Lexington, KY - It's Friday afternoon and you're ready to slow down the pace. Another hectic week trying to keep your job, trying to keep your employees on the payroll and the cash flow positive. Checking into the latest financial news you see yet another scandal has hit. Another case of excessive spending, excessive pay, and outrageous perks.
You think to yourself, "Sheesh, what is it with these folks! I'm scraping just to get by and they're spending as if someone is hauling in wheelbarrows full of money. Why does this keep happening over and over?" The answer is actually quite simple, but first I'd like to discuss how to avoid these situations in your organization.
Behavior
Let's begin by getting a little insight into human behavior we may not realize we possess. In the 1970s Stanford Professor Philip Zimbardo and others created a mock prison environment with 21 "normal" male college students. The simulated prison was to have run for two weeks but was stopped after six days as more and more "prisoners" were becoming depressed and breaking down emotionally. The "guards" became increasingly enamored with their roles in spite of the fact that they spent only 8 hours in the role each day.
The power wielded by the guards and polarization created by the assumed power differential between prisoners and guards set in motion social dynamics one would not expect from normal college students. These heretofore normal students began verbally abusing the prisoners. Sadly, we recently witnessed a real life scenario of this very behavior when the Iraqi Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke in early 2004.
Stanley Milgram carried out an experiment at Yale University in the early 1960s in which he tested a subject's ability to obey and inflict pain on an individual simply upon command. Despite the "victim's" feigned reaction to the fake electric shocks and exhortation to stop , 26 of the 40 subjects imposed the maximum electric shock possible, beyond the level labeled "Danger: Severe Shock" and to a level simply labeled "XXX, 450 volts." Surprisingly, this experiment was repeated in the last several years with a similar result.
Once again we have a situation where a power differential existed and seemingly normal individuals behaved in a manner far beyond expectations. When the idea of this experiment was described to a group of Yale students it was uniformly felt that an insignificant minority would go all the way and inflict the greatest electric shock possible.
Here in America we like to root for underdogs and leaders. At times we idolize and put our strong, decisive leaders on a pedestal. Think of Lee Iacocca, Jack Welch, or John Chambers for a moment. Now think of Kenneth Lay and Jeff Skilling of Enron, Dennis Kozlowskis of Tyco,
and Bernie Ebbers of Worldcom. Along the trajectory of ascendancy to this pedestal, many of us worshipped these heroes of business. However, their place of honor was not permanent.
So we must ask ourselves, why do some leaders "turn bad" like mayo in the fridge, while others improve with age,
like a fine Bordeaux wine.
Rod Kramer, Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford School of Business has done considerable research in this realm. There are several aspects to the situation. First, people in leadership positions, especially high ones, feel that they are in a winner-take-all competition. To get to these positions they must be creative and perhaps at times break the "rules" to outshine their competition. This encourages an attitude that those following the rules are stodgy and boring.
As leaders advance in their career and move up the organization's ladder they gain power and perks. These trappings can easily become intoxicating and the lust for more insatiable. At some threshold individuals will cross a tipping point, becoming slaves to the longing. Like an addict on drugs, all else falls away - marriages, lifetime friendships, hobbies, and simple pleasures.
It is at this point that an intervention may become necessary. Close friends and relatives maintain a down to earth, stable, base to provide a constant perspective. These relationships are like your artificial horizon when flying at night. Flying at night can be disorienting. You cannot see the horizon and our bodies are not good at detecting subtle changes in orientation to gravity. Many a plane has gone down when pilots were lax at checking and maintaining a stable orientation or experienced a failure in these instruments. And so have many organizational leaders.
Your Job
You cannot control the life of your subordinates, but you can hold your subordinates accountable for their performance and judgment. As the studies describe above, normal everyday folks can easily fall into patterns of abuse and lack of good judgment. These people are not evil, they've simply fallen down, down from their stable base of humility and good moral values.
Let's take a further look at some of the lessons from these studies. First off, don't put people in a position and then fail to hold them accountable. We saw what happened in Dr. Zimbardo's experiment and at the Abu Ghraib prison when individuals are given power and authority and left unsupervised.
Let's face it, we all want to trust people as well as be trusted, but unfortunately when left unattended, our human moral compass can easily become skewed, depending on the circumstances. As a leader you should put controls in place for your benefit as well as your subordinate's. Maintain this accountability from a distance so that you do not get sucked into the everyday drama.
Secondly, beware of small lapses in judgment. It is easy for us to minimize or overlook a high performing employee's judgment or behavior since we value him or her so greatly. However, keep in mind that old saying, where there's smoke there's fire.
And so why do individuals continue to make these mistakes? It's because we human beings have a drive to survive and thrive. After all, hunting and gathering is in our DNA and at our core we will drive to collect as much as we can.


Joel DiGirolamo heads the firm Turbocharged Leadership (www.turbochargedleadership.com), and has a BSEE, MBA, and an MS Psychology degree. You can contact Joel at joel@jdigirolamo.com.