Competence at the Cost of Character in Careers

Company Values Must Be Followed, Until They Interfere with Profit?

In many work places, what matters most is whether the money keeps coming in, whether the target is met, whether the client is satisfied, whether the numbers look good, and whether the company appears successful from the outside. If a company is growing, the clients are coming in, and the targets are being met, do we always ask what it cost to get there? or let's be plain, do we even care? Truthfully, for a company to succeed, there has to be skill, productivity, discipline, and results. Employees are held to high standards by these metrics, and where their efforts are rewarded with full transparency of the means used to get the result, then competency becomes a great addition not a detriment. However, in the eventuality that the transparency of the means is unclear, or left untold and still rewarded, what then happens when results by any means become the only language everyone understands?

Today, people are just trying to make ends meet in most parts of the world. It's already an exhausting process to get a job, and once it's finally gotten, most people would do anything to keep it. Survival then becomes the top motivation with a clear goal: do whatever you need to do, just get the job done. Lie if you must. Flatter if you must. Exploit if you must. Compromise if you must. Have sexual relations if you have to. Just make sure the result is achieved and the money keeps flowing. Of course, not every workplace says this openly. Many companies have values written on their walls, websites, and documents. Integrity. Respect. Excellence. Accountability. Sometimes these words only matter until they interfere with profit. Then suddenly, competence and money are revealed as the real gods.

The Trap of Rewarding Competence

Competence is measured by visible results. If someone gets those results and their rewards are withheld without probable cause, it can be interpreted as unfairness or bias. If character is that probable cause, then people may say it is "not that deep" or "grow a spine, this is the real world" So, the highest performer is protected even when they mistreat people. The person who brings in the biggest client is excused even when their methods are questionable. The employee who refuses to compromise is called difficult, while the one who bends every moral line is called “committed.” This is how character slowly becomes a disadvantage in environments that worship results. When people are rewarded only for outcomes, they learn to hide the cost of achieving those outcomes. We can also see this in the lives of modern Influencers. When we reward online followership with fame, money, and influence, people will do whatever it takes to get the followers including sacrificing any ounce of self dignity they have. And as stated in past earlier post, the danger of this is not that people would not realize that there is something wrong but rather, the environment will give them too many reasons to explain away, the abnormalcy they feel

Reflection

What makes this even more dangerous is that, even in the process, people would realize that something is wrong. They may feel the abnormality of what they are being asked to do. They may sense that a line has been crossed. They may know deep down that the method is not clean, even if the result is celebrated. But the environment will give too many reasons to explain it away. Everyone is doing it. This is how the real world works. You have bills to pay. You cannot afford to be the weak one. Do you want to lose your job? And slowly, what once felt wrong begins to feel normal.

We can also see this same pattern in the lives of influencers. When we reward online followership with fame, money, and influence, people will do whatever it takes to get the followers, including sacrificing any ounce of self-dignity they have. The danger is not always that people will never realize something is wrong. Again, the danger is that the environment will give them too many reasons to explain away the wrong they already feel. we explored this concept deeply in the post, "Are We Choosing, or Are We Being Conditioned?" So perhaps the question is not whether a person is competent enough to produce results. Maybe the right question is: What kind of person are they becoming in order to produce them? Drafted by Princess Faith Odo, refined with AI.

Read next

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