“Don’t throw stones if you live in a glass house” is classic received wisdom, but often forgotten and too-often not applied in business contexts. Let’s fix that!
Here’s the core problem with throwing stones if you live in a glass house: in a work context your colleagues, boss, and client will quickly stop taking you seriously, stop listening to you, and stop following your advice. So, the end result of doing this, at work, is one of the worst possible outcomes: you make yourself irrelevant.
Let’s apply this to some of my pieces of advice in this series. One of the core, repeated themes is the importance of writing down and sharing information. Let’s say you ask others to do the same, “please take meeting notes, please write up your thoughts on this or that,” but you just never do so yourself. What happens?
At first, everything will be fine. Almost everyone gives you the benefit of the doubt since almost everyone is a good person and wants you to succeed. But over time, by encouraging standards that you don’t follow yourself, you’re telling the entire team (including your boss or client) that you are a hypocrite.
In a professional context, hypocrisy is a sin for a few reasons.
First, it makes everyone around you not take your words seriously. And your job, beyond the core deliverables itself, is largely about using words to make things happen and make everyone love your work and working with you. That can’t be done if they no longer trust your words nor take them seriously.
Secondly, it makes everyone around you trust you less. Would you trust someone who tells you to pay all of your taxes, while he cheats on his own? Of course not, at least on the issue of taxes.
Third, it will come back to bite you in the tushy immediately. If you tell your boss, “it would make things more efficient if we start our meetings on time” and he responds, “but you’re usually just as late as I am” then you’re at an impasse. If you tell your client, “the company has a culture of secrecy and silos and we need to start being more transparent so we can reduce confusions and misunderstandings” but he then responds, “but you never share anything yourself unless it’s absolutely necessary” then your initiative will fail.
Sometimes, it turns out, timeless wisdom is timeless for a reason.
