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Victoria Nuttle reports: <<There was a time when I thought loyalty to your
company really did mean something.>>
Which raises a point I forgot to address in my previous point: There's a
pernicious and very harmful myth that companies can or should be treated as
individuals, just as if they were human. They aren't. A company is not a
monolithic entity of some sort that acts as if it has a brain--it isn't, and
it doesn't. A company is an assembly of people who mostly act in a concerted
fashion to achieve some kind of collective goal, and it's that assembly of
people we must consider.
It's possible to be loyal to an idea, including the idea that a company
represents. But practically speaking, the actual loyalty most of us develop
is to the people of the company, and specifically to our boss and the
colleagues we work directly with. It's difficult to develop loyalty to a
corporate leader you've never met and will never meet, and who has no sense
of responsibility to you personally because they don't even know you exist.
While we're certainly justified in our anger towards corporate leaders who
lay off employees as their first step in cutting costs, we also have to
accept some of the realities of life at the top: First, if leaders accepted
every employee as a real human and acted accordingly, they'd be paralyzed:
sometimes you really do have to make decisions that involve pain to your
employees, and if you empathize with all that pain, you'd never make the
decisions. (Of course, developing some sense of your employees as humans
doesn't mean you have to feel each one's pain. You can still remember you're
dealing with humans rather than numbers.) Second, given that these leaders
don't know us at all, it's hard to see how they would have a chance to
develop any loyalty to us.
A few more thoughts to ponder...
--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
"Wisdom is one of the few things that look bigger the further away it
is."--Terry Pratchett
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