The CEO is crying. It is a soft, practiced sob, the kind of emotional vulnerability that has been vetted by three separate public relations consultants and a chief of staff. We are sitting in a room with 488 other people, all of us staring at a screen where the word ‘EMPATHY’ is pulsating in a gentle, calming blue. He’s talking about how we are a family, how every voice matters, and how our ‘Radical Transparency’ is the engine of our 18 percent growth this quarter. It’s a beautiful performance.
I’m sitting in the back, leaning against a cold radiator, still feeling the slight sting under my fingernails from where I peeled a Valencia orange in one single, perfect spiral just ten minutes ago. My hands smell like citrus and industrial carpet.
I’m looking at Leo. Leo is 38 years old, a data analyst who has been here for 8 years. He’s not crying. He’s looking at his shoes because exactly 28 hours ago, Leo was hauled into a private ‘alignment session’ for the crime of being transparent. He had posted a question in the public Slack channel-the one titled #culture-and-transparency-asking why the executive bonuses were being paid out in full when the pension contributions for the ground-floor staff had been frozen for the last 18 months. The response wasn’t an answer. It was a reprimand. He was told he wasn’t being a ‘team player’ and that his ‘tone didn’t align with our core values.’
The Great Corporate Gaslight
This is the Great Corporate Gaslight. Most companies treat their values like a coat of paint on a rotting fence. They think if they name the rot ‘Innovation’ and the termites ‘Agility,’ the fence will somehow hold.
Your values are simply the sum of the behaviors you reward and the behaviors you punish. If you reward the person who cuts corners to hit a deadline but punish the person who points out a safety flaw, your value is ‘Expedience,’ not ‘Integrity.’
The 8-Word Rule of Honesty
Emerson C.M., a union negotiator I spent 18 days across from during a particularly nasty contract dispute in 2018, once told me that you can judge a company’s health by the length of its mission statement.
“
“If it’s longer than 8 words,” he said, “they’re trying to hide something.”
We spent 128 hours in a windowless room in Ohio trying to bridge the gap between ‘Corporate Responsibility’ and a 48-cent-an-hour raise. The management kept talking about the ‘ecosystem’ of the company. Emerson just kept pointing at a photo of a broken locker room. He knew that the actual value of the company was ‘Cost-Cutting,’ and every time management used the word ‘Excellence,’ it was just a way to ask the workers to do more for less.
The Debt of Deception
Cynicism Debt Interest Rate
8% Compounded Daily
Cynicism is the debt you pay for every lie you tell your employees. It shows up as ‘Quiet Quitting,’ it shows up as talent flight, and it shows up as a total lack of innovation. You cannot innovate in a culture where people are afraid of the truth.
What Are Your Values, Really?
If you want to know what your values are, look at your last 8 promotions. Who got them? Was it the person who challenged the status quo to save a project, or the person who laughed the loudest at the VP’s jokes?
Look at your last 8 terminations. Why did they happen? Was it truly performance, or was it because they refused to participate in the collective delusion that everything is ‘awesome’?
The orange: Patient process versus rushed ripping.
Tangible Reality vs. Rhetoric
There is a profound difference between a business that sells a promise and a business that sells a reality. Take, for example, the service industry-places where you can’t hide a failure behind a clever LinkedIn post.
When you look at a service like a Laminate Installer, the value isn’t a vague word like ‘Quality.’ The value is the floor itself. It’s level, or it isn’t. It’s installed on time, or it isn’t.
(Can be changed instantly)
(Requires physical correction)
The Silence of Survival
I watched the CEO finish his speech. He wiped his eyes with a silk handkerchief that probably cost $88. The room was silent, save for the hum of the HVAC. He asked if there were any questions. I looked at Leo. Leo stayed silent. He had learned his lesson. He knew that in this ‘Radical Transparency’ environment, the safest thing to be was a ghost.
Breakout Session: Living ‘Innovation’
- Brainstorming coffee machine upgrades.
- Writing Post-it notes about ‘thinking outside the box.’
- Deliberately avoiding discussion of the sinking $18 million project.
- Conclusion: Performance achieved.
The Honesty of Grievances
This is why I trust Emerson C.M. more than any C-suite executive I’ve ever met. Emerson never talked about values. He talked about grievances. He talked about the 18 specific ways the company had failed to meet its contractual obligations.
If you reward silence, your value is silence.
Stop writing on the walls. Look at your payroll, your calendar, and who you listen to.
If you are a leader, do everyone a favor: stop writing on the walls. Tear down the posters. Delete the ‘Culture’ section of your website. Instead, look at your payroll. Look at your calendar. Look at who you actually listen to when the $238,000 deal falls through. If you reward honesty, your value is honesty. If you reward silence, your value is silence. It is as simple as that. Everything else is just marketing.
The Value of the Mess
We are so afraid of the mess of being human-of the contradictions, the errors, the $878 mistakes-that we try to sanitize our work life with these sterile, meaningless words. But the mess is where the work happens. The mess is where the floor gets laid, the code gets written, and the problems get solved. You can’t have ‘Innovation’ without the mess of failure. You can’t have ‘Integrity’ without the mess of difficult conversations.
Discarded Handbook: ‘INTEGRITY’
Embossed in gold foil. Lonely on the pavement.
The CEO might have the silk handkerchief and the blue screen, but he doesn’t have the truth. And in the end, the truth is the only thing that actually scales. If you can’t be honest about the small things-like a frozen pension or a broken locker room-you’ll just be another company with a beautiful wall and a hollow soul, waiting for the 8th of the month to come so you can do it all over again.
The best value a job can have is the decency to be what it says it is.
