I sat on a subway train next to a long-time colleague at an organization I worked for talking about how sometimes an employee in our company would notice a change in how their manager related to them, without accompanying guidance or explanation from the manager.
Specifically, the employee would notice that small issues were blown out of proportion with executives copied on e-mails. It could be something as small as a link the manager wanted added to a company Website page. Instead of communicating one-on-one with the employee by sending an e-mail saying something like, “Hi Judy, could you add XX link to the following page? In the future, let’s always add links to our upcoming events whenever it makes sense to do that,” the manager would send an e-mail to the employee with multiple executives and others copied with a subject line like “Missed Opportunity.” The e-mail then would go on for multiple paragraphs, dramatizing this minor issue.
I marveled that a manager would do that to an employee about something so inconsequential. My long-time colleague said, “They may have told her to do that,” referring to directions the manager may have received from her higher-ups to start building a performance case against this unsuspecting employee.
“That’s how it starts,” my colleague said ominously.
Programmed Manager Machines?
This treatment of an employee in which they are targeted in ridiculous, prosecutorial style seemed unethical and inappropriate to me. I wondered why the manager would go along with these instructions, or orders, from management.
The answer could be because the manager is operating within what they perceive as a “just following orders” culture. This is a culture where you don’t speak up or offer input when an executive’s directives about treatment of an employee do not make sense, or worse, appear to be unethical.
The Milgram Experiment Applied to Corporate Culture
You may have heard of the Milgram Experiment. Subjects were given orders to administer electric shocks. No one was actually being electrocuted, but the study subjects did not know that. Regardless of how much the people “being electrocuted” screamed and expressed pain, many of the subjects continued administering the electric shocks because that’s what they were ordered to do. They seemed to have lost their ability or desire to think independently and consider the ethical consequences of their actions.
In our corporate culture example, a manager in a “just following orders” culture would target an employee without direct communication, amplifying minor oversights or errors. They would do this even if they knew that the right thing to do would be to have a direct, one-on-one conversation with the employee about performance concerns and to give that employee a chance to respond to the criticism and make changes to their performance.
The manager might even tell bald-faced lies to the employee when they ask about their job security and career progression with the company, cutting the employee off when they keep asking questions. I witnessed this happen. “We’re not there yet,” one manager told an employee asking about whether they would have a sense if they were getting close to having their job terminated. A month later, that employee got the news that their job would be ending.
Managers Must Be Responsible for Their Actions
When new managers move into their roles, or a higher-level management role, it’s important that they understand that they, themselves, not their boss or other executives, are responsible for their actions. At the end of the day, they must understand that they, personally, are responsible for the unethical or cruel actions they carry out—even if they were “just following orders.”
When a manager gets promoted or elevated to a higher-level management role, Learning professionals should have conversations with the manager about hypothetical situations in which they have to make ethical decisions themselves.
A common scenario is when directives come down from management to make budget cuts. The initial tendency is often to protect your favorites in the department, rather than those who are most essential to the department’s operations and much harder to replace. You can make a performance argument against nearly anyone, blowing up many minor, inconsequential issues to build a case. But is that the right thing to do?
The manager should be taught in these hypothetical conversations to think critically.
“I’ve thought about what we discussed, Bob, regarding Shelley’s role in the department, her performance, and the need to make budget cuts. I agree that there is room for improvement, but the approach I would like to take is to be transparent with her about our concerns, outline new goals for her in her next regularly scheduled performance review, and then see over the next six months to a year how she does. If she is unable or unwilling to do what we ask her to do, then, at that point, we can talk about taking steps toward termination. I could put together the kind of performance case we discussed, but I don’t think at this point that it would be fair. If we must make budget cuts, I think the better approach would be holding off on hiring Tom back as a full-time employee. He’s my protégé. He came to me right out of college and did a great job, but if I’m being honest, Shelley is the more qualified and essential employee to retain at this time.”
Ethical push-back and communication is scary, but with the right culture taught to managers, it can be as second nature as “just following orders.”
Do you have a “just following orders” culture? If not, how do you encourage critical thinking about directives from executives and other decision-making that impacts ethics?