Not exactly on topic for a compensation blog, but this excerpt I came across recently struck a chord for me and I wanted to share it here. It is taken from Joseph Badaracco, Jr.'s article We Don't Need Another Hero (link goes to article abstract) in the September 2001 Harvard Business Review on recognizing and having the courage to embrace our "deeper responsibilities":
Most of us don't associate bending the rules with moral leadership. But following the rules can be a moral cop-out. If a friend asks you if you like her new shoes, and you think they look ridiculous, you don't tell the truth. And when the Gestapo demanded to know who was hiding Jews, some people lied. Between the trivial and the tragic are many everyday situations in which responsible people work hard to find ways to maneuver within the boundaries set by the rules. Instead of acting like moral bookkeepers, they bend the rules and own up to their deeper responsibilities.
Search internshipson College Recruiter.
Truth telling is always a great theme.
I recently read Sisela Bok's excellent book "Lying." It makes a lot of wonderful points, but my own take-away from it is not the line between the trivial and the tragic, but where the line is drawn between "acceptable" lying and not.
Bok goes through a gazilion forms of and reasons for telling a lie. To my mind, over and over, the conclusion is that you can't absolutely rule out cases where it's appropriate to lie; but that those cases are so rare and so hypothetical as to be virtually irrelevant.
Draw a line from 1 to 10, with 10 being absolute rigorous pristine all the truth and nothing but the truth, and 1 being the worst lying car salesman you ever met. We all like to talk about the boundary between 9 and 10; but we live in something like 4 to 6 territory.
Some other distinctions I've always found useful:
-lies of comission and lies of omission; we tend to do tons of the latter as justification for not doing the former--but in the eye of the one lied to, there's very little difference.
-the whole truth vs. nothing but the truth--flat out lying vs. allowing people to draw certain conclusions. Again, from the point of view of the recipient, it's often a distinction without a difference.
***************
AB - Thanks, Charles - I will have to check out Sisela Bok's book. I concur with your statement that most of us live and struggle in the territory between 4 and 6. What drew me to the quote that I shared was the tendency we all have, especially in difficult situations, to position rules as black and white, as absolute, so that we can hide behind them and dodge our responsibility to deeper truths or values.
Posted by: Charlie | February 05, 2007 at 08:36 PM