Stop Punching Yourself in the Junk

When you think of the Hippocratic Oath, you may think, "First, do no harm."  If you go to the Wikipedia article, as I did, when looking it up because it's relevant to my topic here, you'll see that translation of the oath contains no such verbiage.

I was shocked to see this, but further research explained where the phrase actually comes from, which I leave as an exercise to the reader.

The point is that I was thinking of it in the context of business.  If you're looking to take action in a business, the first thing you want to make sure is that taking action is better than doing nothing.

You see examples of this when senior or executive leadership turns over in an organization.  The strategy may be sound, having been made in a collaborative way, but the instant the new leader steps in, every existing direction or strategy is obviously the problem.  You can often see a lot of counterproductive churn during these transitions, and if you have high turnover, the price of change for change's sake can be quite high indeed.

Sure, sometimes a company is in a legitimately bad situation, but all the proactive things you might do will only make things worse.  Sometimes, time is the only way to get through a tough scenario.

But my thoughts really didn't stop there.

We've all heard of the stop-doings: things an organization can do to improve its standing in the world by stopping.  A good example might be manual process steps that don't provide any value and that can be easily automated.  Maybe documents are routed through extra hands that they needn't be.  Maybe an old monitoring system is consuming CPU cycles when the thing it was monitoring has been gone for years.

Whatever it is, you can make positive steps forward using stop-doings.

There's a certain breed of stop-doings that I've seen a lot of in the past, and that's what I've been thinking about most recently.  I call these things "punching yourself in the junk."

An organization is punching itself in the junk any time it causes to happen, or through inaction allows to happen, any net-negative action by a bad actor in the ranks.

Let's say you have an individual in management that is, say, abusive to women.  Maybe not overtly, but through subtle and not so subtle ways, this individual constantly undermines female employees, using language to put them down, or pass them over.  Let's even say it's a relatively obvious pattern that this individual does this consistently, yet due to organizational politics, folks look the other way.

In that case, you could envision strong women not wanting to be put down or belittled by such a supervisor, and you might start to see some turnover in that particular demographic, which not only hurts diversity in the short term, but then forever brands the organization as misogynistic in certain circles, all because of one particular individual.

That looking the other way while a single individual harms either the reputation, morale, or finances of the organization, that's what I call a punch in the junk.  It's totally avoidable, self-inflicted harm.

Now this is an extreme example, and made up to demonstrate this idea that maybe, just maybe, if an organization is struggling in one department or area, special effort should be taken to undergo a thorough audit of the area, to make sure that the damage to the health and welfare of the organization is not coming from within.