The words dodging, evasion, prevention and avoidance have both constructive and dysfunctional applications.   For instance, avoidance can be a calculated action taken that will serve the greater good.  You can take actions that can help you to avert a catastrophe and save jobs or you can decide on avoiding an immediate decision because it takes time to weigh the risks.  There are times when it is okay to wait and let a situation cool down.  This can be a productive approach as heightened emotions impede communication. 

Avoidance is an action or lack of action propelled by a decision and oftentimes, the decision is propelled by an emotion.  This article will explore the darker side of avoidance, why it happens, and what can be done about it.
When avoidance is in a dysfunctional mode it can be driven by fear or anger.  When a person is in a negative avoidance mode, the quality of communication diminishes.    It is important to note that communication can shut down whether or not a person is still engaging you in conversations.  There are some who choose to literally stop all forms of verbal and written communication, others leave the channels open but their responses are vague, circular or confusing.  Sometimes the responses are passive aggressive, where a person is giving the façade of co-operation but there is no intention to follow through with constructive action.

When the intention behind avoidance is not driven by fear, but by a need to take a step back and view the big picture, it is functional if procrastination does not set in.  When avoidance is driven by the fear of a low performance rating, job loss or the loss of a good customer, because of incompetence, a lack of integrity, a low tolerance for mistakes or a lack of knowledge it can end up with disastrous outcomes.

Dysfunctional Avoidance Tactics

Here are a few ways both employees and people leaders avoid and negative responses: 

• Avoiding the subject can be achieved by changing the subject or pretending the subject was never mentioned.  It is also done by answering a question with a question.
• Minimization is a commonly used tactic that is used to create a positive spin.  The intention behind minimization is to mislead by creating a false sense of security.  For instance, some persons will a general statement that everything is going well or they misrepresent the facts in other ways.  A way to test this is to ask for specific information.
• Others avoid by screening their calls, not responding to emails or at an extreme, hanging up on others.
• Blame is a common way that employees divert attention from themselves.  Blame is sometimes accompanied by half truths designed to appease fact seekers.
• As previously stated, avoidance can be a passive aggressive strategy that is responded to with passive or overt aggression. 

How Avoidance Impacts Others

Using avoidance as a delay tactic only frustrates the people impacted by the delay.  In response, frustration can result in tension or even shouting and profanity, especially if the avoidance is creating an unfair situation where someone feels disadvantaged or disempowered by the circumventive behaviour.  In extreme cases an avoider’s safety can be put at risk causing them to constantly look over their shoulders in anticipation of some type of retaliation.

Introducing Accountability

The whole point of dodging the fall is survival.  When avoidance occurs because of fear or cowardice, the reasons undergirding the evasive action can be fear of consequences, circumvention of conscience, or no conscience at all.  In fear or anger driven circumstances, dodging the fall is about avoiding responsibility and accountability.  Unless the avoider has a cathartic personal experience and honesty and integrity become priority values that drive courageous action, it is highly unlikely that evasion will cease because the need to survive is overrides or nullifies the need to be honest.

If personal transformation is not an option, another way to transform this type of behaviour into functional behaviour is through effective leadership.  Attuned leaders realize the impact of avoidance behaviours on their efforts to build a cohesive, motivated team so here are some of the ways they develop accountable employees:

•  Take assertive action to correct unwanted behaviour.  This can include handing out warning letters and depending on the risks created by the avoidance tactics, termination.  This sends a clear message that avoidance will not be tolerated.
• Reward appropriate behaviour through performance management or other recognition progammes.
• Coach direct reports and peers.
• Mentor coworkers.
• Model desired behaviours.
• Provide learning opportunities.  It is important to note that behavioural training without effective systems implemented to ensure the application of the learning produce a much lower return on investment than training used in conjunction with other developmental opportunities.

As a people leader, it is important to select the right combination of interventions so that the root causes can be adequately addressed and authentic change can begin.  As a leader, it is imperative to sustain the behaviours necessary to effect change, otherwise, sporadic attempts to create long-term change will be pointless.

Yvette Bethel is CEO of Organizational Soul, an HR Consulting and Leadership Development company.  If you are interested in exploring how you can create a higher performing organization, you can contact her at info@orgsoul.com.

 

It is very interesting how people spend time mastering the system.  First they experience the process, exploring its inherent strengths, understanding what the system is designed to do.  Then they scour the process for the inevitable oversights that were invisible when the architects created the system. 

For some, the reason behind mastering the system is a goal of achieving professional effectiveness or personal actualization.  For others, the intent may be less honourable.  Here are three ways employees attempt to manipulate systems, finding short cuts that avoid accountability:

• Extra days:  There are employees who seem to disappear right after a public holiday.  They wait patiently for the holiday to arrive or if they are not interested in waiting, they obtain authorization from a doctor for sick days so they can abdicate their responsibilities temporarily.   For some manipulators, this behaviour is beating the system.  However, they don’t consider the impact of unplanned absences on others who are left to take on additional workload.
• My best friend the manager:  There are employees who try to beat the system by becoming friends with the manager.  Their motive is to carefully position themselves so the manager will be lenient.  The point of befriending the manager is usually self preservation but like any system, the system will restore balance.  This means the work will have to be done and done properly by someone else.     There are managers who bring about forced balance by letting someone else do the work or doing the work themselves.  Others fake the appearance of balance until unavoidable situations arise that expose the gaps.  Sometimes balance is restored as a result of removal, termination or transfer of the person undermining teamwork.
• Christmas vacation:  Some employers have a policy that doesn’t allow employees to extend their vacations past December of each year to avoid the accumulation of vacation in the upcoming year.  Sometimes this policy is coupled with another policy that all vacations have to be taken before November so there can be a full complement at work during the holidays.  People who manipulate this policy find a way to stall all year so the company has no choice but to allow the remaining vacation days to be taken during the Christmas the holidays.

Five Causes for Working the System

There are various reasons why employees seek ways to circumvent a system, seeking shorter or easier route:

• Laziness:  One of the first assumptions persons make about persons who work the system is that they are lazy. Laziness is an inherent lack of drive or motivation that leads to low productivity.  Perhaps this is true in some circumstances, and untrue in others.
• Incompetence: Working the system can also be assigned to a lack of competence.  This happens when employees go into survival mode and find ways to attain a satisfactory rating in spite of their shortcomings.
• I am better than this: We cannot make an assumption that working the system is synonymous with laziness or incompetence.  It can be assigned to a sense of superiority and a refusal to participate in certain tasks because of a lack of interest or challenge.   Some take on this attitude because they took the job for the money, not because they were interested in a career.
• Difficult working relationships: Some people who work the system are highly competent but demonstrate a lack of interest because of a difficult working relationship either with a difficult manager or executive or a belligerent coworker, intent on sabotage.
• Entitlement: Entitlement is a sense that someone has a right to a benefit, whether or not they actually do.  In the context of working the system, entitlement attitudes can cause employees to take liberties they think they have a right to because of a notion of being short changed.

Unfortunately, there are productive employees who make every effort to follow the rules while observing the chosen few flagrantly bending the rules.  In some cases, productive employees may eventually adopt a detached attitude of “If you can’t beat them, join them” or “there is no point”.   However, there is also the risk that if good workers become despondent, they will look for another job because their work ethic dictates productivity.

Everyone we encounter has an agenda driven by a value system.  Whether the agenda is one based on integrity or dishonesty, selfishness or altruism, it is an agenda.  Working the system is usually perceived as a self-centered action because it usually benefits the person initiating the manipulations.  However, there are altruistic persons who manipulate systems so the greater good can be served. 

Thomas Sowell, an economist, political commentator and author once said, “One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.”  When there are persons working the system for personal gain, let us be careful not to demonize the producers but instead, focus on finding ways to stimulate and engage persons intent on working the system and stimulate their productivity. 

Yvette Bethel is CEO of Organizational Soul, an HR Consulting and Leadership Development company.  If you are interested in exploring how you can enhance your team, you can contact her at info@orgsoul.com.

When starting a new career, you are in the exploratory phase of your career, trying to understand if your chosen path is the right one.  The next stage in your career is the establishment stage where you are learning through training and experience, establishing yourself as a resource.   At this stage you are immersed in your career and if you are engaged, you start to think about ways you can expand in your role and position yourself for a promotion.

At the maintenance stage of your career, you continue to gain breadth and depth of knowledge.  At this stage, you may have received promotions or you may be in the same role for an extended period of time.     

The final stage in your career is disengagement.  Here are a few reasons why disengagement can occur: 

• You are experiencing difficulties with your colleagues or manager. 
• You are not interested in the position you occupy because you mastered role and you are no longer 
• challenged.  
• You goals and interests have changed.
• You have changing family circumstances. 
• You are not performing satisfactorily.  

Whatever the reason, disengagement can be a difficult stage because you know it is time to leave but you may not be clear about what to do next or when to make a move. 

There is no fixed timeline for moving through the four career stages.   For instance, some persons may accept a job and move immediately from exploration to disengagement because the work environment is not a good fit.  In cases like these, employees have an opportunity to learn valuable lessons about their strengths and weaknesses.  Alternatively, a person can take decades to move through the career stages gaining breadth and depth of experience before they disengage.  Whatever your reason for disengagement, it is important not to become stuck.

When you feel stuck, you can experience stressful emotions like anger and frustration that can lead to agitated outbursts or even apathy. A sustained negative emotional state can be harmful to your productivity, your health, and your ability to relate effectively with your colleagues.  Stressful emotions can also affect your ability to focus on your career, derailing your attempts to work on a career plan.  The good news is that regardless your circumstances, reinvention is possible.

Steps to Career Reinvention

Reinvention not only takes vision, it takes planning and discipline.  Here are eight tips you can use to reinvent your career and sustain the changes.

• Connect with your purpose.  If you don’t already know your purpose, start from a place of knowing your strengths and preferences.  There are various ways you can do this.  One way is to hire a career coach.  Another way is to complete a self assessment.  For an abridged, free assessment you can visit www.assessment.com.  If you choose, you can opt to pay for the full version of the inventory.
• Identify your values.  Once you identify the career you prefer, identify and understand your primary values so you can structure your career in a way that meets your personal and professional values. 
• Identify your ideal work environment. You may be purpose driven but you accepted a role in an environment where you cannot thrive.  For instance, you know you love a career in accounting but you are not the type of person who can thrive in a competitive environment.  So you enjoy your work, but you have great difficulty with the culture and this can lead to the development of  a love-hate relationship with your work.  
• Write a career development plan.  It is important to identify your skill gaps, your desired career path and then create your career development plan.  Waiting for your employer to train you may not be an ideal decision because training is contingent on budgets coupled with your employer’s commitment to developing employees.  
• Create a Career Action Plan: Once you create your development plan you can create another action plan designed to move you along a defined path to your goals.  It is important to build timelines into this plan so you are clear on how long you want to remain in a particular role.  This plan can also focus on building your network, updating your résumé or starting a business.
• Network, network, network.  Networking is important whether you are changing careers or seeking a promotion.  When changing careers, you can tap into your network to access industry intelligence which can help you to identify an ideal role or work environment.  It can also provide you with information about existing or upcoming vacancies.  If you want to prepare for a promotion, a network can provide you with a mentor or it can serve as a resource you can tap into when you need to make things happen.  
• Create a system of accountability.  Despite your best intentions, your reality of busyness can derail your career change plans.  To remain focused on your goals, it would behoove you to find a way to remain accountable to your goals.  Some people form mastermind groups which are groups of like-minded people who come together to support each other with attaining their goals.  Others join networks or clubs and some decide to keep their plans to themselves.  If you choose not to share your plans, it is important to create a system of personal accountability you can use to remain on a path of change.
• Build balance into your career plan.  There may be times in your career when you decide to sacrifice balance to achieve your goals.  While sacrifice is sometimes perceived as necessary, you can remain stuck in the mode of sacrifice, neglecting to reinstate balance in your life.

In closing, it is important for you to realize you should be the primary author of your career plan.  As previously stated, this means you should create a realistic vision for your career and life so you can decide how long you will await a promotion or other types of developmental opportunities.  You also need to determine how much you will invest in your own development so you are not at the mercy of a fluctuating training budget.  

Yvette Bethel is CEO of Organizational Soul, an HR Consulting and Leadership Development company.  If you are interested in creating and executing a personal career plan, you can connect with her on the contact page at  www.orgsoul.com. Career Coaching Sessions begin in January 2011.

Mentors can have a profound impact on any organization or group.  They serve to ensure present and future continuity through building current and future leaders, they impart operational knowledge and can perpetuate the kind of organizational culture designed to ensure future growth. 

If mentors are good for succession and seamless continuity why don’t more companies invest time and other resources into mentoring?  There are several factors that can create obstacles or derail both formal and informal mentoring programs.  They can happen either in isolation or concurrently:

• The persons deemed repositories of institutional knowledge may not feel comfortable releasing information because the organization is not demonstrating that it values long tenured employees.  Instead the organization highly rewards younger employees with up-to-date skills and limited experience.   As a result, the long tenured employees have the experience that can improve the performance of the inexperienced highly skilled employees but the willingness, trust and the feeling of being valued are not present.   
• There are organizations that exist predominantly in the present, directing their energies toward immediate issues because of a subconscious notion of immortality or a reality of not having enough time.  If the state of being busy is perpetual, it forces decision makers to habitually adopt a view predominantly centered on microcosms instead of a visionary or long term perspective.
• A limited budget is often a reason why talent development plans are delayed.   Executives and owners often have competing financial priorities that require attention so training and development plans are postponed, sometimes indefinitely.
• Negative attitudes toward employees based on past experiences can also obstruct the development of talented employees.  While there are cases where the attitude may be justified because risks are high, there are cases where unforgiving attitudes stall the careers of strong performers who eventually leave the organization and flourish elsewhere. 

Mentoring doesn’t only have to be about succession and the future career of the mentee.  It can be focused on the present from the following perspectives:

Informational Mentoring 

This type of mentoring helps the mentee to focus on correct procedures and processes, both formal and informal.

Friend 

This type of mentor interacts with the mentee in social situations to help the mentee understand how to navigate social interactions.  This is particularly useful in highly political work environments.

Reciprocal Mentoring 

This type of mentoring relationship is one where persons with complementary strengths  collaborate on projects.  Each person learns from the other through mutual exchange.

We tend to focus on the benefits of mentoring to the mentee and the organization but there are tangible benefits for mentors.  Here are a few examples:

By interacting closely with persons from lower levels of the organization, the mentor is being exposed to information directly from a level of employee they may not connect with under normal circumstances.   The direct access allows executives to skip a level of people leaders that may be providing a biased interpretation of circumstances.  It can also bring a deeper understanding of diversity and how to harness differences to positively impact the performance of the organization.

• Mentoring helps leaders to develop their coaching, counseling, listening, leadership and modeling skills.   
• Mentoring helps to create an impression of accessibility, connectivity and humanity between junior employees and executives.    
• Building credibility through creating positive connections and valuing employees can also serve to build trust in organizations where trust is impaired.

Here are 10 considerations for organizations when developing a mentoring program:

• As a mentor, decide why you want to mentor, what you want the mentoring to achieve in the present and future and who would be the best person for you to mentor.  If there is no formal mentoring program, you can select someone to mentor informally.
• As an employer, understand if you have persons within the company who can mentor your employees and if not, determine if there are possible mentors, external to the company, who have the time, interest and skills.
• Determine if talent should be mentored by more than one mentor.
• As a decision maker, get buy in and participation from the business.   As a best practice, companies that treat mentoring as an organization wide priority and not only an HR priority get more out of the process.
• As an HR professional, support mentoring with an improved recruitment process.  No amount of training and development opportunities will improve bad hires.
• Match the right mentors and mentees.  Once you identify desired outcomes of the mentoring relationships, decision makers should consider the strengths and weaknesses of the mentor.
• Create an orientation program for mentors and mentees.  It should include a guide or letter outlining roles, time commitment etc.  A formal mentoring agreement can also capture this type of information.
• Track the performance of persons being mentored and determine if the mentoring match is the right one.
• Some organizations use training as a primary development tool for top talent but there are some things a seminar won’t achieve that mentoring can.  For instance, mentoring aligns an experiential foundation with academic training.  Academic training is theoretical and does not always give the individual the opportunity to apply knowledge, make mistakes and experience variations on a theme. 
• Cultivate an environment of collaboration where employees experience a sense of being valued.  Otherwise your mentoring program will be perceived as a farce.
• What distinguishes good mentors from great mentors is the best mentors don’t focus on creating clones of themselves, they focus on developing the individual’s inherent strengths, guiding the individual to go beyond their perceived limits.

Many companies are so entrenched in survival mode that they postpone the need for preparing for long term realities until it is too late to develop the right people.  Instead, I encourage decision makers to think about ways you can match the right mentors with top talent who will represent the vision and values of the organization in the future.

Yvette Bethel is CEO of Organizational Soul, an HR Consulting and Leadership Development company.  If you are interested in exploring how you can create a higher performing organization, you can contact her at info@orgsoul.com.

When you say you are giving a person the benefit of the doubt it assumes you have a nagging doubt and you will choose to overlook it given the limited facts you possess.  In other words, you are giving the person the advantage of being innocent until proven guilty.  

Before there are facts

There are some who endow the benefit of the doubt not knowing much about the circumstances  or the person receiving the benefit.  This is appropriate when you are new to a role or environment and you don’t know much about the players and the related dynamics.  In cases like these, knowledge of the facts is usually limited so it is important to consider the facts you have because personalities, power structures and working relationships are not yet adequately understood. 

After gathering the facts

There are others who propose the benefit of the doubt after knowing the players.  They are familiar with historical and current data, and they understand the dynamics of relevant relationships.  In cases like these, when you give a person the benefit of the doubt inappropriately, your credibility can be called into question.   This is because it may appear that you are taking the course of least resistance by saying you are offering the benefit of the doubt but all you are doing is hiding behind this statement, using it as camouflage for avoiding tough decisions.

There is another type of person who bestows the benefit of the doubt in a situation where a person they know well makes a mistake or veers away from typical behavioural patterns.  Their rationale is that the person receiving the benefit of the doubt will eventually revert to their traditional patterns of behaviour.  If the person receiving the benefit does not revert to their traditional patterns, the person bestowing the advantage may decide to retract the benefit of the doubt if the new behaviour becomes the norm.

Temporary vs. Enduring Trust

Providing the benefit of the doubt may be safer that than offering a more enduring version of trust because the benefit of the doubt can be used as a tool to wait and see if there are actual grounds for trust.

From this perspective, the benefit of the doubt is granted on a temporary basis because it can exist until you eliminate the doubt.  When you grant a person the temporary suspension of your doubts to allow them time to solidify their position, the burden of proof is typically on the person being given the benefit of the doubt.  However, there are times when the person bestowing the benefit of the doubt seeks to prove or disprove the doubt because of personal agendas.  

Withdrawing the Benefit of the Doubt

If the benefit of the doubt was given initially and additional facts become available, two important questions to ask yourself are, “Should I cease giving the benefit of the doubt and if so, why?   I have witnessed cases where the facts are revealed, proving the benefit of the doubt is no longer deserved but the beneficent one continues to generously endow the benefit of the doubt.  This could be due to fear of confrontation or an inability to identify changes in a situation.

Resisting Assignment of the Benefit of the Doubt

There are others who don’t or seldom assign the benefit of the doubt and require evidence of every single thing.  While this is perceived as a safe point of view and an accountability tool, constant risk aversion can be draining for the people in the environment because it can lead to decision paralysis.

4 Tips for Building Accountability and Trust

Here are three tips you can consider to help you reduce the risks associated with erroneously granting the benefit of the doubt.

1. Get the facts:  Be careful of the people who present opinion as fact.  When you ask specific questions, these people cannot produce evidence supporting their opinion or position, so ask clarity seeking questions like, can you bring me the document or report?  Or what are you basing your assertion on?  Don’t be afraid to constructively confront uncertain situations.  Once you obtain the facts, analyse them by asking yourself if the facts support the doubt or the opposite view.  It is important to review the facts because it is important to avoid creating a situation where the benefit of the doubt becomes an entitlement and causes laziness or mediocrity.
2. Build desired skills:  If you are a team leader, another action to consider is to provide training or coaching opportunities to members of your team where appropriate.  No matter how long a person has been in a position, a lack of skill may be contributing the need for the benefit of the doubt.   
3. Avoid Spin: If you are being doubted it may be that your credibility is questionable because you spin the truth.  While spin is inevitable because we all have different ways of filtering information, building your integrity through being forthright can help to dispel doubts other have in you.  
4. Timing: Ask yourself if you are you giving the benefit of the doubt early on in the working relationship to be fair or after it has been proven that the benefit is no longer deserved.  If it is no longer deserved, are you taking the path of least resistance or have you been fooled by manipulation?

The benefit of the doubt, when used optimally, is a temporary tool.    Therefore, conscious steps should be taken to get the facts so that you are making decisions based on reliable information.

Yvette Bethel is CEO of Organizational Soul, an HR Consulting and Leadership Development company.  If you are interested in exploring how you can create higher performing team leaders, you can contact her at info@orgsoul.com. 

In a collaborative work environment, employees put aside their personal differences and they work together. This type of environment is grounded in trust, integrity, human value and respect.   Unfortunately, collaboration does not always occur.  Here are five ways you can set the stage for a collaborative environment.

1. Break Down Silos:  

Silos occur when there are self-sufficient teams of employees that do not communicate or connect with each other regarding achievement of their goals.  They operate as if they are the only department within the business, ignoring the need for working together.   When silos are resident in your business, employees don’t network internally, or consistently help each other. 

In order to demolish silos and build bridges across your organization it is important to create relationships that can help you get work done.  Building bridges by helping your coworkers can lead to reciprocity and to building or reinforcing a foundation of trust.  Another way you can demolish silos is by opening the flow of communication by implementing a schedule of meetings designed to share the right information with the right people at the right time.

Developing appropriate leadership competencies is another important consideration when deciding to break down silos.  If leaders can recognize when walls are being built and maintained, they can proactively encourage or reward collaborative behaviours.  

It is important to note that in a collaborative workplace, employees will continue to express different points of view.  The differentiating factor is when there is collaboration, various perspectives are considered from an interest based view, focusing on deeper common interests and using those interests to overcome differences.  Therefore, through inclusive leadership practices and trust building, shared goals will begin to emerge and the walls of the silos will be systematically broken down.

2.  Navigate Office Politics: 

Trust and respect have already been established as fundamental building blocks of collaborative     behaviour.  In the absence of trust and respect, a highly political environment can evolve and survive because it is being fed by coworkers who only care about their success.   Based on observation, overly political behaviour can be divisive, creating "us and them" circumstances.

 At its core, politics is about relationships and alliances.  Unfortunately, there are people who are overly political who exploit relationships by being more concerned with form than substance.  In response to this type of political behaviour, author Deborah Hildebrand once said, “Office politics impact employers and employees alike, so it is important to understand how to navigate the minefields in order to ensure a positive work environment.” 

In order to create a collaborative, politically savvy environment, leaders can contribute by building a team through opening top down and bottom up channels of communication and building reward systems that acknowledge team achievements versus individual achievements.  Additionally, an objective based performance management process can help to break down political structures at work because results based performance measurements can obliterate tendencies toward favouritism.  

3. Power Plays: 

Power and politics are inextricably linked.   There are power starved, overly political persons who want to build and protect their power bases so in their minds, this means they have to diminish what they perceive to be your power.  Obviously, destructive power players negatively impact your ability to collaborate because their myopic approach strangles coworkers into a state of inefficiency and ultimately, reciprocated negativity.

When power plays emerge, like saying no to show you who is in charge, pettiness and insecurity are at the root of the power dynamic and training in isolation is not going to change their behaviour.  This is because the power player is doing what he or she needs to do to keep insubordination or noncompliance in its place.  Therefore, training supported by the implementation of systems of accountability to the right behaviours will help to make positive changes and if this doesn’t work, corrective action can be considered as a viable option when seeking to achieve collaboration.

4. Bad Attitudes:  

Bad attitudes can be encountered with customers, executives, managers, supervisors or front-line employees.  A bad attitude can show up as passive aggression, nay-saying, being rude, knowing-it-all, being exact, withholding information or complaining.  When you display a negative attitude your coworkers prefer not to interact with you and this usually includes your reporting manager.  When your reporting manager avoids you, it appears that you are not favoured, but you are contributing to your own circumstance of isolation. 

Another bad attitude consistently identified by managers is persons who are not open to constructive criticism.  As a result, accelerated progress is difficult because managers who decide not to criticize because of the perceived consequences may do the work themselves and slow down the process or they avoid confrontation by allowing errors to recur.

If you are displaying a negative attitude, you will need to become aware of your divisive behaviours and self-correct.  It can mean managing your body language or outbursts. If you are a manager it can mean that you learn the skill of coaching so you can coach desired collaborative behaviours.

5. A Lack of Integrity:  

When there is a lack of integrity, division occurs because you have a group of people who will observe the integrity deficient behaviour and decide to mirror the behaviour because if one person is getting away with it, why can’t they?  Alternatively, the honest persons don’t want to be a part of dishonest systems of behaviour and have to decide how they will confront the situation so they can avoid being indirectly implicated.  They ask themselves questions like: Should I report the dishonest behaviour to management and become a whistle blower?  Should I confront the people involved and become a known potential liability and risk being sabotaged?  Or should I leave the company?

Transforming your corporate culture from one characterized by entitlement and dishonesty to one characterized by collaboration, accountability and results is a colossal task and it requires integrity at the top levels of the organization and a will to implement integrity based policies and systems.  As we all know if policies are in place but not enforced they are only empty words.

Yvette Bethel is CEO of Organizational Soul, a company that offers Human Resource Consulting and Leadership Development services.  If you are interested in creating authentic change at your organization, her contact details can be found at www.orgsoul.com