First of all, ethics codes don’t make people ethical. They don’t make bad people good. Nor do they make people with poor judgment wise. Ethics codes would not have prevented most of the bad behavior we’ve seen in recent years.

You see, there are two aspects to ethics: discernment (knowing right from wrong) and discipline (having the moral willpower to do what’s right). A code defines what’s right and acceptable and imposes sanctions on those who don’t follow it. But unless a code reinforces an established ethical culture, it won’t do much to assure that people will do what’s right.

It’s proper and prudent to clarify obligations under existing laws and to establish standards of conduct in areas not governed by law. In effect, ethics codes transform one perspective of a moral obligation into a binding rule.
For example, it’s helpful to set clear parameters for using e-mail, private information, or company property; for hiring or doing business with relatives; and for accepting gratuities. In more complex cases, codes can mandate disclosure or certification and forbid or restrict transactions such as loans and reimbursements that could create real or apparent conflicts of interest.

To the extent we need more clarity, we need more codes. To the extent we need more character, we need a lot more.

Mostly we get the responses from others that we deserve; and that goes for corporations as well as individuals. Those who treat others badly cannot expect consideration or mercy when they need it. The arrogant find that people take a clear delight in seeing them brought low (witness what has happened to the CEOs of the Detroit car-makers) and have little interest in helping them get back on their feet. Cheats and shysters end up loathed and distrusted by everyone they meet.

This process is well worth thinking about. It suggests that the best place to start when you feel others are treating you badly is yourself. Have you done anything that might provoke the response that’s upsetting you? Have you neglected to do something that might have prevented it happening?

Note to self, that not all problems are self-caused; that would be too extreme and there are people in this world who need no excuse to harm or torment others. But the fact remains that, if it is possible to improve your experiences by doing something under your control like changing your own behavior, that is a good deal more positive than feeling sorry for yourself and letting people and events walk all over you.

Sleeping with the enemy
Too often we collude with the very people who are causing us pain. Take the people we put into positions of power and influence. If we’re unhappy with the way they operate, the first place to look for an explanation is usually ourselves. If we tolerate insincerity, evasiveness, greed, manipulation and generally low ethical standards around us, it’s no surprise that we find it increasing.

Businesses have always pushed the boundaries of what’s acceptable in an attempt to make more profit. We’re constantly assailed by advertising that makes exaggerated claims and deliberately conceals potential drawbacks. We’re exploited when times go well and cajoled into baling out the villains when they don’t. And we’re now so used to it, we don’t get excited. We either tune it out or tolerate it.

Acceptance breeds abuse
Would corporations use misleading advertising if it wasn’t useful to them (read: encourages people to buy)? Would politicians lie and cheat if it didn’t give them what they want? At every election, there’s another cry of ‘foul’ over negative, often rudely personal attack advertising. Yet if it didn’t attract votes, politicians would drop it in time. If it took votes away from them, they’d stop using it in a heartbeat!

Make sure you aren’t contributing anything to the mountain of negative, uncivilized behavior that is already out there.

Of course, in many cases, it’s impossible for you as an individual to change things. Yet you can still check your own actions and make sure you aren’t contributing anything, however small, to the huge mountain of negative, uncivilized behavior that is already out there.

People who behave badly draw bad behavior to them. They mix with the wrong types. They are tempted into dishonesty, only to find that someone who’s still more dishonest and unscrupulous has marked them down as easy victims. Today’s macho, uncaring managers swim with the sharks; but only until they encounter a shark who’s too big to need them and decides to make a meal of them instead.

Gossips who stab others in the back shouldn’t be surprised if they are treated in the same way. Those who refuse to help others will, sooner or later, need help themselves and find that no one will give it to them. Liars and cheats are wide open to being treated in the same way. Those who refuse to trust anyone are trusted by no one.

Integrity is more important than it seems
If you tolerate lying, dishonesty and manipulation in yourself, you can’t complain if others push even further beyond the boundaries of decent behavior. If you exploit the weak, despise your fellows and clamber upwards over the bodies of colleagues, it’s very likely someone else will try to do the same to you. And if they are stronger, more ruthless or more cunning than you are, they will succeed.

Causes have effects. It may take time, but a good many jerks eventually suffer rather badly for their past misdemeanors.

It is sad to hear people blaming all their misfortunes on the malevolence of others or vague concepts like bad luck. They’re making themselves into helpless victims of circumstances, unable to do more than whine about their problems. If they combine this with turning a blind eye to their own bad behavior, it’s very hard to feel any sympathy for them. They did most of it to themselves. Causes have effects. It may take time, but a good many jerks eventually suffer rather badly for their past misdemeanors.

Whatever else you do, don’t draw more problems to yourself by behaving exactly like the those whose actions you dislike. “Do unto others as you would they should do unto you” maybe an antique sentiment couched in antique English, but that doesn’t make it out-of-date. I suspect we’ve rarely needed true integrity more than we do today.

One item I have never read is “effectively fawns over executive management.” While almost every company says it wants people to “challenge the system,” “be empowered to express your opinion,” and “say what you really think,” there sure are a lot of people who are stuck on sucking up!

Not only do companies say they abhor such comically servile behavior but so do individual leaders. Almost all of the leaders I have met say that they would never encourage such a thing in their organizations. I have no doubt that they are sincere. Most of us are easily irritated–if not disgusted–by derriere kissers. Which raises a question: If leaders say they discourage sucking up, why does it happen so often?

Here’s a straightforward answer: Without meaning to, we all tend to create an environment where people learn to reward others with accolades that aren’t really warranted. We can see this very clearly in other people. We just can’t see it in ourselves.

So now you may be thinking, “This person may be right. It’s amazing how leaders send out subtle signals that encourage subordinates to mute their criticisms and exaggerate their praise of the powers that be. And it’s surprising how they can’t see themselves doing it. Of course, she is not talking about me! I don’t do this in my company.” And maybe you’re right. But how can you be so sure that you’re not in denial?

I use an irrefutable test with my clients to show how we unknowingly encourage sucking up. I ask a group of leaders the following question: “How many of you own a dog that you love?” Big smiles cross these executives’ faces as they wave their hands in the air. They beam as they tell me the names of their always-faithful mutts. Then we have a contest. I ask them, “At home, who gets most of your unabashed affection?” The multiple choices are:

#1) one, your husband, wife, or partner;
#2) two, your kids; or
#3) three, your dog.

More than 80% of the time, the clear winner is — the dog!

I then ask them if they love their dogs more than the members of their families. The answer is always a resounding NO. My follow-up: “So why does the dog get most of your unqualified positive recognition?” They reply with answers that all sound about the same. “The dog is always happy to see me.” “The dog never talks back.” “The dog gives me unconditional love, no matter what I do.” In other words, the dog is a suck-up.

I can’t say that I am any better. I have two cats and one dog at home. I used to travel a lot, and the dog would go absolutely nuts when I return from a trip. I pull into the driveway, and my first inclination is to open the front door, go straight to the dog and cats, and exclaim, “Mommy’s home!” Invariably, the dog jumps up and down and wag his little tail. I give him a big hug. One day, my son, Tristan, was home from school (ELEMENTARY SCHOOL 2nd grade). He watched my typical love fest with the dog. He then looked at me held his hands in the air like little paws, and barked, “Woof woof.”

Point taken. Well taken.

If we aren’t careful, we can treat people at work like dogs: by rewarding those who heap unthinking, unconditional admiration upon us. What behavior do we get in return? A virulent case of the suck-ups.

Here’s how leaders can stop encouraging this behavior. Begin by admitting that we all have a tendency to favor those who favor us, even if we don’t mean to. We should then rank our direct reports in three areas.

#1) First, how much do they like me? (I know you aren’t sure. What matters is how much you think they like you.)

#2) Second, what is their contribution to our company and our customers?

#3) Third, how much positive, personal recognition do I give them?

In many cases, if we are honest with ourselves, how much recognition we give someone is more often highly correlated with how much they seem to like us than it is with how well they perform. If that is the case, we may be encouraging the kind of behavior that we despise in others. Without meaning to, we are basking in hollow praise, which makes us hollow leaders.

Think about your job. As a professional, is your job consistent with the person that you really want to be?

CEO’s who are walking away from the Wall Street meltdown are being rewarded with million-dollar compensation packages while the American taxpayer shoulders the financial responsibility of protecting companies, workers, and the U.S. economy itself. Why are millions of dollars of taxpayer money slated to line the pockets of Wall Street executives who have failed at their jobs?

Legislators and private citizens have cried ‘foul’ and have succeeded in stopping the flow of dollars…to a degree.

Wait Out the Bail Out
Banks that receive an equity infusion from the Federal government will be bound by some general guidelines on paying their top five executives. There will be no golden parachute or rich severance packages offered, and companies will have to pay more taxes if an individual’s compensation exceeds $500,000.

The fear is that once the crisis passes, so will the restrictions…again. As an example, let’s look at the Congressional legislation that limited the tax deductibility of cash salaries to $1 million, for example. It led to an explosion in stock options used as compensation and even higher total payouts. It’s generally believed that although the compensation ‘caps’ are politically prudent, they probably won’t have much real impact. Companies will simply wait out the bail out restrictions.

The Human Factor in the Bottom Line Equation
Especially troubling is the lack of oversight and internal corporate governance. While acknowledging that this is not true in every company, most CEO’s are overly focused on the bottom line, completely ignoring the most important factor that goes in to keeping that figure healthy and robust…the human factor.

No single man or woman at the top is solely responsible for the success of a company. Instead take a look at the joint effort of leaders, executive management teams, managers and the people (workforce) who make things happen together. Yet, statistics show that CEO’s of large U.S. companies averaged $10.5 million each in total compensation. That’s 344 times the pay of the average U.S. worker.

Even more outrageous is the fact that when things go wrong, the finger points down the ladder, never up. It occurs because of an imbalance in checks and balances. CEO’s and the ‘executive suite’ have the power to limit transparency and oversight. They do and create a calculated culture of ignorance within business that provides a safety net in the form of blame-shifting.

The results on Wall Street are “excessive compensation packages for executives who have squandered their companies and their ‘human capital.’.

Illumination and Communication
The solution is in corporate social responsibility and improved communications at all levels of business. Like the money they earn for their employers, employees themselves should be held in high esteem, handled with care in an atmosphere of transparency, dignity and personal empathy.

Managers who are unsure whether they have a corporate culture that fosters trust and respect should be encouraged to work with human resource departments to ensure the growth and well-being of a company’s human capital. HR can play a big role in making sure that the corporate mission is clearly communicated up and down ‘the line. They can also examine where things went wrong and why, as well where future improvement should be enforced.

Perhaps most importantly, given current realities, human resources must be given the ability to curb…or at the very least question…excessive compensation packages that are currently approved by the recipients, themselves. In a nutshell, we need to ask someone other than a foxy CEO to guard the corporate hen house.

The human resources function of companies is being corrupted. Forced to focus on bottom-line metrics and measures that are Wall Street-friendly, H/R professionals are losing their humanity and prioritizing profits above people to the detriment of business on a global scale.

There are real concerns with the far-reaching effects that will occur as the human resources function of companies becomes fatally corrupted. Forced to focus on bottom-line metrics and measures, human resource professionals are losing their humanity and prioritizing profits above people to the detriment of business on a global scale.

The problem is that businesses squander their most valuable assets, reducing human capital to black-and-white numbers on a ledge page, and turning human resource mangers into number crunchers. It is part of the current trend, the human resource evolution. The human resources function as it evolved from a pure administrative role, next, to an all compliancy driven role and yet, again, herded by the latest corporate trend, a step toward to another non-strategic function of “metrics collections.”

It is true that the right metrics are foundational to making decisions and focusing on action. But more often than not, the metrics being applied to assess the worth of employees is still all wrong. There are hundreds of metrics which are being implemented by companies and human resource professionals which are not worth the time and effort to produce them. The problem is less about the specific metrics themselves than about their usefulness and applicability to the requirements of a specific business.

Let’s look at the culture of clutter. Driving the culture is the imperative to produce tangible evidence, even if it doesn’t generate immediate tangible results. Managers, human resource directors and others up and down the corporate hierarchy spew out massive amounts of spread sheets with useless information in a pointless exercise in information gathering. The exercise is pointless, because most often the results are not reviewed or taken seriously by senior management and no concrete action is ever taken.

The likelihood that we are still functioning in a flawed Wall Street finance model is the main cause but also included are the human resource vendors among the culprits. In order to sell their various software platforms, hr technology vendors create the perceived need for this information which in the long run does nothing to further human capital management or speed up the recruiting/staffing process.. This creates a vicious cycle whereby the ‘solution’ is actually causing the ‘problem’ to some degree.

Economic metrics are laser focused on employee salaries and the high-cost of benefits as they impact a company’s bottom line, but these measures fail to take into account the higher cost of a revolving door of workers and poor worker morale. The financial impact on global firms is profound as they wind up hemorrhaging money to find and train suitable staffers.
The ability to communicate the contribution and value of people to key stakeholders is critical to understanding the true worth of human resources and human capital. And the first people who need to get the message are senior managers and wall street analysts.

Take Me To Your Leader
A quick point to note is that an H/R department is not the birthplace of a company’s metrics-mad ideology. Most human resource managers merely reflect the mindset of a corporate leadership that has become increasingly and dangerously obsessed with black-and-white numbers while ignoring the ‘shades of gray’ that represent the human part of the success equation.

Companies that demand the metamorphosis of HR professionals into number crunchers are stripping away the fundamental charter of the human resources department. Human resource professionals who have a place at corporate roundtable discussions on profit and loss and who are asked to make departmental decisions based on ROI are put in an impossible situation. The emphasis on corporate financial concerns is in direct conflict with the primary goal of any human resources department.

Human resources departments were added to corporate hierarchies and charged with serving not one master, but several. The function of a Human Resources Department and its personnel is to provide fair and unbiased representation of employee interests and management objectives. The clarity and unbiased perspective offered by H/R enables a company to align the two in order to assure steady and uninterrupted business function. “And that’s where profitability is always found.”

The FACT:

You can get an education, work hard, and dress for success, but without carefully cultivated ‘people skills,’ it’s unlikely that you’ll get very far in business…or in life for that matter! Professional success depends primarily on human relations skills, including effective communications. Many times, it is a superior skill in communication that propels careers, boosts productivity and ensures customer satisfaction.

Communication – the ability to be heard and understood by listeners — affects the outcome of relationships, products and systems within a corporate structure.

In A Guide to for the Perplexed, E.F. Schumacher wrote, “We tend to see ourselves primarily in the light of our intentions, which are invisible to others, while we see others mainly in light of their actions, which are invisible to us; we have a situation in which misunderstanding and injustice are the order of day.” It’s easy to translate this thought into the world of business. Without clear communication, a corporate environment becomes a swirling vortex of “Why didn’t you do what I told you?” and “You never told me to do that.”

Finger-pointing and blame-shifting break down individuals and destroy any sense of team or unity.

Once Is NOT Enough
Despite the fact that communication of company goals and processes is essential to success at every level of business, ineffectual leaders allow daily activities and tasks, as well as unexpected distractions to sidetrack communications. Convinced that ’once is enough’ when information has been conveyed, many managers allow any distraction as an excuse to put regularly scheduled communication on the back burner.

However, while managers busy themselves putting out small ‘fires,’ they fail to realize that inferno misinformation and employee dissatisfaction threatens to engulf the company.

Great Expectations
A key element in leadership is the ability to give clear and accurate directions when setting expectations. This sounds easier than it is. We often think others understand us better than they do. Bad leaders believe their message has been heard and processed by employees, so they don’t bother to confirm that with the employees themselves.

Communication doesn’t end when you finish delivering your message!

American businesses spend hundreds of thousands of dollars sending employees to training classes and still find their companies failing miserably. The ‘students’ may learn skills and ideas, but their ability to put their knowledge to work and communicate what they’ve learned to their staff and supervisors is never addressed. How come? If communications is key, why do employers fail to foster the essential skill that can inoculate a business from a wide range of problems?

Let’s talk about that!

Losing Focus
Management training programs do focus on communications, exploring the different types of communications and the wide variety of communications media. Their message to the managers is a good one: “Create a climate of open communication to increase your team members’ motivation, commitment, and productivity.”

Intellectually, the communication training programs that are out there…many of them are very good…have hit the nail on the head. Practically speaking, however, they fall short. Why? Because there is no follow up whatsoever, it is delivered purely on an “academic point of view”. The focus on communication is lost once the training session ends. People go back to their desks or offices and say, that is nice, now back to reality!

In nine cases out of ten, you’ll find no real accountability built into the administration and ROI of training programs. Training is delivered to a select few in organizations large and small. There is very little follow-through from HR or Training and Development or outside Consultants to see how well the participants able to incorporate various soft skills or have they been able change their own behaviors.

The answer is that H/R and training functions should include ongoing follow-up throughout the entire year. There should be a continuous effort to gather statistical information from participating departments as well as feedback and commentary from managers and workers. Reviewing the numbers and feedback one month after training, three months, six month and a year later is critical to enable the ROI of training. If managers do not want to cooperate, make them. Get it done!

Without follow up, an analysis of the training and its effectiveness is impossible.

The Blame Game
When companies fail, it is likely to be because of a breakdown in communications, concern about reprisals, political silos, and a lack of accountability. All these things create a fear-based environment that inevitably leads to a lot of defensive posturing. Everyone blames someone else: managers blame staff, staffers indict managers, and everyone gets on the bandwagon to point a finger at ‘useless’ training. Since no one wants to take responsibility for a communications failure, everyone gets bogged down in their own inadequate internal processes. This is true at every level of corporate life, including the halls of senior management, management, H/R and T&D. Many of today’s leaders are so focused on positioning ‘someone else’ to take the blame for a mistake that they fail to identify the real cause. This, of course, makes it impossible for problems to be corrected and a company ends in and ruins.

The ability to communicate effectively needs to be measured and monitored on a continuous basis. Organizations change, people come and go, and a variety of internal and external forces can affect a company’s ability to function well. To keep up with change — and hopefully stay ahead of it — internal processes, performance management reviews, reporting structures, and the like should all be consistently reviewed and monitored.

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