How groups of people work together has always been of my keener interests. Do they get amazing things done as a team?  As a teenager working within animal rights and environmental groups, I saw how good intentions are not enough. I touched upon this in a past post, where I quoted Bill Buxton of Microsoft Research:

“A design managers product is the organization.”

Today I wanted to share a video. This 8-minute video produced by McKinsey, & Company “Voicing values in the workplace” makes  a compelling, even if simple, point:  don’t take an ethical issue and assume it’s an unlucky occurrence that’s a bit outside of normal work. Instead frame it as part of your job to deal with – a new assignment.

Professor Mary Gentile says taking the time to frame what’s happening in a way that works for you will be effective in helping you resolve the issue. This helps those unfortunates (no doubt, all of us at one time) to bypass the two typical responses- [1] suck-it-up and ignore it OR [2] fight it. Neither of those stances feels great. However, getting a new assignment that is part of your job, feels better, no?

It’s simple advice but I think subtle and clever. Here is the video:

Does this type of tip matter? Absolutely.  Bad bosses will hurt a company. Here’s a recent example. According to PaidContent.org, Skype let go of a newly hired top executive after one month. Skype had second thoughts about this exectutive after he was attacked in comments left on a Techcrunch article announcing Skype had hired him away from Yahoo! I read over the comments. The commentators are relentless, and if they’re comments are generally true, I’m left wondering how all these Yahoo! employees individually handled their problems over the many years?

I agree with Professor Gentle’s point of view that resolving ethical issues as you come across them is an important part of your job and if they are not resolved, the performance of the company can suffer. The Techcrunch comments are worth reading.