Reading my Sunday newspaper recently I was caught by an article about the Chairwoman of HP. She was being investigated for using a private detective inside the organisation to winkle out the person who leaked strategic information in the company. How the mighty fall! Not so long ago HP was seen as a model of virtue and ethical behaviour. I imagine the founders would turn in their graves at where the company has now arrived. Was it the merger? Was it the insatiable needs of the market? Was it the move away from the founding fathers’ values? Or was it simply the drive to achieve those business targets and, by default, those large leadership bonuses?
I have a friend, here in the village, who has spent most of his career working for HP. He used to talk of the great family events, the picnics, the film days. Now it is about the latest round of redundancies, which are happening every six months. Yes, he survives. Yes, he’ll probably be well rewarded when the great machine finally scythes through his department. But where has that great company gone? How can the picture change so quickly?
I know I can be smart on the outside, I don’t have the pressures of maintaining the share price, fighting off competition – who may be more quick footed, more innovative, smarter. But HP are not the only ones in this situation. Many large organisations, and from my experience smaller ones too, come to a point where ethics and performance seem to move from being pretty happy bedfellows and end up smashing into one another. Performance normally wins – ‘pull forward the orders from next year, inflate the sales figures, massage the profit numbers’. Is it wrong? Probably not … well maybe, but certainly somewhere in there that line gets crossed. And you can bet your bottom dollar there will be a meeting – a conversation – around which a major behaviour change, and ultimately a cultural shift, begins to swing. Dramatic yes, but how does a great culture disappear? We know the research – Good to Great, First Break All the Rules, etc. We know the benefit of a great culture and indeed a great brand … it works.
But what about the impact of poor leadership and poor decision making? Where can, and does, that lead us?
I wonder about that proverbial line in the sand. Where is the line in your leadership? I know it is tough; it might cost you your job to refuse to cross it, or to be the one to push beyond it. The scythe can quickly turn and take you down too. But maybe that is the leadership choice we have to face. We all enjoy the visions, the planning and delivery of those plans, the bonuses, the ‘off sites’, the great sales conferences (I’m currently listening to a great ‘pump upper, make those sales’ piece of music which I got from a client conference), but are we also willing to pay the price?
As Joseph Campbell the writer says, in any adventure there will be moments of testing and trial. When they will come we don’t know, and indeed often they do not come head on and so can catch us unaware. But how we deal with these tests will in some form reset and may even define our leadership. Crucibles have a way of resting the materials in them. So the question I am thinking about right now is: do we want to come to the end of the journey knowing we talked the talk and indeed walked the walk, or not?