Ducks in a Row: When Trust is not Enough
by Miki Saxon
How would you respond if you were head of a global professional company with more than 1,400 partners, 18,500 employees and a culture built on values, trust and honor when the values were ignored, trust was broken and the organization dishonored by someone at the highest level?
That was the challenge that Dominic Barton faced shortly after he became head of consulting firm McKinsey.
The values that Marvin Bower, its longtime managing director, instilled included putting the clients’ interests above the firm’s, providing independent advice and keeping confidences. These ideas were imparted from one generation to the next, mentor to apprentice. But after Anil Kumar’s arrest [he pleaded guilty] in late 2009, Mr. Barton, who had been elected to head the firm just months earlier, decided that the honor-driven, values-based system was not enough. What the firm needed was some rules.
Powerful people do not take kindly to rules and nobody takes kindly to rules that result from someone else’s actions—especially when they impact one’s income.
Ethical people like to believe that defining values and modeling them across the organization from the top down is enough.
It’s not.
An exceptional CEO I worked with who detested politics believed it was enough that his senior staff couldn’t use politics to get ahead with him. What he refused to recognize was that even though the political games didn’t work on him they wreaked havoc on those below the game-players.
This is especially true in the current world where greed, whether for wealth and/or power, is epidemic and “enough” no longer has any meaning.
But to work, the rules must apply evenly to everybody, at all levels, including the rule maker.
Flickr image credit: Andrew Scott
