Andleeb Abbas

‘Mind your own business’. ‘What is personal is not professional’. ‘Do not mix business with pleasure’. These are some of the wise comments that we have heard over a period of time. They all make sense. A professional must learn to focus on his own business. He or she must not get involved in office politics and grapevine. He or she must leave his home issues at the office entry gate. He or she must learn to be “official” and not “personal” in his or her working relationships. It sounds very sound. And as many would say it is common sense. But then common sense is uncommon. And even if it is common it is a bit unnatural. Nature has a habit of taking over common sense. Nature also strikes back. This clash between what you are, what you appear to be, what you are able to perform becomes a dilemma for many companies dealing with the contradictions of human behaviour.

The recent string of personal scandals on top executives raises many questions. Is the “Me Too” movement responsible for this string of exposés or is it just the social media penetration into personal lives. The recent horrible scandal that came out about the CEO of Affinity is an example of how the professional world needs to rethink its “raison d étre”. Is it all fair in business and profits? Is the power of the C-Suite a cover-up for personal failings? Is the professional performance a licence to abuse authority? Is it all “ok” till it is not “ok”? These are the uncomfortable musings that are going around without really becoming strategic discussions or decisions. Let us look at some fundamental truths that are shunned till they catch up with you:

1. What is personal is also professional— The personal life of a CEO, as long as it was out of office, or to put it more bluntly, as long as it did not affect the company bottom line, was none of the company’s business. It was wrong then, and it is wrong now. Companies hire people based on integrity and credibility. Financial scams are taken to the cleaners as soon as discovered. However personal “digressions” are overlooked. Character of a person is not divided into office and home. Character is a whole that affects the whole. You cannot compartmentalize your person. Yes, many of us behave differently when in office and when at home. That is due to the roles we play the nature of being formal or informal etc. What does not change are values and principles. You cannot be honest and dishonest in different places. You cannot be moral and immoral according to domain and location. This is a fact that is a highly inconvenient truth that companies like to shun and avoid. Many studies have now started substantiating this finding. David Larcker and Brian Tayan studied 38 incidents of CEO bad behavior and measured their consequences on company performance. The study said that those who cheat in the bedroom also cheat in the boardroom. The study found a strong correlation between adultery and workplace misconduct by corporate executives and financial advisers. A computer hack in 2015 revealed the names and personal data of more than 30 million among them corporate executives, white-collar criminals and brokers.

Crosschecking against public records, they found that those Ashley Madison customers generally were more than twice as likely to have violated professional codes of conduct compared with a control group. “Our study indicates cheating in one context carries over to cheating in others,” the scholars told Bloomberg. “We’re not trying to debate ethics or lecture people. All we’re doing is examining the data and the data is fairly strong.”  

2. Culture sarts from the top— What sort of a culture a company can have and sustain depends on the commitment at the top. The leadership team is quick to give big statements on diversity and zero tolerance for harassment, etc, but those statements are more for public consumption. They are more for relevance. They are more for image builder check-list. They are more for annual report executive summaries. And, to make them look more than just words, their implementation is done when mid level and lower level employees are caught on non-acceptable behaviours. Thus as you go up, their execution goes down. Take diversity- The main focus is to increase the number of women in the company. Many corporates will proudly show how female hiring ratios are improving. The question is at what level? Hiring more female customer service reps is good, but what about top leadership composition? What about Boardroom seats? The signals are not encouraging. Are we trying to say females are not really top material? Are we trying to say gender affects the chances of being in the power decision-making body. If that is what we are signaling then all the talk about diversity and inclusion are exactly just a talk. It is when the top walk the talk that the rest walk the talk. The digression in values especially things like abuse of power, harassment, etc will only be followed in the company if it is followed by the company leaders. The classic rise and fall of Uber as a company is a classic rise and fall in Uber corporate culture. Held as the fairy tale that became real, CEO Travis Kalanick was the young turk who took Uber in 7 years to 70 countries. In this growth euphoria the board turned a blind eye to ethics and values. The company had a group of top management executives who paid no attention to CEO behavior, a questionable corporate culture, and an inappropriate set of values. As Travis himself was not taken into account for a long time on his Susan Fowler, an HR employee allegations, the Uber drivers were found wanting too. The toxic culture carried all the way down to the backseat of the Uber cars.

3. Morality does affect profitability— The reason why some cleaning up in the boardroom is taking place is not due the rise of the corporate ethical values but due to the fall in corporate share values. This is a social media era. Matters of boardrooms and bedrooms are in every room in every office in every home before the company knows it. The resultant public uproars and boycotts dent sales, profits and shareholder values. When profitability is down, morality makes a comeback in the boardroom. The CEO of McDonald was asked to leave in 2019 due the inappropriate relationship with an employee. But the investors persecuted till recently they got their “pound” of flesh.   SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) fined McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook $400,000. These penalty was to settle charges that he allegedly misled investors about the circumstances of his 2019 firing following an illicit relationship with an employee.

For years personal life accountability was not the business of the business. No more. Even if there are reasons other than a call of the corporate conscience, it is great news. After all, all is well when the business is well.

(The writer is a columnist, consultant, coach, and an

analyst and can be reached at [email protected])