CHAPTER 1

WHY NOW?

The question this book will answer is, “Why is it that America has learned—better than any country or culture in the world—how to build great companies and great leaders to lead them, yet many of these same leaders seemingly look the other way as their companies and colleagues sink into ethical mischief and outright criminality?”

Why is it that even after the behavioral trauma of Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Equifax, VW, Theranos, Madoff, Wells Fargo, Nissan, the beat goes on—seemingly unabated—fraud, bribery, insider trading rings, and Ponzi schemes remain ubiquitous.

And why is it that despite the Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, Dodd-Frank, and the growing ranks of compliance and risk officers, corporate roguishness and misbehavior persists among “leaders in loafers”?

This book proposes that the priority of rushing to greatness too often produces temporary perceptions of success and misguided leadership. All too frequently, it turns out that these great companies are not good companies, and their highly publicized and highly compensated leaders turn out to be compromised. Too many of these organizations and their leaders have been revealed to be unequal to the ethical standards to which they’ve committed. The authors prescribe a solution, one that may be shunned by some less enlightened corporate leaders but will become fully embraced by just about everybody else.

Our prescription is that the reporting of public companies as well as larger private companies needs to incorporate palpable evidence of their intentional ethic: developing and maintaining a civil culture; designing programs to promote the workplace as an ethical, desirable environment; rewarding values-based behavior, honesty, and integrity as much as profitability. In other words, organizations and leadership that can demonstrate that they are good companies with values that are so simple, sensible, constructive, helpful, and positive that only the critics, naysayers, and bellyachers will be opposed. After all, leadership is what drives decency, civility, integrity, and associated pathways that make up The Decency Code, including:

•   Accountability

•   Civility

•   Compassion

•   Empathy

•   Honesty

•   Humility

•   Principle

Traditional media continue to swing between high treason and high glamour as they document the disconnect between corporate promises and leadership misbehavior. Film, TV, and print media often trade on the excessive lifestyles of those who rise and fall in the tainted glamour of the tarnished business rock star or big-time producer.

Consider two vivid examples of corporate shame. Volkswagen altered the pollution control devices on 800,000 vehicles to falsely meet environmental standards. Wells Fargo employees intentionally cheated millions of customers who found that their trust in the bank was betrayed by misaligned incentives established by flawed leadership. In both cases, employees and their supervisors and managers by the thousands were responding to their bosses’ signals or incentives. The corporate cultures of the respective organizations rather than growing stronger were made weaker, then too weak to deter misbehavior. These are two real and unfolding stories of intentional bad, unethical, and some clearly illegal management behavior. When this book is published, there will likely be other instances of corporate misbehavior.

Decency Requires More Than Compliance

Compliance and ethics programs are proliferating; business schools are expanding their curricula; ethics and engagement managers are being hired; and leadership programs are multiplying as the subject of corporate culture has become sexy. But the incidents of fraud and gross misconduct continue. The weekly TV series American Greed continues to report on stunning real-life examples of leadership misbehavior.

This book proposes that since corporate greed continues and since the post-Enron controls have been inadequate to detect, prevent, deter, or eliminate wrongdoing, different answers are needed if only because of the realities of the new world of work: flexible, insecure, robotic, delayered, virtual, unstable, out-of-balance, fast-moving, complex, ambiguous, global, diverse, and ruthlessly competitive. Members of Generation X, Generation Y, and Generation Z coexist with the survivors of what we term the “RE” generation in business, as companies REdeploy, REorganize, REfocus, REnew, REalign, and REengineer. Organizational change efforts have been described by management guru Tom Peters as upsizing, downsizing, rightsizing, and capsizing. To quote change management expert Charles Handy, “a work world of seemingly endless whitewater!”

We argue that institutionalized decency is a success factor in helping leaders and their workforces to REvitalize, REinvent, REinvest, and REspect. Now, a new kind of manager is needed: whitewater navigators who thrive in our turbulent work world. Leaders who understand that the antidote to corporate cultural disorder is leadership to help replace confusion with order, opaqueness with clarity, complexity with simplicity, hopelessness with confidence, greed with selflessness, and suspicion with trust.

The ongoing trust deficit is, in the eyes of one compliance expert, an unfortunate reality. Thus, he said, there are always people looking for shortcuts, intent on gaming the system, who in good times get greedy and in bad times get selfish. It has become clear that something more than regulation, jail terms, compliance training, hotlines, and values statements is needed. This book argues that the new age whitewater leader has tools at his or her disposal to forge an environment that will sustain an enabling culture where innovation is stimulated, performance is rewarded, trust is deep-rooted, and where it “feels good to be here.” The indispensable element is trust.

The Lexicon of Trust Busters

During his 50-year career in crisis intervention and prevention, covering hundreds of assignments in the United States and globally, helping leaders and their organizations prepare for, respond to, survive, and recover from crises, Jim Lukaszewski has developed a lexicon of leadership trust-busters:

•   Arrogance (executive pomposity)

•   Testosterosis (hitting back first)

•   Broken promises

•   Fear-creation

•   Deception

•   Denial

•   Overplaying strengths

•   Lack of empathy

•   Procrastination

•   Disrespect

•   Ducking responsibility

•   Dismissiveness

•   Disparagement

•   Inauthenticity

•   Concealment

•   Lying

•   Isolation/AWOL

•   Intimidation

•   Overoptimism

•   Sarcasm

•   Minimizing

•   Tone deafness

•   Corrosive delegation

•   Misguided incentives

•   Operating on the edge

•   Fostering a “do whatever it takes” culture

They did what? Said what? Promised what? Now what? Any combination of these trust-busters can be corrosive to the human spirit and counterproductive to culture enrichment. Think Albert J. Dunlap at Sunbeam, Dennis Kozlowski at Tyco, Ken Lay at Enron, or Bernie Madoff. They destroyed trust and created victims and critics, some of whom look for and find opportunities for revenge.

Rather, it’s about integrity, compassion, truthfulness, transparency, apology, inclusiveness, and the morality of ethical expectations of leaders and leadership. Jim describes himself as more of a management pathologist. He has seen so much repetitive negative behavior, decision making, and self-forgiveness that he has developed insights into the pathologies—the origins, nature, and course of negative management behavior and of leaders who are headed for trouble.

Steve Harrison’s 50-year career spans labor relations, human resources, entrepreneurship, and global corporate consultancy, including career transition (outplacement), leadership development, and employee engagement. Steve’s observations align with Jim’s as they relate to workplace instability and leadership shortcomings, especially in turbulent times. As well, they are aligned in proposing the antidotes:

•   Telling the truth

•   Listening

•   Genuine recognition

•   Keeping rich traditions

•   Modeling ethical and compliant behavior

•   Demonstrating a willingness to sacrifice profits for principle

•   Developing and sustaining a coaching culture

•   Building trust at every opportunity

•   Respecting innovation failure

•   Collaborating genuinely

•   Vocalizing, publicizing, and operationalizing core values, ethical standards, civility, and decency—in all scheduled operations and performance reviews, in all group company functions, in every new-hire onboarding session, in every CEO message, in all compliance and ethics training, in all executive coaching programs, and in all leadership programs and talent development processes

What Decency Looks Like

A business decency is a thoughtful, meaningful gesture offered that in ways small and large can enhance a corporate culture. Decencies are how we more humanely treat one another. John Cowan, author of Small Decencies, reminds us that we can be true to our values both at home and at work. The more humanely we treat one another, the better we will be as people and the better we will be in doing our life’s work.

We are colleagues who want to make a positive difference in another person’s day. Out of such actions, multiplied dozens of times over a period, corporate cultures are enriched and ethical behavior reinforced. Widely accepted and adopted, decencies become a force multiplier for employee engagement.

The late Herb Kelleher understood this when he created Southwest Airlines’ “culture committee” to honor people in unglamorous jobs: “top wrench award” or “top cleaner award.” Doug Conant, Campbell’s ex-CEO, regularly handwrote thank-you notes to deserving employees all over the world. Herbert Baum, ex-CEO of Dial Corporation, regularly held informal chats—serving hot dogs—as he hosted “Hot Dogs with Herb.”

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, was inspired in 2017 to initiate a national conversation about the moral responsibilities of businesses. Jim Lukaszewski has taken Tim Cook’s commencement address at MIT on June 9, 2017, and transformed it into Lukaszewski’s “Civility and Decency Manifesto.” Highlights of Jim’s manifesto include:

•   Business has a moral obligation greater than the accumulation of wealth and sole allegiance to Wall Street.

•   Businesses should be places where individuals can find meaning, purpose, and can serve humanity . . . something greater than themselves.

•   Businesses, like technology, can do great things. But like technology, businesses don’t necessarily want to do great things, they just do things. Business purpose comes from those who lead.

•   Keeping people at the center of business and in life can have enormous impact.

•   Whatever you do in life it must be infused with the humanity, values, and decency that each of us is born with.

•   Use technology to reinforce and amplify the rules of decency and avoid pettiness and negativity.

•   Measure your impact on humanity by the lives you touch, rather than popularity.

•   Stay on your personal course, focused on what really matters.

•   Bring your values, compassion, empathy, and concern for consequences into your daily life and your work. Avoid those who advise otherwise.

•   When you know your course is right, have the courage to take a stand.

•   When you see a problem or an injustice, recognize that you are the only one to fix it.

•   Use your mind and hands and heart to build something bigger than yourself.

•   Strive to create the best, give the best, do the best for everyone.

We applaud Tim Cook’s real vision. His vision lays a useful groundwork for this book. His passion and his quest for a fraud-free business culture reinforces the authors’ experienced and deeply held conviction that the terms “integrity,” “ethics,” and “values” are too theoretical and intangible to be clear, vivid, and actionable for corporate cultures and their leaders in turbulent times. The power of institutionalized, tangible, visible, measurable, and pervasive decencies creates a deterrent to misbehavior, misdeeds, and contaminants to employee engagement. Cultural decency helps inoculate workplaces from the “doing whatever it takes” crowd, regardless of consequences.

Whitewater Leaders

The coauthors argue that the keys to whitewater leadership effectiveness include agility, adaptability, and intuition. We are familiar with the seemingly endless variety in leadership theory: authoritative, collaborative, servant, charismatic, emotionally intelligent, level-5, “blue ocean,” etc. But successful “whitewater navigators,” regardless of their predominant leadership styles, display a unique talent, especially in a crisis: the ability and agility to adopt and embody most of these styles during any given day. Collaborators need to be decisive; authoritarians need to be collaborative; quiet and humble leaders need to step up and communicate more aggressively than they ever have; noisy leaders need to know when to “zip it up’’; cerebral or process-oriented leaders quickly learn that turbulent times place a premium on managing decisively.

And ironically, during the very time when they’re reacting, the effective whitewater leader needs to anticipate, to “see around corners,” in the words of Colin Powell. As one CEO said, “I spend half my day thinking: What am I not thinking of? What could possibly catch me by surprise?”

In 1982, Terrence Deal and Allan Kennedy published their groundbreaking book Corporate Cultures. They said this: “Great leaders . . . make success attainable and human. And the great stories that emerge in a culture tend to spread information about valued behavior.” We believe that valued behavior includes a universal commitment to small decencies—gestures by leaders that are tangible, replicable, and sustainable. They create stories . . . and stories travel:

•   Praising people in public, criticizing in private¹

•   Greeting visitors promptly and enthusiastically

•   Valuing receptionists—they are our Directors of First Impressions

•   Rejecting executive pomposity

•   Promoting trust through accessibility, transparency, and candor

•   Institutionalizing civility

•   Making a difference!

Institutions Laid Low

When our institutions are laid low, it’s often because of internal events and intentionally counterproductive decisions of leadership. Think of Volkswagen in the wake of a systematic effort to cheat on emissions tests. Such events—ethical shortcuts, fraud, deception, misrepresentations—are invariably self-imposed internal episodes that arise because people are fallible and incentives are perverse.

This book focuses on the challenges imposed from within. These are the activities that are covered by the newspapers and cable TV shows. They lead to resignations and firings, payments of huge fines, and, occasionally, criminal charges. These behaviors violate well-understood ethical, cultural, and legal norms. The violations create extraordinary challenges for leaders, many of whom fail to rise to the challenge. These violations are always a choice. Collectively we call them “incivilities.” Decency is the antidote. Decency is also a choice.

The Decency Code is about promoting one choice over the other. Think of this book as your guide to structured decency in the workplace and beyond. We believe that decency scaled up to an institutional level is fundamental to corporate success in a globalizing world. Yet it is no secret that many of our institutions seem more devoid of decencies than ever.

Building Resilience

The focus of this book is about building resiliency against corporate misconduct and disengagement. We consider the causes, patterns, prevention, and deterrence of indecency. We look at what options companies have for deterring, preventing, detecting, and exposing incivilities.

As long as organizations must recruit from the human race, incivility seems inevitable. But it’s certainly possible to prevent many indecencies, detect them early, expose them to the light of day, and minimize their frequency and cost. A corporate culture committed to decency represents the most powerful inoculation against indecency. When decencies triumph over incivility, a superior level of employee engagement results. This book makes a case for integrating decency and integrity into our work and private lives.

Decency starts with a commitment to verbal and written communication that is predominantly positive and carries messages that are sensible, constructive, positive, helpful, empathetic, and ethical and benefit the recipient of the message more than the sender—what Jim Lukaszewski refers to as The Ingredients of Leadership. A culture that is based on greed, opportunism, and exploiting unearned advantage leads to incivility, promotes deception, and frustrates mitigation and resolution.

Decency often keeps leaders in crisis from making the worst possible mistake: the cover-up. History shows that the cover-up is almost always considered a greater betrayal than the underlying crime. Decency reminds leaders that, in the end, it’s not what you do that matters most, but what you do about what you did.

How Do These Two Authors Find Themselves in the Same Book?

We’d like to share a few words about the authors, how they met, and why their complementary skills are perfect for a book called The Decency Code.

Steve Harrison is the author of The Manager’s Book of Decencies: How Small Gestures Build Great Companies. He serves as chairman of Lee Hecht Harrison, the largest career transition and talent management firm in the world, with 400 offices in 60 countries. He has spent his career promoting the lasting power of decency to engage employees and build enabling corporate cultures.

The focus of James E. Lukaszewski (Loo-ka-SHEV-skee) is cultural incivility and all the ways that organizations sabotage themselves. Jim’s most recent book is Lukaszewski on Crisis Communication: What Your CEO Needs to Know About Reputation Risk and Crisis Management. It is widely considered the bible of crisis management. Many executives throughout the land have Jim Lukaszewski on speed dial. Known throughout the country as America’s Crisis Guru®, Jim is respected for his ability to help executives look at problems from a variety of sensible, constructive, and principled perspectives. When there is a scandal or trouble brewing in corporate America, Jim’s phone usually rings. Think of a major corporate scandal, and chances are good that Jim was recruited to mitigate the problem. But Jim’s most powerful work is represented by corporate scandals you never heard of because they were resolved quickly or prevented altogether.

The worlds of the authors converged about 25 years ago when Steve Harrison’s company experienced an isolated but embarrassing scandal that was featured in the Wall Street Journal. It was a crisis that required the best response. Steve was referred to Jim Lukaszewski for help in resolving the issues created by the unethical behavior of an employee. The results of that engagement cemented a powerful professional and personal relationship between the two men.

What’s fascinating about it is the two different worlds Jim and Steve have occupied all these years. The reader may find it helpful to understand the common and contrasting views of the two authors.

Steve: his fundamental philosophy is that the vast majority of firms in the US and likely other countries and cultures operate within the parameters of being useful, helpful, productive organizations. Each, through its business operations, provides productive employment and opportunities to grow personally and professionally and, to varying degrees, is a reasonable place to work.

Jim’s fundamental philosophy comes from an entirely different perspective, studying the pathology of management and leadership misbehavior observed over 40 years. He used this knowledge in real time to guide the recovery of 300 companies, domestic and international, through more than 400 victim-producing events. Lukaszewski believes that while every organization experiences a variety of difficulties and challenges as it operates, those that suffer serious adverse circumstances do so as the result of their intentional decisions, acts, and omissions. A leader decides to cross a line, deliberately ignoring existing regulatory controls, rules, and cultural norms. Jim’s client companies experience self-inflicted, extraordinarily stressful, victim-producing events. The pathology of these circumstances results from intentionally inappropriate or unlawful behavior and management bungling.

It’s a relatively small universe, but one that produces devastating and often highly visible negative results. He maintains that despite the protestations of troubled organizations and cultures and their misbehaving leadership, the choices between ethical decision making and unethical decision making are always clear and always intentional.

How the Book Is Organized

The Decency Code charts multiple paths to decency and integrity. The Foreword, by Ranjit de Sousa, president of Lee Hecht Harrison, expresses the need for decencies and civility in today’s workplaces. Following the welcome note from the authors, Chapter 1 makes the case for having the Decency Code. Chapter 2 shows how corporate culture and employee engagement are influenced by a commitment to decency and civility.

Chapters 3 through 6 make the case for decencies as a business imperative. Chapter 3 defines the concept. Chapter 4 presents a rationale for decency as not just a nice-to-have but, in fact, an indispensable element for any organization that aspires to excellence. Chapter 5 describes the elements of decency in operational terms. Chapter 6 describes real-world examples of how decencies are contagious and serve as force multipliers of ethical behavior.

Chapter 7 connects the dots between decency and employee engagement. Most organizations are making extensive investments in motivating their employees. This chapter shows how decency is an essential component of any employee engagement agenda.

There is no more critical time for decencies than when faithful employees, through no fault of their own, must be terminated. Chapter 8 describes decencies when separating employees. Terminating managers will find time-tested practices for not only supporting separated employees during this difficult period but also providing critical information to surviving employees.

Chapter 9 summarizes the role of decencies in creating a resilient corporate culture by considering the ethical expectations for leaders by those they lead. “A Closing Perspective from the Authors” concludes the book by presenting a map to help today’s organizations move from business as usual to becoming workplaces of decency and engagement.

We are glad you are on this journey to decency in the workplace and beyond. Let’s get started.