Business Insight Zone

Kitty Genovese, you’ll recall, was the victim in a dark episode in modern urban history: she was stalked and murdered in Queens, New York in 1964 — not in silence or seclusion, but in the full hearing of her neighbors, all of whom assumed that someone else would do something about what they were all hearing. Horrified reactions to her death prompted not just intense media coverage, but a wave of research into what we now call the “bystander effect.”

Usually I try not to think about gruesome things like Genovese’s untimely end, and I would never make a straight-up comparison between the frustrations we face in the workplace and the murder of an innocent woman. But I was reminded of Genovese and the bystander effect by a short, powerful item by Francois Gossieaux that I came across this morning.¹

The Conspiracy Of Silence – how silence fails — and sometimes kills.

Before turning to the business applications of his thoughts, Gossieaux talks about how this “conspiracy of silence” — the thought that I’m not going to speak up because no one else has — genuinely can kill, for example when hospital staffers do not speak up about problems they see.² He summarizes thus:

Most of us have been in organizations where it is politically unacceptable to speak openly about what is going wrong – only to see projects fail because of weak sponsorship, unreasonable constraints, unmotivated team members, or plain old politics. It is sort of ironic that while not speaking up will eventually kill the organization in which you work and thus your current job prospect – it is job preservation that drives this behavior.

Note Gossieaux’s accurate language: “politically unacceptable.” Not “technically incorrect.” Not “against explicit policy.” Not “actively discouraged by management.” But “politically unacceptable.” In theory, organizations should be run for maximum efficiency and productivity; in theory, professional businesspeople should act like grown-ups who are open to honest critiques of their actions, policies, or performance.

But that’s only in theory. In real life, people are people, and mostly they (read: we) don’t want to be criticized. Too often they (we) overinterpret criticisms as personal slights or underhanded attacks. Or, worse, we don’t encounter the need to interpret criticisms at all . . . because they’re never offered in the first place. Like Kitty Genovese’s neighbors, we sit around hoping that someone else will raise the alarm. And then after the fact we all talk about what a shame it is that no one did anything, and that poor girl . . .

Listen, unless you’re doing something like running an emergency room, business is not a case of life or death. It is, though, a matter of livelihoods and, more broadly, of human fulfillment — and therefore it’s worth doing well.³

Don’t be a bystander. Don’t be one of those who will be left thinking, “Maybe I could have done something . . .” The regrets aren’t worth it.

Refuse to join the conspiracy of silence.

~

1. As if in confirmation of my prior post, this link came to me through friends on Twitter.

2. This tendency has been countered in hospitals by the use of checklists as promoted by Dr. Peter Pronovost, which we discussed here and here.

3. If you think it’s not worth doing well, you need different work.

(Photo by victoriapeckham.)

Category: The language of business, The working life