As a leader or future leader of people, we have to remember a simple fact which is our character is always on display. Last week’s revelation about New York Governor Eliot Spitzer is a prime example of that. There are probably two schools on this issue. One would offer that it was a victimless crime and while illegal, shouldn’t tarnish the works that he has done bringing criminals to justice. The argument would offer that in most situations, he acted beyond reproach. “Why should this incident force him to step down?” people would ask.
The other school, to which I am a student, would offer that a person’s character is shown when people are not looking. In this case, he thought that he was getting away with something. Because he deviated away from leading a moral life, his public career is now over. And let’s not even contemplate what his wife is saying to him right now. She has been publicly humiliated as well. This is caused by what I call situational ethics. Situational ethics is when people believe that morality is relative. They espouse that they can act according to a set of principals in certain business situations, but at other times, it’s ok to bend the truth, mislead people, or act in ways that if revealed would be embarrassing to them.
How do you treat your waitress?
Someone a long time ago told me something that I think about every day. They said that you can tell the character of a person by how they treat their waitress. The point is that people’s true character is exposed when you don’t have to be nice. Everyone has to be nice to their boss. In the corporate world, people are nice to others because they believe they can gain something politically. You don’t have to be nice to your waitress. He or she has no power over you and cannot influence your life. And that’s exactly why people’s character comes out. If you go to lunch with a group of coworkers and you see one of them being rude or abusive to your waiter or waitress, you know all you need to about how that person treats people who don’t have political power to challenge him.
Golf and Ethics
I love golf. I love being out there with friends as well as with coworkers and vendors. It’s a great game and it provides a lot of great experiences. But it is also useful for understanding your character as well as the people playing in your party. Everyone who plays golf knows the old adage, “you learn more about a person in four hours of golf than you do in a year of working side by side with them.” This is an adage that has never failed me when trying to understand the true character of the people I interact with in the corporate world. For those of you who have never thought about the insight you can gain, consider the following next time you are playing with someone for the first time. When they shank the ball into the woods, or if they hit the ball in deep rough, how do they respond? Do they curse and slam their club into the ground? Do they blame the wind, rain, sun, height of the grass, condition of the course, distractions from animals or other external events? Or do they look at what has happened and acknowledge that they were the cause of the poor shot and accept the fate that their swing delivered to them? When they get to their ball and they see that it is a terrible lie, or behind a tree, or out of bounds, do they take their club and give themselves a “foot wedge” by moving the ball into a more favorable spot? I played with a former executive who I knew for a number of years. When I played golf with him, I gained an insight into why other people considered him untrustworthy. On the course, he consistently tried to improve the lie of his ball without regard to the rules of the game. Many times he probably thought that I wasn’t looking. Sometimes he probably didn’t care feeling that he had his own set of rules that he played by regardless of what the overall rules stated about improving your lie. After watching him play golf, I never looked at him the same way again. I also understood the political dynamics at work better thanks to observing him on the golf course.
As leaders, we are always being watched. Everything we do and say is observed by our team, and our company. This extends to happy hours, and other social events as well. You’re always on the clock. Never forget that. Eliot Spitzer thought he was off of the clock when he was secretly wiring tens of thousands of dollars to prostitution rings. He thought he was off the clock when he paid for services while holding the highest office in the state of New York. My former colleague thought he was off the clock when we would routinely cheat at golf.
They were wrong. As leaders and future leaders, we shouldn’t forget these lesson and the importance of being grounded in a moral sense of right and wrong.
