Legislating Character

A couple of months ago I was visiting with a friend who is on staff of a large church in the Midwest. We were talking about personnel policies since we were in the middle of re-thinking ours. He sent me a copy of his church's personnel manual, which was roughly the size of the unabridged Encyclopedia Britannica.

Policies are important for every organization. They define the boundaries of the playing field and help ensure a relative amount of consistency across the organization to ensure everyone is playing the game with the same expectations. More than anything, they exist for the sake of clarity.

But policy manuals go wrong when we forget that it is impossible to legislate character.

If the sole purpose of your policy manual is to allow you to trust your employees, you've got the cart before the horse.

When an employee does something outside the pale of what is normally acceptable, the first instinct is often to create a new policy. This almost never solves the problem. Instead, it inevitably creates new problems: Malicious employees who need policies to stay in line will always find ways around policies no matter how many you write. Trustworthy employees will be frustrated by the lack of flexibility because of policies you created for someone else.

My experience says that policies ought to address patterns you experience with multiple trustworthy employees. Patterns with individual trustworthy employees need to be addressed in frank conversations. Employees who are not trustworthy, pattern or not, should be dismissed from your team as quickly as possible. Why? You can't legislate character.