What Standards Are You Teaching?

Every one of our actions sends a message to the people around us about what our values are, what our standards are, what we'll tolerate, and what we consider unacceptable. What we allow, we teach.

Rob Lebow

Recently two senior managers told me similar stories. Each senior manager summarily dismissed an employee for unacceptable behavior. In one case, the employee sent pornographic emails to their co-workers using the company email system. In the other case, an employee displayed a sex toy on their desk where coworkers and clients would be certain to see it.

I asked these senior managers the same questions: “Do you have a formal statement of organizational values? Do you have a code of conduct that describes what behavior is expected from all employees?” I received the same answers from both managers: “No, no. They should just know.”

My follow-up question to both managers was: “Have you observed less serious behavioral problems of this nature in the past?” Their responses (which you’ve probably guessed by now) were: “Well, yes. But they weren’t so bad that I needed to take action.”

I am seeing this situation more and more. Top management doesn’t feel the need to clearly state their corporate values and standards of behavior. After all, “people should know.” But many employees don’t know.

Leaders communicate their values and behavioral expectations in three ways: 1) what they tell others, 2) how they behave themselves, and 3) and how they react to the behavior of others.

In both situations above, the leaders had not communicated using the first approach - telling others how to behave. And the leaders were so busy and inaccessible that the second approach was not being used either, employees could not observe directly how leaders behaved themselves. So employees relied solely on approach three, seeing how leaders reacted to the behavior of employees.

Unfortunately, most managers’ first reaction to bad behavior is to ignore it and hope it goes away. As Rob Lebow pointed out, any behavior that is tolerated will be repeated.

For example, if one employee is allowed to show up for work fifteen minutes late, other employees quickly learn that fifteen minutes late is OK. Sooner or later, someone will show up thirty minutes late. And if showing up thirty minutes late is tolerated, everyone learns that it's acceptable. The tardiness will get worse until a manager steps in and takes action.

I’ve started asking my coaching clients several questions: What behavior are you tolerating? What behavior are you modeling? What standards are you teaching?