Honor or Deceit

Imagine you've been working as a member of a project. And one day you realize that in your past project work, you had made a mistake. A big mistake. If your manager knew about this mistake, he would halt the project immediately, and reassign tasks to remedy various problems caused by your mistake. For the good of the company, you should tell your manager immediately. That would be the honorable thing to do. And you are an honorable person, except for situations where there are extenuating circumstances. And this is certainly one of those situations. Let's list your options, and discuss the consequences of each alternative.

1) Tell your manager about the mistake. Your admission will have immediate and untoward consequences. You will likely be seen as incompetent by your peers. They will find the extra work required to remedy your mistake quite annoying. This alternative will require great courage of you. Perhaps a bit too much courage.

2) Never tell anyone about the mistake. Wait until the mistake is revealed by someone else. If you are asked, simply shrug your shoulders and claim that you never saw this coming. This alternative works well in companies where managers say things like "We don't want to blame anyone, we just want to identify the problem and keep going." But there is a deeper logic that can be applied. There is a chance that the project will change in a way that makes your mistake irrelevant. Perhaps another mistake will be found, or the parameters will change. Your mistake might slip under the radar, never to be discovered. In companies where projects are chaotic, this can actually be a fairly likely outcome. And here is one final point. By not telling anyone about the mistake, you have increased the likelihood that the mistake will be revealed at the end of the project. It will now have to be remedied in firefighting mode. Some people really shine in a crisis. You may feel that you can redeem yourself by working long hours to remedy your own mistake. And be both the villain and the hero.

3) Never tell anyone about the mistake, but involve them in it unwittingly. Find a way to shift blame to someone else, preferably a vendor or outside contractor. Create an email chain where you hint at the periphery of the problem, but never come right out and acknowledge it. When the mistake is revealed, you can claim that you had almost seen it, but others did not provide enough support for you. This is an attractive option in many ways, and some of the benefits from choice 2) also apply. You do run the risk of having your mistake revealed prematurely by the hints you drop.

We generally act in our self interest. Management plans that requires subordinates to be altruistic will fail. The problem with predicting outcomes is that individuals define their self interest differently. While one person might reason that getting the truth out in the open as soon as possible was in her best interest, another person might decide that a very painful experience in the future is preferable to a somewhat painful experience today. Motivational techniques have little to do with the way people determine their self interest. Aligning the interests of the company with the self interests of the employees is a difficult and necessary challenge.