Greg Smith did not agree with the corporate culture at his employer, Goldman Sachs, so on 14 March, 2012, he resigned. And he did so publicly, very publicly – the reasons for his resignation was explained in a scathing column in the New York Times of the same date. Greg, an expatriate South African, was the London-based executive director of equity derivatives at Goldman Sachs, one of the more successful investment banks on Wall Street. In his New York Times exposé he described a ‘culture of greed’ at the company, where profits came before the interest of clients, and where clients were ‘ripped off’ as a matter of course. Greg did not agree with this, and after almost 12 years at the company, he resigned.
Greg blamed the Goldman Sachs leadership, specifically the CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and the president, Gary Cohn, for losing ‘hold of the firm’s culture’ and for changing the way the firm ‘thought about leadership’. Leadership, he said, used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing, but now it was all about how much money they could make off a client.
Greg’s problem was that his personal values were no longer aligned with the company’s ‘culture of greed’ and what it stood for. The company’s values seem to have shifted since the company went public and its leadership traded client loyalty for short term profits. So it left Greg with a conundrum which he simply had to resolve. Research confirms what is intuitively known: people who are forced to compromise on their values behave inconsistent with their beliefs and what they stand for, and will experience undue stress and internal conflict. They may even find that they are gradually losing the respect and trust of their peers, superiors and even clients. People who are forced to compromise on their values are not happy people. Greg was not happy.
The importance of some form of alignment between the values of an employee with those of the organisation should not be underestimated. A genuine and meaningful alignment will ultimately result in greater employee loyalty and respect for the organisation. To quote Steve Jobs, ex-CEO of Apple Computer, Inc. ‘The only thing that works is management by values. Find people who are competent and really bright, but more importantly, people who care exactly about the same thing you care about.’ Shared values build trust, which is the basis on which relationships with team members and customers are built.
But management by values, as Steve suggests, implies that the leadership should behave as role models. What they convey through their beliefs, values and behaviours will guide the behaviour of the rest of the workers in the company. At Goldman Sachs, according to Greg, this included ripping off their clients and selling them products that were wrong for them. People emulate what they see modelled. What leaders do or value, their people will do or value. Greg clearly was not strong in the emulation department.
There seems to be some scientific foundation for this ‘emulate what they see’ or ‘monkey see, monkey do’ behaviour. Mirror neurons, a recent discovery in the field of neuro-sciences, seem to explain our copy-cat behaviour. Mirror neurons are specialised brain cells in the frontal cortex of our brains that activate in the same way, whether we do something ourselves or we see someone else do it. This involuntary response in our brains is believed to be the foundation of empathy. It will eventually become part of our personalities if we are exposed to repeated observations of the same behaviour. Which explains why the way the leadership of a company behaves, ultimately gets replicated throughout the organisation – people emulate what they repeatedly observe. This would also explain why the example a manager set has a greater influence on an employee’s behaviour than anything the manager can say, or for that matter, anything that is written in the company’s policies or hitched to an employee’s key performance indicators. To quote someone else, this time the noted medical missionary Albert Schweitzer: ‘Example is not the main thing in influencing others… it is the only thing.’
The ‘monkey see, monkey do’ emulation of role models, of course, applies to all of society – from government and politics to business and even parenting. A leader’s work ethics, values and respect for others will permeate right through the organisation. After all, what behaviour do we expect ordinary constables to emulate when the former national police commissioner (Jackie Selebi) has been convicted for corruption? Or how should learners behave at school if their teachers are consistently late or unprepared for class? Or what behaviour do you want your kids to emulate if you… well, you get the picture. The culture at Greg’s company is unlikely to change on his account; he either had to compromise on his values, or he had to get out. He did the only thing he could do.
So there you go: monkey see monkey do leadership – as managers and leaders we have to carry the burden of being role models, whether we like it or not. The commitment we demonstrate, the dedication we show, the ethics we practice and the values we live by will invariably be the basis of the behaviours we instil in our people. We can only demand from them what we demand of ourselves. And we need to remember that when they follow us, they can only go as far as we go. Or they can decide to check out, like Greg did. None of us are perfect – we are all works in progress. If we want to remain true to ourselves, we should continuously learn and grow by constantly and critically evaluating what we do and how it fits in with our vision and our values and our commitment to our staff and our customers. And if we want to be true to our followers, we should do this openly, so our teams can emulate us in their own journeys of continuous learning and growing.