Timothy’s Thought for Thursday:
Joe Clancy, the current director of the United States Secret Service, is a veteran agent who has been charged by President Obama to bring reforms to a troubled agency. Early 2015, he was grilled on Capitol Hill by the House Appropriations Committee regarding a March 4 incident at the White House. He admitted that as the director he did not know the incident had happened until 5 days later when he got an anonymous email. When questioned why he was kept in the dark by his staff, he said he thought it was due to fear of repercussions when reporting bad news up the chain of command.
What you don’t know, can hurt you.

As leaders, we need to provide our employees a safe environment where they want to report incidents and problems as they arise. If a culture of fear is created by Leadership, people will not tell the truth or they will omit the truth; essentially lying to protect themselves. This is destructive to the organization because as a leader, what you don’t know, you don’t know. What is essential is a culture of:
- Transparency,
- Truth, and
- Trust.
This is a top performing culture, one that owns its challenges together and can solve them together. Only then can something be learned, owned, and applied so it does not happen again.
Insight:
“When a man is penalized for honesty, he learns to lie.” ~ Criss Jami
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