The Ethics of Loyalty

If you’re a Dodgers fan (and heaven knows I’m not suggesting anyone should be after this year), you’ve probably been hearing a lot lately about how the team’s veteran players are blaming this season’s collapse (from the best record in the Major Leagues two months ago to 4th place in their division today) on the younger players and the mistakes, poor cooperation, and attitude being given off by the younger players. Meanwhile, those same younger athletes are pointing out that the complaining veterans have all struggled this year, turning in lackluster performances while the team has tried to cope with injuries and other problems. It would be nice to dismiss all of this on a bunch of grown men making millions of dollars to play a kid’s game – and then whining about it. Unfortunately, the situation is all too similar to a problem every manager will face sooner or later.

Let’s suppose for a moment that you need to promote one of your people. The new position will offer more responsibility, more money, and generally be seen as an advancement of the person selected. You would think that this would be simple: just select the person best suited to perform these new duties and promote him or her. If there is one person who is clearly the best choice (e.g., most experienced, best leader, best at doing their job, best at teaching others how to do the job) this should in fact be relatively simple; if not, you will have to figure out which of your people is the best in which of these areas, and try to select the best of the lot. If it’s a very close decision, you might even want to “interview” these people, and ask them how they would handle the new position. Unless you’ve been living in a cave somewhere for the past thirty years, however, you already know better than to favor people of a specific race, gender, ethnicity, age, height, size, weight, sexual preference or style of dress, so we will assume that you don’t.

Where things become murky is when you attempt to factor length of service into the equation. Some companies actually do consider seniority as a factor in promotion, holding that a person’s years with the company indicate their stability, maturity and loyalty in addition to familiarity with company policy and experience on the job. Other companies have a strict policy of “merit only” promotions – promote the best person for the job, even if that person has been around for a few months and everyone else in the department has decades of experience on the job. A company-wide policy may take the heat off of you, or at least give you something to blame for the choice you are being forced to make, but it does nothing to solve the underlying ethical problem.

Does the company owe its long-term employees anything in particular? Assuming they have been paid fair wages and given decent working conditions (including reasonable hours and livable benefits), does management owe them special consideration when issuing promotions? Or, perhaps more to the point, does the company’s obligation to support, reward and advance its loyal employees supersede its obligation to promote the best possible managers, thus maximizing performance and shareholder value? Especially when you consider that if your senior people believe they are being deliberately passed over for promotion (because the younger people will require lower salaries, for example) they are likely to leave the company seeking advancement elsewhere?

Of course, this same issue by definition touches on problems such as recognition (people see promotion as a public acknowledgement of their performance and abilities), security (people believe – often quite incorrectly – that higher-level people are less likely to be laid off or fired), morale (it’s demoralizing at best to be passed over; it can easily be insulting, depressing or infuriating, depending on whom you were passed over for) and employee retention (if the only way to obtain promotion and the attendant increase in responsibility, power, reputation and money is to change employers, people certainly will), but those issues will exist no matter how carefully we select people for promotion, and we can almost guarantee that someone will feel unjustly passed over no matter what we do. The question we as managers have to ask is where to draw that line between rewarding loyalty to the company and doing what is best for the company, on those (hopefully rare) occasions when these are not one and the same…