In the name of the Father, Son & of the Almighty Boss?

Welcome To TishTrek - THE JOB BLOG...

This is a true story that speaks to the 'power of genuflection' in the workplace that transformed my thinking in 1991 on why 'leader behaviors' on any team and inside any company need to be assessed and monitored as closely as we monitor the skills, competencies, experiences, credentials and background of the leaders we hire.

All new hires in management positions are accountable for achieving results & revenue goals, but they have an equal responsibility to manage the human resources (the employees) assigned to them in a way that protects and honors the values, ethics, tone, tenor and brand of your company. Respecting the integrity employees have built their lives and reputations on is also a 'critical reponsibility' when managing people who are engaged in delivering solutions that support the mission and goals of your company.

Some watched in horror, but said nothing... as a senior sales executive harrassed, badgered and bullied a male employee for a long time to get him to compromise his core values, military training and integrity to close one $10 million deal with a prestigious client in the Financial Services Industry.

The employee - a West Point Graduate - died in the intensive care unit @ Cooper University Medical Center in Camden, New Jersey so he's not here to know how this story ended... or how many times employees in other corporations, organizations, institutions would be forced to genuflect at the office doors of morally bankrupt leaders for the two decades that would follow his death, (Think Enron, Wa-Mu, Worldcom, Insider Trading, Countrywide, AIGFP, Tyco, Subprime & CDO Madness, Anderson Consulting, Smoke & Mirrors, etc...).

One morning at 3:45 a.m., a Human Resources Director in the Tri-State area received a call at her home that changed her life and tragically changed the lives of many. The New Jersey State Police, a corporate security official and a senior technology executive from her company were on the phone. An employee had been in a horrific car crash and his status was very serious - that was all they could share on this terrible call.

Corporate Security requested permission to break down the door to the file room in the Human Resources department to access emergency contact information which - at the time - was housed in the crash victim's personnel file in her office.

As her two year old daughter slept peacefully down the hall, she gave them permission as she fought back tears while sitting on the floor at the foot of her bed stunned and sick to her stomach. Her husband held her hand as she silently waited for the next instruction.

The employee - fighting for his life - had started his day at a local gym off Exit 4 of the NJ Turnpike at 5:00 a.m., he then executed a 140 mile round-trip commute to attend a technical client engagement @ the World Financial Center in NYC. After work, he went to an Eagles football game with a honorable company official.

He left the game in Philly and caught up with a few additional friends and acquaintances at an evening gathering post; then stopped during the wee hours of the next morning at a famous South Jersey diner where everyone knew his name.

Beyond his radiant smile and great skills, this employee was "that guy" - that shining bright light who lit up a room, an office, a meeting, a conference call and even the local diner when he walked through the door.

It was fortunate that his employee ID badge led the authorities investigating the accident to his place of employment because no one was at his home when his car left the road. His wonderful wife (his high school sweetheart...) was visiting her parents out-of-state with their precious five year old daughter and new infant son. They needed to be found immediately.

When the State Police returned to the phone, they instructed the HR Director to call the people listed on the crash victim's Emergency Contact Card so they could get a family member to the hospital as soon as possible.

When the Director hung up, she called the first number on the list and got word to friends' of the victim (a husband & wife...) who sobbed quietly as they rushed off the phone to deliver the devastating news to his wife.

When the employee left the diner, his car left the roadway & hit a tree during a light rain storm. On impact he was ejected from the car through a window and thrown quite a distance from the vehicle into a wooded area. By all accounts, he was not wearing a seat belt.

As the employee fought to recover from his accident, the HR Director met his wife several times to work through benefit & insurance questions and disability & pay issues. They'd hug at the end of each meeting and she knew the positive energy and prayers of an entire corporate community were with her husband and their family.

The sheer strength of this young man helped him survive in a coma with critical internal injuries & significant trauma to the head for a number of weeks but then his beating heart stopped - this 37 year old intelligent, handsome, athletic, funny, and vibrant young man who was a popular and respected employee was gone.

The Executive Management Team and the HR Director sent out a communication to let employees know he had lost his battle to survive and to announce that the Employee Assistance Program was offering counseling for all who needed to work this through. The news was not unexpected, but hard just the same... Hundreds of people were grief stricken for his wife, their five year old daughter, new born son, but especially for him.

Bus loads of employees and clients attended the services held in upstate NY; those closest to him never really recovered; his aging parents (in their 80's at the time...) would suffer with broken hearts in their final chapters; and knowing that his children had to grow up without their dad left countless people & employees devastated for a long time.

The day of the funeral, the HR Director who had arranged the transportation actually couldn't get on the bus... She stood gazing across some parking lot near Gaither Drive in Mt. Laurel, NJ completely numb and frozen. Few people knew the depth of the employee relations issues this employee unnecessarily suffered in the months before this tragedy; so all she could do was put on a pair of sneakers and jog non-stop for 5 hours until she collapsed grasping the fence surrounding a local recreation center in her hometown of Pt. Pleasant, NJ.

This professional working mom - just some HR Director trying to do her job - sobbed uncontrollably as her fingers grasped the chain-link fence as if she were grabbing her employee by the collar in a final and dramatic effort to save him and to say she was sorry that others had not helped him sooner and that actions inside of one of America's great market leaders had produced such searing pain for him during his journey in their company.

The Director sat alone at the rec center until her husband pulled their car up on the side of the road. He stepped out; said nothing... put his arms around her; and took her home. The job of a Human Resources generalist or director never ends if you were raised to care about people...

The collision of anger and sadness and grief and helplessness was something she could not define. When she added up all the facts to-date, it started to feel like someone had actually killed her struggling employee before that crash.

But thanks to her own mom's advice, she went "placidly amid the noise and haste and remembered what peace there can be in silence" out of respect for all the people so painfully impacted by the loss of this special person in their corporate community.

Months earlier the victim of this car crash told his Director of HR and several other people in his corporate circle that he had been the victim of 'that man' - the senior sales executive who had harassed and bullied him for almost a year. He was pressured weekly and literally offered rewards (some financial...) to compromise his integrity by breaking into the locked computer workstation vendor demo area at a prestigious client site in Florida. The director wasn't really surprised because she was acutely aware of the leader this young man was talking about.

The employee told her that he was afraid and he claimed that it was what he didn't know that kept him from coming to anyone internally for help for more than 9 months. He stated unequivocally that the "pressure was frantically consistent and that the demands always came from the boss he directly reported to who talked incessantly about the importance of the commissions tied to this deal because it would aid his personal struggle of keeping up with rising costs at Syracuse University."

Two years later, as the former HR Director rejoiced over the birth of her second child, she would read in the press that additional leaders inside her former company had helped orchestrate this approach to business. Her recollection and one-on-one conversation with the young man who died led her to believe that he had 'limited' to no knowledge as to how high up in the management-chain these requests were coming from and that he had no clue how many others were involved. Two years earlier, that's exactly what the HR Director reported to the authorities.

He swore to her that employees at the prestigious client site did not directly pass competing vendor's trade secrets to him, but they did assist him in other ways after working hours. With their help (and he named two of them) he gained the access he needed into the confidential locked vendor demo-room several times where he leveraged his military training in information systems & intelligence to copy proprietary and fully patented technology solutions. He had lifted IBM RS/6000 tapes & disks; he copied source code - all this intellectual property that he was told to retrieve was considered trade secrets of the company's leading competitor and rival.

The senior sales executives' goal was to cheat by replicating what was stolen and then to match the competitor's great work to-date. The hope of quickly superseding the competitor's superior solutions by adding some customized features to what was duplicated would hopefully inspire the shift of this $10 million client from the targeted competitor to his team. The plan worked, but at what expense?

In what the employee described as a frenetic pace, the sales exec played on the fact that his subordinate had a new baby on-the-way and he personally authorized a one-of-a-kind (unprecedented by all corporate standards) 'funding arrangement' that amounted to a down payment so this subordinate - who he treated like a worthless minion in his pathetic & contrived business development effort - could gain 'some' financial relief during his struggle to purchase a new home for his young and growing family.

The senior sales exec kept pushing and pressuring him and in the end - he "showed him 'his' ropes" and inspired this employee (and of course there were others...) to participate in what the executive allegedly described as "No big deal. Not one person on the Street will care where we got the code, as long as it works and comes cheap! Not one person in the whole company will care where we got the code, as long as we bring them this $10 million deal!"

In 1991, after the deal closed with the prestigious client, the entire company had an awful day. Due to 'some' of the alleged illegal actions executed @ that Florida client branch and other alleged acts executed at a NJ development center, the company was raided by the Federal Authorities due to a copyright infringement suit filed in US Federal Court by the competitor who charged the firm with stealing their intellectual properties & trade secrets.

The Feds arrived at the company's New Jersey development facilities with guns drawn AND - worse yet - additional federal authorities showed up at the same exact time at 'that' revered client's Florida branch. Frightened employees were ordered off the premises; trucks were backed up to two of the office buildings to remove computers, tapes, disks, mountains of documentation, coded materials, and print pool data, while demanding private sessions with assorted employees for questioning.

Members of the Corporate Legal Department and assorted corporate executives were on their way traveling south on the NJ Turnpike to take over the management of this situation.

This in-house operation set up to copy and steal the hard work of the rival company's employees was a disgrace by every standard the 50 year old company represented. How could this happen? The answer: Easy - without leader behaviors at the forefront of an organization, brands, reputations and success are always at risk.

The evidence seized by the authorities included disks from personal computers that had been located at the development site and in the homes of some employees. Over 140 of the rival's corporate interface programs which included instances of functionally 'identical code' that had been copied and stolen one symbol at a time were also recovered. It was astonishing - all of it.

All of the events tied to this situation were utterly shocking, sickening and unnecessary. It was one of the worst weeks in the history of the entire company and for this division's employee population; many needed employee relations counseling as a result of this one bad experience inflicted on 600 innocent employees because of the actions of a small group of people who didn't have the skills and expertise to battle their corporate rivals by producing superior products and best-in-class solutions. And let's face it - to no fault of their own - many of the employees who felt like they had to 'play this game' reported to at least one leader that was myopically obsessed with securing 'his' commission for a client his team never could have closed or won without cheating.

Companies invest a lot of money in new hires, so make no mistake (and I've repeated this theme consistently in my blog) 'competitive advantage' starts with finding people who mirror the high standards, values and ethics of the companies they are accountable to.

What the deceased employee appropriately feared was that he was up against a giant systemic way of doing this business being orchestrated by corporate leaders with power over him and his family financially; and who would have run him out of the company or town had he not complied with their demands. I'm pleased to report that the company did initiate and offer employees a nationwide 1-800 Ethics Hot Line after this event, but it was too late for this employee. He was already dead at the age 37.

TishTrek - THIS BLOG - is on its second year, so it's no secret that “I'm one of those 'recruiters' and a 'voter' and a 'mom' and a 'spouse' that believes you can't be one kind of a man or woman and another kind of president, governor, IMF head, sales executive, CEO, leader, employee, parent, spouse or civic leader.”

I know this to be the truth because I've lived it inside every company I've had the privilege to work for. I know this for a fact because on earlier blog posts I've profiled talented professionals & giants (great men and women) in industry who succeeded at creating great companies, powerful organizations, and profitable growth, while always operating with business integrity.

Having said all this - some have argued aggressively that the senior sales exec could not 'force' his employee or any other person for that matter to take actions they weren't willing to execute, but I can only say that many others who worked with this particular executive directly have spent 19 years vehemently arguing otherwise... Many stand with them.

For the record and many people know this: Before his death, the employee admitted that he'd crossed lines that shocked even him; his own actions betrayed the way he was raised and the tenets he lived by. He stated, "That his unbelievable actions would disappoint his aging mother, make his dad furious, and leave his wife in tears worrying how all this nonsense would end for their family."

Over 65 IBM RS/6000 tapes & disks had been taken from the competitor which were duplicated by others working on Information Technology Teams and they were recovered in those raids by the Federal Authorities... How come someone didn't find the 'management courage' to stand up to alert upper management, the prestigious client, or the competing vendor before it was too late? What do you think the answer is?

All the technical experts and many employees who had nothing to do with any of this became suspects in this case and all of the company's products existed under a cloud of suspicion until proven otherwise. The Feds required third-party assessments on all non-RS/6000 programs, such as the DOS/Mondrian-based platforms, additional tools, technologies, and methodologies; other valuable client relationships were ruptured by this man-made mess. The actions of a few powerful leaders damaged an entire business. Sound familiar?

For many employees, there was non-material damage (i.e. "loss of pride" & "low morale") as news spread that their work as a vendor in their chosen field often seen and touted as "a progressive technology company" actually became known as satisfying customer requirements by lifting code from rivals. Who does this to fellow colleagues?

The race was on to settle with the Federal Authorities and their rival to keep the press coverage at a minimum and to ensure that the larger corporate brand would not be damaged too much as result of what had happened here... The company was in many other legitimately successful businesses.

In the end, this lapse in business integrity cost millions of dollars to settle and years of judicial intervention to figure out. Some of the cheated rivals failing lines of business were actually purchased by the defendant. Charges against the prestigious client were dropped as part of this settlement. More competitors and clients came and went... Careers were ruined. Reassigned and new corporate soldiers sold off the business when the public relations timing was right. The chapter would close for the company, but it never closed for the employee's family and others touched by this tragedy...

The press reported that the company "agreed in Federal Court not to copy competitors code going forward and to adopt "clean room" procedures for its subsequent software development." So many people reacted with outrage!

I remember thinking, it didn't dawn on a single leader inside that company to build that leader behavior into their Sales and Account Management Code-of-Conduct manual before getting into 'this' business? Was this really great news after a 2 year federal judicial process that put an entire division through hell and risked ruining the brand name of a great market leader? Did they plan on adding their newly adopted rules on software development to the deceased employee's gravestone?

I was the Director of Human Resources - the HR leader on the Executive Management Committee, the colleague, the admirer of the car crash victims' many talents - and it was my house the NJ State Police and our technical executive called @ 3:45 a.m. the morning of that dreadful accident. It is the nightmare that has never left me, but it taught me that NOTHING is more important to an organization than employees and new hires who operate with leader behaviors and who arrive with and 'live' high caliber values and ethics. I think the recent financial collapse and current recession proves this point beyond a shadow of a doubt once again.

After the federal raid on our facilities, my employee had the 'management courage' to come directly to my office in Mt. Laurel, to my home in Pt. Pleasant, NJ; and we met at diners on Rt. 70 & 73 near Philly. I cautiously escorted him to a number of internal executives who were accoutable for these types of employee relations & legal situations, but when it became clear to him that their #1 focus was to protect corporate interests & brand at all costs, these people became little comfort to this employee. Tormented and shaken by all of it, the gist of our many discussions went like this:

"Oh my God." he whispered.... "What about our new baby and little girl? How will my wife survive this? Will I go to jail? What if the giants in our company who mandated my actions blame 'only' me as their lone fall-guy? What have I done? What the hell have I done? Everyone said it wasn't a big deal." They said, "This is how our business is executed and that no one would care. It was all wrong; I should have quit or walked away, but I had so much going on. What can I do now? Please help me."

Corporate Competitive Advantage starts with hiring high caliber talent with values and ethics; and Competitive Advantage has to be sustained long-term by people who operate consistently with leader behaviors which is defined by the way people operate and act when no one is looking no matter what the goal or challenge, no matter where they are... (think about the senior sales executive in this true story, Joseph Cassano @ AIG Financial Products, Kenneth Lay & Jeffrey Skilling @ Enron, Dennis Kozlowski @ Worldcom, Former Governors Sanders, Spitzer and Schwarznegger and the voters who trusted them to put the interests of their states first, & the now infamous & former IMF Head - DSK). Millions of people relying on the integrity and success of all these leaders... but not one of them had a personal history of operating 'consistently' with the necessary 'leader behaviors' to lead by example and always with business integrity.

This colleague told me and others that stress, sleepless nights and anxiety had been keeping him up because a powerful leader in 'our' company had inspired and/or forced him to compromise the integrity he had built his life on for 36 of his 37 years; and to compromise the 'history of integrity' that helped him get accepted and succeed at one of the great military academies of our time.

As I reflect on the unbelievably sad facts of 20 years ago, I'm completing my promise by letting others know that this employee was already 'dead inside' long before his car hit that tree because he (and others...) had been forced to genuflect in the corporate office of a self-absorbed business leader who thought nothing of harming him and taking everything from him.

When the police answered the emergency call, he was unconscious. He had been up... literally awake for 22 hours straight before he would finish the day that would put him to sleep for eternity.

This cherished son, husband, and father had everything to live for, so today I'd like to honor the memory of my brave corporate friend and his widow, who I think of often, with a Special 20th Anniversary Blessing...

I will never forget the two enchanting children who had to grow up without the dad who loved them. May God Bless your "infant son" who is now a 20-year old young man and your beautiful "little princess" who turns age 26 this year.

Their faces are forever etched in the lives and hearts of many who became better people and leaders in their Dad's name.

In the name of the Father and of the Son... his name was George. - Amen.

Respectfully submitted,
TishTrek