Lessons from HP’s board

Commenting on a story as big as the HP spying scandal is always risky. I’m not connected to anyone intimately involved, I’m not a Federal prosecutor, and I’m not even on a board. This story has been covered in the press so much that everything has probably already been said. But since not everyone has said it yet, I’ll weigh in, tangentially at least, in my one and (probably) only HP spying post.

The story so far…

In case you’ve been under a rock, all this got started in September when news broke that HP, in an effort to figure out who was leaking details of its meetings to the press, was illegally obtaining phone records of board members and journalists. The board’s chairwoman resigned, and the company has been working to put the case behind it since before the holidays.

Good-natured corporate shenanigans aside, there are some very basic problems to deal with here that plague teams of all sizes within a company, from the shop floor to the boardroom. And there’s a chance for us to learn something.

Get something—anything—done. Now.

When Patricia Dunn became the chairman of the board in 2005, her initial priority-setting interviews with the board members pointed to leaks as a serious problem that needed to be addressed quickly. None of the directors were ready to ‘fess up, so HP retained an outside firm to conduct and search for the hole that she wanted to plug.

I’m not on any corporate boards, but I am very sympathetic to feeling a lot of pressure to make some quick progress right after taking on a new management job. And you probably have, or will, face the same pressure at some point in your own career.

My own experience suggests that when you are faced with a situation like this, it almost always makes more sense to sit on your hands and make sure you truly understand the dynamics that have created the problem before you act. It can be tough to do, but unless you are in one of those very rare situations where almost any action is better than no action, waiting to understand what’s really going on is the best approach.

Something to note about the HP scandal in particular is that Dunn had been on the board as a director since 1998; she was appointed to non-executive chairman of the board in 2005 when Carly Fiorina “stepped down.” If Dunn didn’t understand the team dynamic by the time she became chairwoman, an extra month or two figuring things out probably wasn’t going to lead to new insights. But leaks were a problem before she became chair: a key interview question should have been to examine how she was going to deal with the problem. At that time it might have made sense to bring in someone new to lead the board and, possibly, to heal the dyfunction that had caused the leaks in the first place.

But, back to the lesson. Some time spent trying to understand why the team had fallen apart into mutual distrust, and dealing with those issues, might have obviated the need for an investigation at all. Or it might have at least identified the chain of cirmustances that lead to the creation of the dysfunctyion. Once identified and elevated as an item for group action the group could have, perhaps, started to heal itself.

Of course this doesn’t always work. Some barrels really do have bad apples. But the other thing this time spent trying to understand the team dynamics might have revealed is which apples needed to move on to other barrels.

What’s important?

There is something else that often catches up to us when we feel the rush to action.

In the rush to get things done, and to deal with all the pressure newly roosting on your shoulders, it is very easy to rush past what’s right—or honest, or honorable, or whatever—in favor of what’s expedient. It’s especially tempting to take any likely action, right or wrong, that might make the pain stop when the stakes are high.

But these are exactly the circumstances in which we should stop and try to figure out whether what we are doing is in line with our own values and the values we want stuck to us if it doesn’t all work out.

In this type of situation I try and project myself 6 months down the road, after everything has settled down and the crisis has passed. Trying to figure out what kind of person I want to be after the crisis is over (and probably forgotten) has saved my bacon many times as I try to make sound decisions in tough times.