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A NOTE ABOUT THE STORIES
Every story in this book is based on interviews I conducted or experiences I’ve had. To protect confidentiality, however, I have sometimes changed identifying characteristics of the people involved, such as their names, where they live, and what they do.
When I was a medical school professor, one of my mentors used to advise, when writing a case study about patient care, “Write it in such a way that the people it’s about won’t recognize themselves.” It’s a good rule, and I’ve followed it here when necessary to honor a subject’s wish to be anonymous.
You’ll know I’ve applied this rule when the story you’re reading introduces someone only by a first name. That isn’t the person’s real name. In some stories, subjects allowed me to use their names but asked me to mask the identity of other people, which I’ve done.
TEN CRUCIAL QUALITIES OF HIGH-CHARACTER EMPLOYEES
So shines a good deed in a weary world.
—Willy Wonka to Charlie, after the boy makes a difficult but honest choice, in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (originally from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice)
After the closure of the furniture factory where she had been working for twenty years, Brenda Harry found a minimum-wage job at the Goodwill Store and Donation Center in Pearisburg, Virginia (population 2,786). Her job was to process clothes and other items that people deposited in collection boxes around town. She made sure that they were in good condition and that the donors hadn’t left anything in the clothing. Most of the time the pockets were empty, but one day in January 2014, she discovered four envelopes inside a suit jacket.
Those envelopes contained $3,100 in cash. This was more than she made in two months of full-time work at Goodwill. If she had pocketed it, no one would have known. But Brenda Harry immediately turned the money over to her supervisor.
When Deb Saunders, chief compliance officer for Goodwill of the Valleys, told me this story, I wanted to know why Brenda didn’t keep the money for herself. So I called Brenda and asked her. “I was raised to be honest,” she told me. It was that simple. “It doesn’t matter if you need the money. It’s not yours. So you turn it in. My parents told me that if you’re honest, you will get your reward at the end of time. If you’re not honest, you will pay for it on Judgment Day.”
It’s hard to know how many people would do what Brenda did, because the sort of people who would keep the money might not report doing so. It doesn’t even matter, really. What does matter is that smart employers hire people like Brenda Harry, because they can trust her.
All of the ten qualities we’ll examine in this book are hallmarks of high-character employees, but honesty is the most important one. No matter how knowledgeable or skilled a person may be, if he or she is fundamentally dishonest or doesn’t value honesty, that person is detrimental and possibly even dangerous.
What isn’t immediately obvious is how honest employees benefit the organization. In some cases, a business can quantify a benefit; the Goodwill store in Pearisburg had $3,100 added to its monthly revenue when no one claimed the money that Brenda turned in. But there are other ways that honest employees are a boon to a business, as we’ll see.
What Is Honesty?
Honesty is above all a feeling, a disposition, an orientation toward the truth. Honest employees cannot tolerate lying, fudging data, misrepresenting themselves or their companies, or other conduct that displays contempt for the truth. Falsehood in all its forms is a poison to an honest person.
Refusing to Fudge Data
Well before she became senior vice president for strategy and business development at Xerox, Cari Dorman worked as an electrical engineer for a company that had been awarded a contract with the U.S. Navy. Her role was to develop a software program that would measure the likelihood that a transmitted electronic message had reached its intended target. Cari’s boss — I’ll call him Saul — asked her to change some data in her research because the results were not what Saul wanted or hoped they would be. Cari did not want to because of the potential implications and did not make the changes.
“I knew that standing up to Saul might get me fired,” Cari told me. “But I asked myself, ‘What if my son were in the navy during a war, and he was relying on my software program for knowing whether a message he sent got through or not?’” With lives on the line, Cari was willing to risk her job for the sake of doing honest research. Her passion for the telling truth and her courage to be true to herself makes her one of the Good Ones.
For reasons Cari doesn’t know, Saul eventually was asked to take a cut in pay, and he left the company.
Standing Up to a Dishonest Vendor
Honest employees are truthful employees. Ken Meyer, vice president of human resources at Community Health Services in New York City, told me how an employee’s passion for the truth potentially saved lives, certainly vanquished a cheater, and changed the way Ken runs employee orientation sessions.
Marvin was the new director of the fire safety department at a large company where Ken used to work. When he was going through the contracts from various vendors, Marvin noticed that the one who supplied the company’s many fire extinguishers had never inspected them. Marvin called the vendor, Bill, to find out what was going on.
“You’re supposed to inspect them,” Bill said.
“Um, no I’m not. That’s your job,” Marvin replied.
Bill then explained how previous fire safety directors had handled the issue. “All you have to do, Marvin, is go through the building, take a look at the extinguishers, and make a note on where you checked the extinguisher,” Bill said. “Then count how many you inspected, let me know how many there are, and I’ll send you a check.”
“Wait a minute,” Marvin said. “You’re telling me that after I inspect our fire extinguishers, you’ll send a check to me, not to my company?”
“That’s right,” Bill stated, presumably expecting Marvin to exclaim, “Sign me up!” But that’s not how Marvin responded.
Instead he said, “All right, I can’t attest to what happened before me, but immediately two things have to happen. Number one, you have to send people to inspect these fire extinguishers. Number two, if you ever suggest anything dishonest like that to me again, I am going to drop you like a bad habit and you’ll never get work here again.”
Imagine an employee lighting a small candle on a birthday cupcake intended for a coworker. The employee blows out the match and tosses it into a wastepaper basket that’s half full. As he leaves his desk to deliver the treat to his coworker, that match, which is still smoldering, rapidly ignites the contents of the trash can.
This is the kind of problem that fire extinguishers are meant to solve, but if Marvin hadn’t
