Values and the Bonus Giveback
Seidman
By now, we’ve all heard that top execs are giving back their bonuses.
The cynics say they were coerced. There’s another way to look at this — that something else is at a play: values.
Shame is a powerful social force, and guilt is a powerful internal force.
Shame is often thought of as a result of a violation of cultural or social values, and that guilt results from a violation of one’s internal values.
When shamed as a child — when we were told “Share!” or “Don’t eat like a pig!” — we were, in essence, told not to behave in ways that are beneath our human values. We learned.
Shame has its benefits. It deeply connects us to our humanity. It’s a powerful socializing and regulating force — perhaps the most powerful.
The reason? It connects and reconnects us to our values. It helps us change our behaviors.
A connection to values is at the root of something we’ve been hearing a lot about lately: inspirational leadership.
The alarm is being rung for embracing an inspirational approach to leadership in the 21st century. More people are recognizing the value that comes when we move from being command-and-control disciplinarians to becoming inspirational leaders.
On Sunday, it was Thomas Friedman who sounded the call.
On Tuesday, it was Stefan Stern’s column in the Financial Times. Stefan writes:
Lastly, leaders need to inspire. A “call to arms” can work … but it will fall flat if the leader has failed to make a strong connection with his colleagues, and they are too fearful to be able to buy into it. So, yes, the way leaders behave matters.
It is my belief that there are fundamentally three ways to get people to do things: coercion, motivation and inspiration.
Carrots and sticks are necessary and will always be; however, 21st-century leaders also recognize their limits and disadvantages. Coercion requires an ongoing investment in a bureaucracy of rules, processes and enforcement. Motivation is expensive, particularly in a down market where money does not flow as freely and dollar-based performance targets are more difficult to achieve. It is also under a high degree of scrutiny.
Also, financial incentives cannot be shared and rarely connect individuals to a higher sense of purpose. So what does? Values.
You may think. Business is a rough-and-tumble world. Competition is fierce; the pressure to make the numbers intense and the environment slippery — and that’s in the good times. It’s great to think in these ideal terms where everyone is driven by values and inspired by common goals, but that’s just not the way it is.
I believe that we are in an era of inspiration, where great results will come from employees who are bought into not just the company’s potential for success but also its underlying mission. They work not just for the pay but also for their ability to achieve something they find inspiring. For the cynics, inspirational leadership is also a heck of a lot more efficient.
When you are inspired, you act on something you believe in; you are in the grip of ideas; you are compelled by a deeper purpose and propelled by values you hold fundamental. Unlike carrots and sticks, values are free — and they can be shared. Because they can be shared, they spur collaboration and serve as the glue that keeps people aligned and energized. This is particularly important in the current economic times.
Certainly by now, we have all heard calls for more coercion. It’s my hope that we’ll start hearing more calls for inspirational leadership. In our more complex and global 21st-century world, what makes a company “sustainable” is not when it adds more coercive rules and regulations to control behaviors. Laws only tell you what you can do. But it’s values that inspire in you what you should do.
We need more of the latter, now more than ever.
Last 5 posts by Dov Seidman
• Why We Can't 'Motivate' Engagement - August 19th, 2010
• The Economy: Don't Hit the Reset Button - May 19th, 2010
• Is There 'Honest Tea' on Wall Street? - May 14th, 2010
• Inspirational Shame in the Era of Behavior - April 14th, 2010
• Philosophy Is Back in Business - January 13th, 2010
March 25th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Thanks Dov. We need more standard-bearers rather than regulators and lawmakers.
Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational, gave a presentation at the recent TED conference about one study he did that found that honor codes and even the Ten Commandments decreases cheating. I posted the video on my blog at http://www.andrewmitton.com.
May 22nd, 2009 at 9:24 am
[...] Dov Seidman, who runs the ethical consulting firm LRN in Los Angeles, says, “Shame has benefits. It deeply connects us to our humanity. It’s a powerful socializing and regulating force — perhaps the most powerful.” He posts further comments here. [...]