Sometimes it’s a negative Aha! Leadership Moment that we take most to heart and it can influence our behaviour more deeply than years of positive role modelling. Janet’s story highlights the importance of knowing who we are at our core and the values that we cannot allow others to dishonour. The Coaching Lens
Janet’s Story – An Aha! Leadership Moment about Integrity and Trust
When asked about an Aha! Leadership Moment, Janet muses that the most profound one was an example of what NOT to do. Ever. Janet was working as Account Manager for XDataGen, a struggling start-up company which sold customized financial software to a wide range of businesses. XDataGen unfortunately sent their largest client a new version of their software containing a glitch, one that caused the client to make some inventory decisions that resulted in significant monetary losses.
When the client complained, XDataGen did an internal investigation, uncovering and speedily fixing the software bug. Rather than go to court, the client asked that XDataGen pay for only half of the financial loss. As Account Manager, Janet was relieved that the client would stay with them and thought the solution eminently fair. To her horror, she found that XDataGen’s entrepreneurial owner had sent a letter to the client, accepting the terms but explaining that the money would come out of the wages of the programmer who had made the mistake. The client shared the letter with Janet and when she questioned her boss on how he could do such a thing, he smirked and assured her that he had no intention of taking the money out of the employee’s pay but that it was a clever tactic to make the client absorb the entire loss.
Janet faced a dilemma. To keep her much-needed job, she would have to go along with her boss’s unethical behaviour but at the same time, how could she continue in a relationship of trust with the client if she maintained this enormous lie? Especially as the client was responding exactly as the owner intended, feeling obliged to absorb the whole loss rather than to penalize an individual to whom they believed the cost would be crushing.
Looking back, Janet reflects that she wishes she had known about coaching — a safe, confidential and non-judgmental environment to explore the problem and with insightful questions to draw out options and ramifications and then support her in a course of action. It was a difficult decision but Janet remained true to her values. She encouraged the client to stick with their original offer (without breaching confidentiality to XDataGen) and she immediately began searching for a new job — with an unshakeable determination that the management of any company she worked for in future must share her core beliefs in trust and integrity.
