It’s been a tough few weeks for standards.
While the details and allegations aren’t settled, the arc of the scandals involving Herman Cain, the Penn State University football child sex abuse case, Tokyo-based Olympus CEO firing and coverup, and the Jon Corzine -MF Global debacle is familiar; people betrayed positions of public trust.
There are standards that everyone flaunts (Are you driving 60 miles per hour in a 55 mph zone? Were you smoking cigarettes 10 feet away from the front door of a bar when the regulation requires 15 feet?) and no one outside of the overly politically correct really cares.
There are standards that are mixed – 12 items in your shopping cart in the 10 items only line during rush hour, or private downloading for personal use of music or video media – with the spectrum of support or mocking spread evenly across a broad range.
For some standards, such as those involving public trust or fiduciary responsibility however, there are no choices. Uphold the standard, or step aside and let people who can and will take the stick. For some things – child sex abuse, devastated retirement savings of investors, the trauma of submitting or even refusing a senior’s bawdy sexual advance – there is no “do over.”
The action happens and they sticks for a lifetime. And like Humpty Dumpty‘s fall from the wall, “All the King’s Horses. And all the King’s men, Couldn’t put Humpty Dumty together again.”
Madeleine P. Brennan is no standards breaker (at least as far as I know) but she is clearly a standard setter. For almost 50 years – longer than many have been alive – she has been churning out great product – the word education administrators sometimes use for the type of students who matriculate through a school’s program – as the principal at Dyker Heights Intermediate School in Brooklyn.
For those who think of Brooklyn as trendy neighborhoods like Williamsburg, Clinton Hill, Fort Greene, or Park Slope, Dyker Heights is the pre-trendy version of what formerly was a not-so-trendy borough. With what some would call “little to work with” Brennan’s school produces the types of graduates that end up at New York City’s top high schools.
While Brennan’s strictness can strike as over the top (a 13-year old was handcuffed by the police and escorted out of the school for carving up a desk), her stance is not; “Consistent rules and consequences. A dedicated hard-working staff. Sincere care for your charges.”
Early in my career I worked for a great boss by the name of Dominic Ciarfalia. Hunch is that he and Madeleine Brennan would have been best friends.
Dominic’s belief was that the way to make standards work was to breathe life into them; not one and done in new-hire orientation day but as an ongoing conversation about what they are and how they apply every day of every week. While he called them “rules of war” they were really rules of life; how do we choose to operate, what’s our public responsibility and what are the consequences if we don’t uphold those responsibilities.
While you can’t always who you work and associate with, you can choose to model the norms and values but which you choose to live. The trouble with standards is not that they don’t work; reasonable ones, backed consistently with responsibilities and consequences do work.
The trouble is that at times we want to duck the former (responsibilities) and avoid the latter (consequences).
If you want life to work out well – as Madeleine Brennan might suggest – standard keeping involves both fulfilling your responsibilities and embracing the consequences.
Because for some things in life there is no do over. Which may be why we have – and need – standards in the first place.
Life Back West is an occasional set of writings focused on ways people, teams and organizations can be both more effective (doing the right thing) and more efficient (doing the right thing well). More about executive, career and team / leadership coaching services can be found at the “About J. Mike Smith and Back West, Inc.” sidebar or the “Hire Me” tab above. You can also read an online interview with me at WhoHub, as well as participate in my learning community courtesy of KnowledgeCrush.