What’s at the heart of many of today’s scandals? Legal and even innocent behavior that creates a toxic culture.
Take the recent GSA scandal for example. As quoted today in Forbes:
David Gebler, a whistleblowing expert, lawyer, and author of The 3 Power Values: How Commitment, Integrity, and Transparency Clear the Roadblocks to Performance, says good intentions can lead to bad outcomes in business, and the GSA scandal provides an apt example of this.
“With all the rampant spending at the GSA, one has to ask if employees were afraid to speak up, lest they upset their coworkers,” he said. “Or perhaps they had become complacent in an upbeat, backslapping culture that rewarded everyone early, often, and extravagantly. Time will tell. In the case of the GSA, the good intention of employees—being a team player—led to a very bad result. But it’s poor leadership that created that toxic culture and allowed it to drag good employees down.”
David Gebler is the President of Skout Group, LLC and the author of The 3 Power Values: How Commitment, Integrity and Transparency Clear the Roadblocks to Performance (2012 Wiley)
Carter McNamara of Authenticity Consulting, LLC, provides organizational development, consultant training and Action Learning services, and is developer of the Free Management Library.