   When you use sarcasm to ridicule and damage, demean, dismiss, diminish, or humiliate, stop.

•   When your words are arrogant, causing needless but intentional pain and suffering, stop.

•   When your words clearly express anger and irritation, stop.

•   When your words, deeds, or actions are demanding and bullying, stop.

•   When your words are just plain mean, stop.

•   When your words insult, stop.

•   When your words become corrosive and disrespectful, stop.

•   When your words become disparaging and tone deaf, stop.

•   When you speak and behave without empathy, stop, reconsider.

•   When your words mindlessly injure, stop.

•   When your words, deeds, or actions intentionally injure, stop.

•   When your words spread accusations and suspicion, stop.

•   When your words exhibit overbearance and overzealousness, stop.

•   When what you propose is negative, punitive, defensive, and harmfully restrictive on others, stop. Choose another pathway.

•   When your words exceed the boundaries of decency, civility, and integrity, just simply stop. Choose another path.

The true test of decency is a commitment to verbal and written communication that is predominantly positive and declarative and behaviors that are simple, sensible, constructive, positive, empathetic, and beneficial to the recipient out of proportion to the sender. Any other pathways lead only to trouble, prolong problems, and delay mitigation and resolution. Empathy means positive deeds that speak louder and more constructively than words.