The Character Thing

Here's a hypothetical situation for you.

Say you are in a very visible position. Your unpopular government job involves conducting inspections of a technical nature - sort of like OSHA. But it's not OSHA. But if the inspections are doing what they are supposed to do, then they prevent terrible accidents which could involve loss of life. If the inspections are doing what they are supposed to do, they piss a lot of people off and can even get you personally attacked in the media.

Right away you start aggressively doing your job. You either shut down or threaten to shut down some significant operations on the grounds that they are unsafe. It even attracts some press coverage and embarrasses some powerful people. But it's fun.

OK. So some people come to you and say that they have potential candidates for inspector jobs. If you approve hiring these two candidates, you feel confident that you could train them, and that they could become very competent doing what they are supposed to do. If you hire these candidates, you will also be making some people very happy - people who helped get your boss his job, and helped him keep his job. The candidates are awfully young and inexperienced, but you think you can train them. Hell, they might make better inspectors than many of the people already working for you, who got their jobs under politically influenced appointments from many years past. And it's just possible that they were sent to you at the direction or condonation of your boss. Since a lot of people less competent than these people are already working, you either say OK or you kind of don't notice it.

So one of the companies you've inspected and pissed off finds out about this. It happens that they own and operate a lot of media and have been publicly embarrassed by your inspections. They break the story, saying that only a moron or political hack could possibly allow something like this to happen.

Part of the media story says that the organization that sent these candidates gave significant help to your boss. So your boss reacts by condemning the action that he himself either requested or tacitly condoned. He goes to the media and says that such actions cannot be tolerated, and that he will soon clean house. "Privately," he demands an undated resignation letter from you. You provide it, and then are sent to meet a hostile press. You tell the press that the two people recently hired will be checked out and, probably, fired. When asked if you will quit your job, you say you serve at the pleasure of your boss. You then return to your office to finish up your Friday not knowing whether your boss is going to fire you, wondering how you're going to send your two children to college or, for that matter, make your mortgage payment.

So far so good?

So, if this was you, what would you do? Check all that apply...

1. Go home and drink your way through the weekend.
2. Stay sober because you're still getting emergency pages from your managers about unsafe conditions.
3. Blame your boss for everything.
4. Not only take personal responsibility for what happened, but decide to set and implement even higher personal standards for leadership and job effectiveness, regardless of whether you get fired or not, because self-respect is even more important than the respect of others.
5. Take an unscheduled vacation to Cancun to avoid the media.
6. Show up to work on Monday.
7. Crawl to your boss's office and beg to keep your job.
8. Immediately convene a meeting of all your inspectors and apologize to them for compromising the professionalism of the inspections staff.
9. Barricade yourself in your office and refuse to take visitors or phone calls.
10. Conduct an internal review of inspector credentials and find a few more with bogus cred.
11. Borrow an untraceable automatic weapon and go to your boss's office for a reality check.
12. Terminate the employment of inspectors with bad credentials and actually relish the opportunity to improve the quality of your staff - given lemons, you make lemonade.
13. Publicly lambast your boss as a hypocrite who really directed the hiring of these people to begin with, and get a lawyer for a whistleblower lawsuit.
14. Find yourself on the following Friday still working and even, quite remarkably, whistling while you work.
15. Quit, because the stress of all this is too much to take.

What was your score? Give yourself +2 points for every even numbered response, and -1 for every odd numbered response. If you end up with a positive number, that's pretty amazing.

I am unbelievably proud to know a guy who got a 14. I wish I could be more like him, and I want my children to be like him.