American View: Why yours should be the only shop in the company that isn’t lying

The explanations I’ve heard most often for leadership’s deliberate falsehoods are always spun to sound noble and necessary, e.g.: 

• It was required to avoid causing a market panic 
• If was necessary to prevent spooking clients 
• Our lawyers advised us not to say anything 

It’s always someone else’s fault, right? And it was never about wringing the last possible cent of economic value out of you vulnerable workers right before betraying your naïve and mislaid trust! Or course not!  

 

Lies like these give working folks every possible reason to distrust everything that management tells them in the course of routine operations. Hell, it’s self-destructive to take any upper management pronouncements at face value. Jaded workers have families to feed. Expecting duplicity and preparing for betrayal is the most pragmatic way to prepare for the worst possible outcomes.  

 

I was reminded of this situation over this last weekend while I was reading Daniella Mestayanek Young’s book The Culting of America. In chapter 6 ^[1] she writes: “Language gives us a code for understanding the world and our place in it – especially manipulated for that exact purpose.” ^[2] Corporate speak – in all its dialects – deliberately deemphasizes specificity and clear accountability. “The company is moving towards more agile best-practices” can be interpreted hundreds of different ways, whereas “The Luton office is underperforming because we botched our Agile transformation so we’re firing everyone at that site to hit our quarterly numbers” leaves nothing to the imagination. The evasiveness makes it difficult to know who the responsible offenders are when the torches and pitchforks come out.

This tendency of lying-by-obfuscation, in turn, reminded me of a passage I’d read in a textbook thirty years ago. I’d just mustered off active duty with the U.S. Army and had returned to the Army Reserves. My new commander assigned me the Army Psychological Officer’s Course. I was almost finished with the book on “PSYOP Communications” ^[3] when I found an essay in Appendix 3 titled “Cross-Cultural Communication in Coalition Warfare” by Captain David E. A. Johnson. Under the subsection titled “credibility,” Johnson wrote: “We … establish credibility by building rapport. … As always, honesty and tact in even the smallest things are critical.” ^[4] 

 

It’s a small passage, and it almost certainly seems like common sense. I submit, however, that dismissing this rule is the fundamental flaw undermining all internal corporate communications endeavours, no matter what industry sector you occupy.  Further, I contend that this flaw is what conditions workers to reflexively distrust and suspect everything their upper management reps say.  

 

Think about it: We all know that other people can lie. Deceit is a universal human skill. We like to assume that other people are generally truthful with us up until we catch them lying to us. From that point forward, we treat that other person as “a liar.” It’s human nature even when the stakes are low. Why would things be any different in the corpo realm? As one of my Public Affairs Officers quipped in that Army school, “Credibility is like virginity. Once you lose it, you can never get it back.” 

 

Overcoming users’ natural and earned distrust is, I believe, one of the most important challenges that every Security Awareness / Security Human Risk practitioner must overcome to be successful in their role. It’s on us to prove to our audience that we genuinely care about their safety and success; that everything we tell them is soley for their benefit; and that everything we share with them can be accepted at face value (that is, there’s no sinister element being obfuscated in or deliberately left out of our message). We will not mislead or betray them, no matter what. 

To secure our personal and institutional credibility, we must start our professional relationship with our users being as transparent as we possibly can be. That’s where blatant influence does its best work. “Yes,” we explain. “We are trying to change your behaviour! We are attempting to convince you to do more of the ‘good stuff’ and less of the ‘bad stuff’ … not just for your benefit, but for everyone’s benefit. Yes, we are using language and symbolism and repetition and every other communication tool we have, to alter and improve your thinking and behaviour.” Most importantly, we’re doing all of this in the open! It isn’t a secret; we’re being honest and consistent about it and are totally open to critique. We’re even begging you to learn how and why we’re engaging in blatant influence so that you can get the most value out of our efforts.

 

Blatant influence is the exact opposite of traditional – aka, smarmy – corpo doublespeak. Security Awareness must be consistently virtuous and trustworthy if it’s going to succeed. That’s the only way to win and maintain users’ trust and voluntary compliance over the long run.  

 

Would I like upper management to adopt a total-transparency-and-integrity policy? Yes, I do, in every place I work. I understand the traditionalists’ argument that sometimes lies are “necessary” for the “greater good” … however I fundamentally disagree that the inevitable degradation of collective trust in leadership is worth the potential gains. High morale and esprit de corps depend on faith; fait, in turn, can’t exit in a group without trust. Ergo, there must be someone in the organisation that the users can trust without reservation. For security’s sake, that must be us.  

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^[1] “Distinguishable Vernacular: The Jargon Jungle 

^[2] Emphasis added. Consider me pounding the pulpit while I preach this part of the sentence. 

^[3] Sub-course 0205, edition of March 1995. I kept all my books.  

^[4] See footnote 2, re: emphasis and pulpit.