Business Insight Zone

Without question, I’m spoiled by my working environment. Hoover’s is one of those rare companies where virtually everyone is nice, to the point that crabby or Machiavellian people never last here. (There’s a reason we rate so high in “best places to work” polls.) So no doubt my perspective is skewed when I consider the tale of “Bob” in this Chris Brogan post:

Shut Up — You’re Helping the Customer!

The basic issue: “Bob” was using social media to talk to his company’s customers online. Despite enthusiastic engagement from the customers, some managers within Bob’s company didn’t like this online interaction and told him to shut it down. But Bob’s enthusiasm for engaging with customers — or else his unwisdom in disobeying direct orders — kept him from obeying.

Now Bob’s job is at risk. But should it be?

Especially because of the complex responses that Chris’s post have drawn, my Saturday-morning thoughts on this issue have grown long, so I’ll leave the rest of the post after the jump. Join me, won’t you?

Chris’s post has inspired more than sixty comments, including two mini-essays from me (here and here). Many of these comments (including my original short take) have made broad assumptions about either (a) how right Bob was to fight the benighted powers-that-be at his company, or (b) how right the powers-that-be were to shut down a rogue player like Bob.

Partly we in the audience are hamstrung by not knowing all the details of the story. As I said in one of my comments,

. . . we don’t know whether [Bob]’s a model employee or a steady source of problems for his managers, whether the organization is generally functional or dysfunctional, whether Bob handled these situations with high or low emotional intelligence, et cetera. In particular, we DON’T know whether there are liability or regulatory issues attached to his communications . . .

My last couple of comments have drawn smart rejoinders from Chip Griffin, who holds the view — expressed in a post of his own — that employees should “follow legitimate orders or resign.”

Well, there’s the rub, isn’t it? Is an order legitimate simply because it comes from a superior? Lucretia Pruitt, another commenter on Chris’s post, brought up an excellent analogy when she wrote

Even in the armed forces, when an order is irrational it is a soldier’s duty to question it.

That’s why I put the picture of Marines at the top of this post. Marine officers have an explicit duty to question orders from above that they believe to be illegal or mistaken.

Now, Chip agrees with Lucretia and me that Bob has a right (or a duty?) to question irrational orders. But in Chip’s post about this, the emphasis is on the damage caused by “loose cannons” like Bob:

You Can’t Ignore Your Boss: Loose Cannons Threaten Corporate Social Media Adoption

Let me hasten to say that Chip’s a smart person who’s clearly thought about these issues a lot, and that the view he expresses is sensible. But it’s also slanted all in one direction. Although he agrees that we don’t have all the details we’d need to pass a dispositive verdict on Bob’s behavior, he latches onto one statement more than I think he should:

“My boss at this point told me to stop what I was doing and to not further engage with them anymore,” Bob told Chris. That seems pretty cut and dried, right? Not to Bob, apparently. Since he disagreed with his manager’s instruction, he chose to simply disregard it.

It worth pausing, at this moment, to consider how many layers of recollection, hearsay, and extrapolation we’re dealing with. I’m also acutely aware that I’m blogging about a blog post about comments to another blog post about an anonymized e-mail exchange about recollections of oral conversations . . . The recursive nature of all this may be dizzying, but I think the underlying business issue is worth it. So let’s look again at what Bob originally said:

“My boss at this point told me to stop what I was doing and to not further engage with them anymore.”

That could be as cut-and-dried as Chip suggests — or maybe not. If your experience is anything like mine, you know that there’s many a slip twixt cup and lip when it comes to communication. Maybe Bob’s boss said something like this:

“Bob, if you go on that forum even once more, your job will be on the line. I mean, I don’t want you logging into it again — not on your own time, not ever.”

In which case it would take childlike naivete on Bob’s part — or else a subconscious wish to be fired — to log back in. But what if Bob’s boss said something like this?

“Bob, listen — you’ve gotta cut this out because you’re ruffling too many feathers. I mean, okay, if a customer asks you a direct question you can answer as part of your regular duties, go ahead and answer it. But you can’t be spending all this time engaging in these forums, got it?”

If the boss said that, there’s wiggle room for interpretation — especially when we consider the two men’s different perspectives and the potential influence of different learning, thinking, and communication styles. (Pretend we have time for a mini-seminar on MBTI and multiple-intelligences theory here.) For instance, Bob might legitimately walk away from this conversation feeling chastened, but believing that he is empowered to “speak when spoken to” in social-media settings so as not to leave customers hanging.

Mind you, my fictional stabs at what the boss might have said are just cartoon versions from opposite ends of a spectrum of choices, but either of them — or many different phrasings in-between — could have resulted in the statement that Bob made about what his boss told him.

More to the point in dealing with Chip’s rebuttal is this: just because something sounds cut-and-dried at third hand doesn’t mean that it is. Yet Chip hews to the cut-and-dried view throughout his piece, and although he raises vital and correct points about the risks that Bob’s actions might create for the company, he consistently casts Bob in an unfavorable light with phrases like these:

• “Bob chose to willfully and flagrantly disregard his employer’s instruction.”
• “. . . apparently Bob is the sole arbiter of what is valid . . .”
• “Loose cannons get companies into trouble . . .”

Let me hasten to add, again, that Chip might be right about all of these things. He might. But I don’t agree that we have enough evidence to go on to conclude with certainty that Bob is a loose cannon, or that Bob believes he’s the sole arbiter of anything.

To put it another way, we don’t know that Bob chose to flagrantly ignore or wilfully disregard anything. While it seems clear that Bob could’ve advocated his positions in better ways, he may have felt whipsawed by the competing duties of obeying orders and fielding legitimate (but social-media-conveyed) requests from customers. Again, we’re speculating at third hand here, but from where I sit there’s no necessary reason the speculations have to question Bob’s best intentions.

As I said in one of my comments on Chris’s original post,

Maybe I’m just feeling my oats today, or maybe I’m drawing too heavily on many years spent at a progressive company where impasses like this are virtually inconceivable, but I’m having a hard time getting behind the idea that someone passionately devoted to the best interests of the company should submit to the ignorance or timidity of middle-management.

So, I admit my own bias — not in the direction of the “Social Media Kool Aid” that Chip (rightly) derides, but in the direction of employees having a duty to do what’s best for the company, rather than a duty to appease their individual managers.

One more thing worth thinking about comes in the closing lines of Chip’s article:

Employees do not have the right to ignore corporate policies they disagree with. It’s fine to disagree, make your case, or ask for an explanation. But the choice is clear: follow legitimate orders or resign. [Emphasis in original.]

I don’t believe Chip’s statement is true — or, at least, it’s not universally true. I believe there are times when the better course of action is to force the issue to a head, that is, to force the company come to the point of firing you.

The outcome might be the same — and if you’re gonna fight authority, you should keep in mind that authority usually wins. But the process of forcing the issue could allow Bob to raise the question of what his company’s “legitimate” interests are in terms of social media. That might bring beneficial change to the company, rather than costing the company both a passionate (if blundering) employee like Bob and the opportunity to learn and grow as an organization.

But I invite your feedback. In fact, if the issue intrigues you, I hope you’ll read Chris’s post and Chip’s article, then tell me whether what I’ve said here makes sense.

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Photo by surfingsanders.