Loyalty, forgiveness, a team focus … these are all admirable traits of organizational culture …to a point. When loyalty morphs into blindness, forgiveness becomes rationalization, and the team focus becomes an insular culture, however, disaster is inevitable, and it happens when organizations are driven – and succeed – by a 'Management by Objectives' rather than a 'Management by Means' mentality. It doesn't take too deep a look into the colossal failures at Penn State and the Catholic Church to see this in action … or to see it in action in a much less spectacular fashion in organizations of lesser prominence.
Make no mistake that the 'Win' part of "win with honor' was the over-arching objective at Penn State, and the "with honor" part was more a wish than a principle. As Sports Illustrated's recent article on the Penn State debacle points out, PSU was tied for fourth place among top 25 teams for the number of players with arrest records going into last year. But it is also easy to see all of the good things Paterno did and believe that he really wanted to win with honor.
Likewise, the Catholic Church has long measured itself by its numbers – how many Catholics there were and how many attended mass routinely. Why they were Catholics and what they believed was secondary. The Church hoped they were good Catholics – really wanted them to be – but this was secondary to the bottom line. The 2,000 year history of the Church is littered with examples of compromising principles for the sake of size … and power. That Church leadership believed they were also 'winning with honor' is unquestionable – they were simply blind to the reality that the 'with honor' part was routinely rationalized away in pursuit of winning.
In such a culture leadership finds it easy to protect its own. 'We are Penn State' and we win with honor – and all of those examples where we have not been so honorable are anomalies that people just don't understand – and because we are inherently good and successful we have to protect our good and successful people from outsiders who simply don't understand how good and successful we are and will attempt to destroy us. The bad acts of one of our members should not be allowed to serve as ammunition for outsiders to undermine the greater good we serve. Likewise, the Catholic Church – the Church Jesus himself charged Peter to build – believed within its insular leadership that it served such a greater good that the horrible misdeeds by a few priests, although bad, cannot be allowed to derail their success.
Fortunately, in most organizations the bad acts of one of its leaders do not rise to the despicable level of Penn State and the Church, but the same dynamic is at play far too often. In one company (whose bottom line was very good) I advised it was plain to all – except the senior executives – that one of its executives was abusive and divisive, wreaking havoc on organization, demotivating and driving away some of their very best people. The CEO told me that (1) I was wrong and simply didn't understand the contribution the exec was making, (2) the sources of my information were lying to me, and (3) it was beyond my charter so I should keep my nose out of it. Within three months, two key operations mangers had quit and their biggest customer dropped them, directly attributing their decisions to the exec in question. Why the blind support of a destructive person whose mean nature was so easy for anyone outside the leadership team to see?
While this is far from the norm, it is not that unusual either. I am intimately familiar with another company – a very profitable one – that protected, rationalized and ultimately paid a severe price for blind support of an exec who was stealing from the company – a fact patently obvious to virtually every employee outside of the senior leadership ranks.
The common thread is a rationalization of the end justifying the means – common enough among us individually but especially destructive when it creeps into the leadership culture and too common when the end results appear to be good. Management by Means – focusing on how things get done and how people lead – provides the right focus, assures that the 'with honor' goal supersedes the 'win' goal, and most often results in winning. At the very least, it assures that organizational problems are resolved by organizations instead of grand juries.
(By way of full disclosure, I am both a life-long practicing Catholic and a huge Big Ten football fan. The failings of both the Church and Penn State have not been easy to observe)
Jim Fernandez says
As a Lean Manager I am in charge of changing processes and cultures. When it comes to getting workers to change their behavior the same issues you speak of; protecting, rationalizing and blindly supporting distructive employees, even at the lowest levels, is very common. And sometimes those that will not change can be very distructive to the company. My point is, is that this protecting behavior happens at all levels.
Come to think of it, it’s like a parent that rescues, defends and makes excuses for their child when they know the child is guilty.
Bill Waddell says
Jim,
Your comment is obviously correct and, as it regards to families, is why I have always been impressed with the moral courage of David Kaczynski, brother of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. While most families close ranks and defend, as you suggest, he turned his brother in to the FBI. I have seen interviews with David and it is clear that he was torn by the decision, but his moral compass took priority over family ties in the end. I’m not at all sure I could do the same.
Jim Fernandez says
My son went to jail for 30 days for shoplifting. He called me and said “please get me out, there is a guy in here who wants to kill me”. I said I’m sorry, I love you but you’ll have to do your 30 days. It was an extremely difficult thing for me to do. He got his GED during that 30 days and he decided he never wanted to go back to jail. Today, 15 years later, he is a very successful person.
This applies to companies. Do the right thing for your company and everything will work out for the best.
david foster says
Part of the problem is that the pull of the *ordinary* is very strong in humans. In aviation, there have been plenty of accidents that happened because someone didn’t want to disrupt the normal flow of things and ask a controller for special handling, or even declare an emergency, or cause a schedule delay by, say, diverting to an alternate airport…they did not make the mental jump between SOP and schedule-achievement, on the one hand, and avoidance of a bad accident, on the other. In the present case, it was evidently difficult for certain people to make the mental jump from dealing with matters of football to dealing with matters of crime.
The writer Arthur Koestler spoke of the “tragic and trivial” planes of life, the first being the psychology of dealing with ultimate things and the second being the psychology of ordinary life…He used the biblical story of Jonah as an example of a man’s reluctance to leave the trivial plane and act on the tragic plane as he needed to.
Bill Waddell says
David … I think you are suggesting the ‘when the only tool you have is a hammer, all problems look like nails’ situation. To the Church, priest behavior was viewed as a religion problem to be dealt with within the church system according to church thinking, and Paterno could only see football problems that had to be dealt with as the problems related to football, andd resolved according to football principles. In both cases they were blind to the reality that the problem went way beyond the church or the team.
Rick Bohan says
It’s important to remember that we aren’t talking about mere poor judgement in the cases of the Catholic Church and Penn State. We’re talking about men in power knowingly aiding and abetting crimes against children over long periods of time.
Nor are we talking about a few bad apples. The men in question were (and, in the case of the Church, often still are) at the highest ranks of the organization. Ergo, we’re talking about organizational cultures of criminality, deceit, and willingness to inflict great harm on others. It’s my fervent prayer that the bishops, the administrators, and the coaches (including Paterno) involved spend long periods of time in jail. They are, each and all, active and direct enablers of criminal behavior.
Bill Waddell says
Actually Rick, depending on which report you believe, somewhere between 96% and 99% of the 408,000 Catholic priests around the world have NOT been accused of any sort of sexual misconduct at all – ever. We are, in fact, talking about a relatively few bad apples, and the “highest levels” of the Cathlic church have not ‘aided and abetted’ any crimes whatsoever … but then you never have been one to allow data to cloud a good inflamatory theory.
Rick Bohan says
Bill says: “the “highest levels” of the Cathlic church have not ‘aided and abetted’ any crimes whatsoever”
Look up Bernard Law. Then try again.
BTW, exactly how many bishops would have to enable how many pedophile priests in how many different countries before it rose to an unacceptable level? You’re telling me the possibility of more than 16,000 active pedophiles in the priesthood might not be enough? Which would be bad enough if each of them were defrocked and reported to the police as soon as their alleged crimes became known. But, in too many cases, that’s not what happened, is it?