The American View: How Leadership's Knee-Jerk Reactions Wreck Workplace Culture

From a corporate leadership perspective, the issue has been sorted. Work will continue and there won’t be any more huge medical payouts for this specific danger. Mission accomplished! Except … none of the six-figure demi-gods who negotiated the solution thought through how their order would be received and what chaos it might cause. For example:

The local union demands that the organisation provide the snowshoes as company safety equipment since it’s unreasonable to pass along the cost of procuring such uncommon items to the employees. They threaten to take the organisation to court over the issue. 

• The Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Virgin Island, Guam, and American Samoa offices all complain that their workers can’t purchase snowshoes without importing them from the mainland. They’ll need a budget increase to pay for priority overseas air freight.
• The Alaskan office demands a waiver since all their workers already own perfectly functional cold weather clothing that does better on ice than snowshoes because they live in freaking Alaska. 
• Most of the offices in the Deep South demand formal training on the donning, wear, and removal of snowshoes because no one in their offices has any idea what in the hell these things are. They “can’t use them safely until they’ve received extensive training. Perhaps an off-site session in Vail would do the trick?
• Health & Safety, meanwhile, gripes that wearing snowshoes in the cubicle farm will lead to a massive increase in tripping incidents, each requiring its own medial payouts to injured victims.
• Facilities demands a stay on implementation until all company lavatories can be reengineered to accommodate people wearing snowshoes. That, or the janitorial staff will need to be doubled and offered hazard pay.
• The Fire Marshal orders the policy revoked immediately because workers wearing snowshoes can’t escape a burning building via the stairwells. One fire drill puts 95% of participants in hospital.
• The rank-and-file workers are, of course, livid. They recognize the knee-jerk policy for what it is and refuse to comply. Sure, there may be offices where local supervisors compel compliance, but soon enough key leaders will have publicly refused to comply that opening violating the “mandatory” policy becomes normalized.
• To make a bad situation worse, this inescapable example of bad policy crafting convinces the lion’s share of the organisation’s workers that it’s okay to ignore any policy that you think is stupid. Compliance becomes a matter of convenience, not an effective set of mitigating controls, which puts the CSO and CIO in berserker mode.
• After a year of trauma, outrage, worker defections, and merciless mockery from the industry press, a new CEO rescinds the snowshoes order … but the damage is done. Literally in the case of everyone who played avalanche in the stairwells. 

As I said, this is a deliberately silly example. The thing is you can probably remember a SNAFU like this happening someplace you’ve worked. Spastic reactions to complicated problems tend to cause far more harm than they address. The resulting loss of trust in leadership and the weaking of the organisational culture can take years to repair. As I said at the beginning, it’s social and cultural self-destruction that could have been avoided if only people had thought through the downstream consequences of their proposed “solution(s).” Yet no one did … or maybe someone did and was silenced. Either way, the outcomes were embarrassingly inept. 

I’m not suggesting that the best way to respond to a crisis is to do nothing and to allow it to happen again. Rather, I suggest that policy crafting is an art that requires a light touch and delegation of authority to address unique situations. Risk management is a tricky business. Balancing operational need and preventative measures is always a difficult trade-off. Still, there are rules I live by that help achieve the best practical outcomes:

1. Limit your hard requirements to only the most inflexible issues and require that all exceptions are signed off by the policy owner. For example, an organisation-wide ban on possessing firearms inside company facilities by anyone other than licensed law enforcement officers is a sound and appropriate physical security control. If and when there are legitimate company needs – like a private security contract or a company shooting team – a reasonable exception can be documented and communicated to prevent misunderstandings.
2. Never publish a “requirement” that you’re not 100% committed to enforcing. Set your requirements at the lowest level possible, then allow specific sites or groups to increase their implementation of standards to address unique needs. For example, requiring all sales weasels to wear three-piece suits makes sense; requiring janitorial staff to wear suits is actively counterproductive. Therefore, set the basic dress standard to polos and jeans, but post a sales department standard that requires when interacting with customers.
3. Troubleshoot the likely arguments against your requirements and address them before implementation. Communicate your intent to all affected personnel before implementing the changes and be prepared to tweak your solution as theory gets T-boned by reality. For example, tell people why “appropriate footwear” is required when couriering content between buildings during ice storms, but allow local management to adapt the implementation to their site’s peculiar characteristics.
4. Never attempt to mandate with policy that which can be handily sorted by competent line leadership. Train and empower your line leaders to maintain good order and discipline … and drop-kick them into the sun if they fail to do so. Explain the intent and give local leaders manoeuvre room to accomplish the mission.

That’s my take. I realize that my position won’t go over well with people who are only capable of seeing the world in binary terms (e.g., lawyers, auditors, et al). Still, the world is complicated. Ignore that at your peril. Leadership, safety, and security all require good judgment and local tweaking to be effective.  

On a personal note, I’m bloody sick of watching people suffer from ill-advised or outright insensible policies foisted on them by far-off corner office types who have zero understanding of the effects their policies have on operations, morale, discipline, and worker trust. I hear story after story of workers left paralyzed and frustrated by random rule changes that make it impossible to accomplish their tasks. What’s the point of coming to work if no one can accomplish anything meaningful?