It was my birthday, and Penny took me out to dinner at an upscale restaurant. We began the evening at the bar, but our table was ready before we’d finished our drinks. The hostess told us she would take our drinks to the table and have the bar tab transferred to the check. We finished our meal, the check arrived, and lo and behold, the drinks weren’t listed.
“I guess they’re a gift!” Penny said in all seriousness. I told her that didn’t seem likely, but because it was early in our relationship, and I didn’t want to start an argument, I let it slide. I wasn’t comfortable with that decision, because we were stiffing both the restaurant and the bartender, who wouldn’t be getting a tip.
Penny’s decision to get two drinks for the price of none was a red flag that turned out to be indicative of her character. Quick to anger, she criticized me frequently and often used personal attacks to make her point. She had no tolerance for criticism when she was on the receiving end. She rarely came to my defense when others treated me poorly.
Of course, she had positive qualities too, and I’m far from perfect. My flaws, however, don’t include stealing, which is what Penny’s choice in the restaurant amounted to. Since Jerry Seinfeld is right in likening a date to a job interview, employers who ignore red flags such as evidence of dishonesty do so at their peril.
The Convict and the Firing Range: Enduring Repercussions of Dishonest Acts
“Dad, will you go to the firing range with me?” Chuck Gallagher’s son asked him one day. “Why not?” he responded. Chuck’s son had recently bought a pistol and was looking forward to spending some time with his dad at target practice. But when father and son got to the gun range, they were shocked by what they encountered.
“Not only can you not touch a gun here,” said the clerk to Chuck after asking a few routine questions, “but you also can’t pay for your son to be here. In fact, you’ll have to leave.”
Chuck wasn’t expecting such a hostile encounter, but he admits he shouldn’t have been surprised. That’s because Chuck is a convicted felon, and losing the privilege to enter a firing range is one of the consequences of his conviction.
In 1986, when he was in his mid-twenties, Chuck had a successful career as a CPA, and his thorough knowledge of what was then a new employee-benefits provision of the tax law earned him an invitation to testify before the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee. But when he fell behind in his mortgage payments, he borrowed money from a client’s account to make up for the shortfall. One thing led to another, and before long, Chuck was running a Ponzi scheme. When it eventually caught up with him, he was convicted of one count of embezzlement and one count of tax evasion and sentenced to eighteen months in federal prison. He lost his wife, the trust of his business partners, and the good reputation he’d had in Morganton, North Carolina.
Chuck did a lot of soul-searching while in the penitentiary, and on his release, he vowed to turn his life around. He created the Choices Foundation, which supports ethics education for young people and awards scholarships to children whose parents are incarcerated. He now is the chief operating officer of a national company based in South Carolina and has a busy schedule as an ethics speaker. He begins his talks in an orange jumpsuit and handcuffs, which make an impression that’s hard to forget.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “there are no second acts in American lives,” but Chuck Gallagher transformed the poor choices he made in the first act of his life into an opportunity to prevent others from doing the same. Incidents like the one Chuck experienced at the firing range drive home how devastating the consequences of dishonesty can be.
“Not being admitted to a firing range didn’t mean a lot to me,” Chuck said, “but it did illustrate two important points for my son. First, it showed him that today I am willing to be honest, even though the consequences may be less than pleasant. Second, there are unintended consequences to your actions, and you cannot escape those. Both of those were good things for my son to experience so that he can remain conscious about the choices that he might make and what the consequences might be.”
One Strike and You’re Out
Many years ago I had the privilege of taking a weeklong seminar in leadership at the Gallup Institute in Lincoln, Nebraska. Donald O. Clifton was the institute’s president (you’re probably familiar with his protégés Tom Rath, author of Strengthsfinder 2.0, and Marcus Buckingham, coauthor of First, Break All the Rules), and I’ll never forget what Don said about how the organization deals with employees who have done something dishonest, like fudging data in a poll: “They’re fired. Immediately.”
“Even if it’s just a single offense?” I asked him.
“That’s right. Because people have to trust that our surveys and polls are conducted with integrity. Otherwise our product is meaningless.”
I asked Alan Murray, editor of Fortune magazine and former president of another esteemed polling organization, the Pew Research Center, if he thought Don’s policy was too harsh. He didn’t think so. “The Pew Center sees its greatest asset as the trust that people have in the information the center provides. So anything that has the potential to damage that public trust is an existential threat to the center’s work. Trustworthiness is the core of the Pew brand, and the same was true at the Wall Street Journal,” where Alan used to be managing editor.
The advertising legend Walter Landor once said that “a brand is a promise.” The logo of one of your favorite companies is more than just a cool graphic. The company is essentially saying to you, “You can continue to buy this service or product with confidence that we stand behind what we sell. And if we fail you in some way, we’ll make it right.” Dishonesty at any level of the company threatens that implied promise.
“I’m privileged to have worked for several great brands, and when you think about what makes brands powerful, it’s all about trust,” Alan Murray added. “The public has a certain understanding that what they’re getting when they see that brand is something they can count on and rely on to a higher degree than what they might find elsewhere. I see maintaining the public’s trust as my highest purpose.”
A company’s power, influence, and integrity are a direct function of the honesty of its employees.
Obstacles to Honesty
If honesty is so important and confers so many benefits, why don’t we see more examples of it? It’s because lying can be beneficial in both the short and long term.
Success through Dishonesty
A young man named David had dreams of making it big in the entertainment business, so he did what a lot of enterprising people in his position do: he got a job in the mail room of the William Morris talent agency. On his application he wrote that he had been a production assistant for a popular TV show (true) and had graduated from UCLA (false). When a fellow worker in the mailroom got fired for having lied on his application about where he’d gone to school, David got nervous. The agency apparently was fact-checking what their employees stated about their histories. What could he do to prevent his lie from being discovered?
For the next six months, David was the first one to show up at work, and he went through every piece of mail the business received. When the dreaded letter from the university finally arrived, David steamed it open and replaced it with a phony letter confirming his graduation. No one was the wiser.
David’s story tells us that starting off your career by committing a felony (mail fraud) can be the first step to becoming wildly successful. That’s because the David of this story is David Geffen, one of the richest men in the country. He launched the careers of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; Joni Mitchell; Linda Ronstadt; Donna Summer; and the Eagles. He produced Cats, one of the longest-running Broadway musicals in history, and together with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, he created the film studio Dreamworks SKG.
When David tells the story