un hommage
Hypocrisy is a response to a world in which values, ideas, or people are in conflict—a way in which individuals and organizations handle such conflicts. It is a way of trying to satisfy some demands by talk or decisions and others by action.
…Another issue to explore is under what circumstances hypocrisy is unstable and when it is stable… Hypocrisy often involves talk and decisions about the future, promises that actions in the future shall reflect interests that are not satisfied by today's actions. What happens when the future becomes the present? (Nils Brunsson, Hypocrisy, International Encyclopedia of Organization Studies)
If hypocrisy is the gap between what we say and what we do then we are all hypocrites. What kind of freak exactly aligns their words with their actions? The question is not whether we are hypocrites but how we are hypocrites. Are we dishonest (judgmental version) or inconsistent (forgiving version) merely about small matters or consequential ones?
And if we as individuals are hypocritical then it should be even less surprising that organizations behave in a hypocritical manner. It is more shocking that aggregations of individuals with competing interests achieve any kind of alignment and consistency at all.
However their leaders claim that they are a common culture with a common set of values. These values typically include statements about “innovation”, “integrity”, “customer-centricity”, and “collaboration”. Are these statements accurate? Researchers analysed corporate value statements of 500 companies and compared them to comments made on Glassdoor about those companies.
The analysis reveals that there is no correlation between the cultural values a company emphasizes in its published statements and how well the company lives up to those values in the eyes of employees. (Sull, Turconi & Sull)
This is reminiscent of the joke in consulting that if you want to know what an organization is bad at then you look at their values statements. As these statements are “aspirational” – or, to use the vernacular, untrue. They embody what the senior executives of an organization want that organization to be rather than what it actually is.
L’hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend à la vertu.
Nos vertus ne sont, le plus souvent, que des vices déguisés. (François de La Rochefoucauld)
What is the harm in this? From my experience, the harm is in the conversations they prevent organisational participants from having. While one of our stated values may be “integrity”, how do we discuss the actual value of “ruthlessness” that is valued in the tangible currency of promotions and career advancement rather than the cheaper currency of press releases.
Don't tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value. (Joe Biden)
If we cannot talk honestly about what we value, if we disavow who were really are, then we cannot hope to become something else. “Fake it til you make it” cannot beat “Don’t get high on your own supply”. And no one will believe us any way. Employees do not believe what executives say because executives say all kinds of things. They watch their actions and believe those. They wish to be paid in the hard cash of acts not in cryptic corporate cant crypto.
If you cannot have an honest conversation about values then you cannot have an honest conversation about ethical choices – because ethics is dependent on values. And if you cannot acknowledge what your values really are, if your claimed values are not really your own, then your ethics will always be the ethics of some imaginary self who is not you. All you have to offer is a dramatic performance.
Theatre cannot go for ever. At some point, the play ends, the curtain falls and you are left alone with yourself. At that point, a sane person would stop acting. What do you do?