Whistleblowing & Villains
Two key parties play in the whistleblowing myth. The first is the hero, who does what is right
despite the cowardly behavior of those around him. The second player is the villain, greedy and duplicitous,
who commits a shameful deed.
The reality of most whistleblowers stands in the way of
seeing them as heroes. Their selfish
streaks may manifest differently from those they denounce and they may do
better at staying within the lines of lawful activity, but they are so sufficiently
flawed that some observers may find the retaliations they experience
understandable.
In the stories of actual whistleblowers, people accused of violations
seldom come across as heinous, at least with respect to the deeds that we disclose. For example:
Fred
Czerwonka was hired as superintendent of the St. Joseph (Missouri) School District in
July 2013, the month after Beau
Musser started as district CFO.
Czerwonka’s background included a PhD from St. Louis University, several
years as principal, assistant superintendent, and superintendent in the smaller
West Plains (Missouri) School District,
and 11 State awards for education performance. A few
months into his job, Musser discovered that Czerwonka, without Board approval,
had used an unexpected insurance refund to pay special $5,000 stipends to 54 of
the district’s administrators, principals, and assistant principals. A year and a half after he was hired,
Czerwonka was fired due in part to his whistleblower retaliation against
Musser. In 2015, the Missouri
State Auditor found numerous control problems going back years (including
payments of millions of dollars in stipends), some of which continue according
to a recent Board
member statement.
From the published reports, a plausible, human story emerges:
(a) Czerwonka and Musser found that
the district was a bigger mess than they had anticipated when they accepted
their positions;
(b) Czerwonka wanted to be a nice
guy using the stipend technique employed by his predecessors, including one
who later got jail time for it;
(c) Czerwonka screwed up when he suggested
that Musser resign in exchange for dropping the sexual harassment charges that surfaced
after he blew a whistle on the stipends – that misdeed plus Musser’s suspension
and termination cost the district a $450,000
lawsuit settlement;
(d) Czerwonka’s relatively
successful years before St. Joseph and his apparently happy
time at the much smaller Caruthersville School District after St. Joseph is
not that of a villain, even if he wronged Musser.
Viewed now from a distance, the life of Jenny Niklaus,
HomeFirst’s CEO who fired me after I disclosed suspected legal violations to
her, the Board, and external authorities, seems to me that of a generally
likable person, not a demon. Except for undergraduate
years in Davis, California, Niklaus has lived and worked her entire life in
Santa Clara County, California. Her
mother assisted her move into each new living arrangement. Her Friday girls’ night out get together
included friends drawn from local nonprofits and government agencies. A few days before she went to Acapulco to
celebrate her 45th birthday with a group of girl friends from
college, she celebrated in San Jose with a larger group of mostly women,
including those from her class at the American
Leadership Forum - Silicon Valley.
A licensed clinical social worker, Niklaus had spent her
entire career trying to help people. She
would sometimes cry when she spoke of the homeless served by HomeFirst. She told of her brother who was occasionally homeless
as a consequence of a mental disability.
She insisted that homelessness was a community problem that could be
solved through the coordinated efforts of nonprofits, government, foundations,
and businesses.
Seven months after firing me, Niklaus left HomeFirst to
become a vice president at tiny ALF-SV, which arranges networking among
community leaders. Although she traded her
work with the poor and vulnerable for associations with the locally powerful,
she continued to pursue the community building to which she had devoted much of
her time at HomeFirst.
Far from being villains, perpetrators can find ample reasons
to excuse their actions – the action was not really so bad, the victim was partly
to blame, bygones should be bygones[1].
For the broader society, social
scientists have identified numerous explanations for why basically good people
do bad things[2]. Research discovered causes in personal and
institutional biases, insufficient information, impulsive decision-making, the “want”
self vs. “should” self, slippery slopes toward wrongdoing, faulty incentive
systems, environmental uncertainty, resource limitations, inflated
self-perceptions, focus on outcomes rather than the methods used to achieve
them, motivated blindness, failure to see through indirect relations, ethical “fading”
– a complete list would go on and on.
These apologia leave the villain in the whistleblower myth
empty. No
person remains to blame for the crime.
Whistleblower Eric
Ben-Artzi’s frustration that the SEC did not punish executives at Deutche
Bank wins our sympathy. Basically nice
as he may be, the fact that the St. Joseph School District (or its insurance
company) paid $450,000 and wrongdoing Czerwonka skated away unharmed undermines
our concept of personal responsibility.
That Niklaus escaped so easily from any penalty for HomeFirst’s
(alleged) wrongs and her retaliation against me likewise offends.
The whistleblowing project is endlessly ambiguous: whistleblowers
are tainted by complicated motivations, and they can be said to bring their
troubles on themselves; the alleged wrongdoers are not clearly villainous, and they
are seldom punished
Roy Baumeister observed[3]
that victims view the time frame of a crime differently than do perpetrators,
who feel that the incidents are isolated affairs. Victims see the long lead up to the event
more clearly and feel the painful effects for far longer. The torturously slow regulatory and legal
proceedings involved in whistleblower cases encourages us to consider the
situation longer, in contrast to corporate perpetrators who can deal the
transaction off to attorneys for handling.
But many whistleblowers just take a long time to get the meaning of all the
bastards did to us.
[1] Baumeister, Roy
F., Arlene Stillwell and Sara Wotman. “Victim
and Perpetrator Accounts of Interpersonal Conflict: Autobiographical Narratives
about Anger.” Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology. 59.5 (1990):
994-1005. Baumeister, Roy F. Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Violence. New York: W.H. Freeman. 1997
[3]
Baumeister, 1990
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