The Living Ethical Culture: Trust, Truth, and Accountability

More and more, potential employers are requiring candidates take behavioral and personality assessments to determine organizational “fit.” The questionnaires are tabulated, and the information derived from them is then compared to the job requirements. Extroversion may be a desirable trait for a salesperson, for example, but perhaps not as much so for a programmer. As a business leader and the son of a behavioral psychologist, I understand the value of assessments—there is a great deal of science and research behind them. The information they provide is intended to reveal indicators about how an individual’s mind works and their potential behaviors, and they do a good job of that. 

Throughout my own career, I've taken a lot of assessments and found them to be insightful and helpful. That made me wonder whether a company can carry this information forward to provide the taker ways to self-calibrate to improve performance. While it’s easy to get caught up in the taking, scoring and results of these assessments, after they’ve been administered and hiring decisions are made, what purpose do they really serve? Are the results useful longer-term? 

While the information provided by an assessment facilitates self-awareness, I’ve found that it doesn’t provide much guidance in how to use that information for self-improvement. While I’ve seen efforts to use assessments as a management tool, it’s hardly an organic process. In an effort to find a way to close that gap, I took stock of my own working experiences, the expectations of my former employers, the performance of my various team members and my personal management methods, and distilled all that down into a simple construct: trust, truth and accountability—or TTA for short. 

These three simple words resonate for me because they embody the kernel of what, as leaders, we expect in ourselves, in our colleagues and the company for which we work. They plainly mean: We will trust each other; be truthful with our words; and be accountable for our actions. I know this may sound pedestrian, but it works. 

Let’s explore TTA in action.

TTA Explained

TTA may sound simple, but my experience shows following these principles creates an extremely powerful company culture. Part of the beauty of TTA is it establishes a simplified approach for interactions between parties. Because it’s an easily understood concept, it leaves little ambiguity about how people should behave. Plus, it’s applicable to all levels and types of team members and is easy to apply. Unlike other management tools, there is no assessment, no scale and no rating sheet—all time-consuming and overly analytical techniques that, in my experience, do little to guide day-to-day behaviors.

For me, the principles of TTA are my cardinal rules, in business and in life. (Seriously, ask my team members!) When introducing TTA to new team members or discussing it with a new organization, I’m very clear that TTA is not about perfection or being absolutely error-proof. Instead, I stress we are human and when we make mistakes (and we will), we own them. Someone who makes a mistake should not wait for it to be discovered by an individual inside the company or even worse, by a customer. Rather, that person should proactively raise their hand and say, “I made a mistake. This is what I did, this is what I’m doing about it, and I accept the consequences of my actions.” By declaring and acknowledging that an error has occurred, all parties are able to have an open, dispassionate dialogue about the event, one that does not involve blame, but solutions. 

However, for a team member to assume accountability for their actions and to be truthful about them requires a high degree of trust in the manager. As a servant leader, when a team member makes a mistake but follows TTA, I defend them and help them through the consequences. No matter how painful or how great those consequences may be—I will still stand with them. Why? I believe that humans are fallible but will do the right thing if given support. I must do my own part of TTA by honoring their trust in me, even when they make a mistake. To quote the Indian author Udai Yadla, “Failure is the greatest teacher.” I will help guide them through that learning process without them needing to fear repercussion.

However, when TTA is not practiced and an error is discovered, I step to the side to allow the team member to experience the consequences of their actions. However, let me be clear: I don’t just walk away. While I don’t defend their behavior in this case, I am still present supporting, mentoring and working with them to help them learn from their mistake and understand how following TTA would have improved—or even prevented—the situation. This, too, is a learning experience.

A New Culture

Here's what I didn't anticipate—the growth of TTA as a cultural phenomenon. 

After joining a company as an executive, I conducted introductory roundtables discussing TTA and what it means, its importance and how I utilize it as an ethical behavioral framework. Over the next several months, I talked more about TTA at various meetings and events, and the concept developed a life of its own. Much to my surprise, many team members began discussing their own and others’ "TTA scores” totally organically. This concept of “score” came up during staffing discussions, individual one-on-ones, and peer conversations. There was no numerical value associated with a person's TTA score. Instead, it was an intangible quality, a term meaning how well one’s actions met the expectations of TTA.

TTA resonated with the team, creating a companywide standard and establishing a self- and peer-calibrating culture: We will trust each other, be truthful and hold ourselves accountable for our own actions. This empowered team members to interact in a much more positive way with each other. They became more honest, open and allied. This in turn manifested in improvements in productivity and reduced error rates, and resulted in a positive and healthy culture. I was floored. Not in all the years of my soapboxing TTA had any group embraced the concept as a compass to evaluate their day-to-day performance. I was—and still am—super proud of them.  

This organic social contract didn’t require documentation, or anyone assigning a value-based ranking scale. Instead, it became self-sustaining, with its own gravity and momentum. As new members joined the team, peers, supervisors and others would speak about TTA without prompting. Independently, they explained what it stands for and how the new team member needed to embody and uphold the core tenets. This simple construct became engrained in the culture as a mutually understood and accepted way of behaving at work.

More Than an Assessment

As leaders, we know companies transform for a variety of reasons: executive turnover, revised goals and objectives, a merger or acquisition, global economic conditions, changing product or client focus, and so on. No company is exempt. In considering how to engrain TTA as a grassroots ethical principle into a company’s culture in spite of this constant change, I understood the common path would be to task Human Resources with investigating the phenomenon. They would document it, develop a formalized training program and create a structured, scored assessment, much like the personality assessments we talked about earlier. 

However, all this would defeat and deflate the organic success of TTA. Instead, I chose to allow TTA to naturally embed itself into the core values of the company. This, to me, seemed in harmony with what I’d discovered about the appeal of TTA and how, when nurtured by management, would grow itself organically without executive oversight. It would evolve right along with the organization itself.

A company’s culture is more than assessments, training classes and scores. Ideally, it is fueled by a belief in ethical operations and wanting to do the right thing. While assessments have a distinct purpose, they simply provide a snapshot in time of the test-taker and show areas of strength and potential development. TTA takes that much further. Because development comes only through experience, team members need to be supported on that journey. If they know they will be backed up by management when they try to do the right thing, take responsibility for their actions and are truthful about them, they’ll be encouraged to take that leap of faith leading to personal growth. It’s a win-win.

TTA grew spontaneously from a concept, was germinated through the belief of the team members and fertilized by the support of executive leadership—ultimately growing into a living cultural phenomenon. 

As leaders in modern business, we must all constantly ask ourselves if we are following the principles of TTA. Are we trustworthy people, upholding the values of the company and of ourselves? Are we truthful in every circumstance, even when it’s uncomfortable? Are we accountable for our actions and their consequences? If we aren’t, is it reasonable to expect our employees to be? But if we are—the vast potential of a positive, productive and living ethical culture awaits.

---

Originally posted on May 28, 2020 on LinkedIn.