Earlier I wrote about a meeting where a COO acted poorly and treated employees with little or no respect.  This COO accused current employees of inferior performance and tried to hold them accountable for circumstances that occurred many months and years before they even worked for the company. Some employees resigned, some employees continued to do their own thing, and some employees that were truly invested in making the company and the product successful worked very hard to help the company succeed. To make a long story short the COO and the new management took offense to these efforts and began a passive-aggressive campaign to remove or reject these efforts.  It was learned that by July seventy-seven (77) percent of all the employees at every level was no longer with the company. Those employees left are confused, worried that they will be fired at any time, and full of anxiety. We talked in the last installment that “When confronted with a situation like this it is very important that we try to establish where the anger is coming from. Asking questions like “is this something that I did or didn’t do”, ‘am I the target of the rage or a bystander”, “is there anything I can do to make this better immediately?” If the answer to these question is “no” then we need not take ownership and allow the COO’s problem to become our problem.”

Kathy Caprino in her article “5 Undeniable Signs It’s Time To Leave Your Job” in Forbes Magazine Feb. 14, 2017, ask, “Do you believe in the positive good of what you’re doing, and that what you’re spending your precious life energy on is indeed worth it? Or do you think that what your company is doing is actually wrong, unethical, unnecessary or even hurtful in the world?” And she goes on to say, “You can’t thrive or even succeed a tiny bit if you don’t believe in what your organization is putting out in the world, or how they’re doing it. You simply cannot succeed if you subconsciously oppose what your employer stands for in the world.” Ron Carucci, in his article “Three Hazards Of Working For A Dishonest Boss”, in Forbes, Sept 16, 2016 reminds the reader, “While we’d prefer honesty over dishonesty, we’re willing to put up with dishonesty in our leaders and political candidates because we’re not actually the ones being dishonest, and we’re willing to trade off honesty to get things done that we want done.” In the same article,  Dan Ariely, bestselling author of “The Honest Truth About Dishonesty”, and Professor at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, ‘whether you are benefiting or not, consider the longer-term consequences of colluding with a corrupt boss.   Pretending you don’t see the behavior, minimizing it as “just how things work,’ or justifying it as ‘If he doesn’t, someone else will, anyway,’ may lead to hazardous personal damage.”  What do you do when you find yourself having knowledge that the management is telling new employees and encouraging retired employees to come to work knowing that their departments were scheduled to close in the near future? What do you do when you see rules being violated?  What do you do when laws are being circumvented and policy is being created daily to fix something that should have been avoided, to begin with.  An unethical boss or management that is out of control jeopardizes the business, the product, and the employees.

It is truly unfortunate to find yourself in a situation where the management is corrupt, dishonest, abusive, and ruining your company.  But you must understand that you are an employee and it is not your company. Everyone needs to be mindful of their reputation and the integrity that has been established with every person that has been in contact with you for all your professional life.  A decision has to be made, do I stay and pray that everything works out and pray that my reputation is not associated with this company when it goes down the “tubes’, or do I make a controlled and positive change guaranteeing my reputation will not be harmed. It takes a lifetime to build a reputation and to establish integrity, it only takes a second to cause reprehensible damage to the reputation that may never be repaired.  No one can give you an answer to your particular situation, every circumstance is different, and no one solution will solve every problem. But I suggest that you gather all the facts, move slowly, and know what you want to do before you act on anything.  But most importantly you need to talk to family and friends and by all means, Pray for guidance.