Political Dilemmas at Work: How to Maintain Your Integrity and Further Your Career

Chapter Three

VICTORIA’S SECRETS

You’ve got the inside track on a big issue, and you are bound by confidentiality—but everyone keeps asking anyway.

 

 

 

Enjoying greater career success means that not only do we get access to more information, we also get access to information that is politically and commercially sensitive. This dilemma is about what to share and what to withhold. There are often confidentiality agreements in place and breaking them risks, not only the deal, but also personal integrity. There is no credibility in being identified as the source of a leak. Most of us recognize that to break confidentiality is to break trust, which is not a career-enhancing strategy.

But what do you do when withholding information means that people on your team or in your department are making bad decisions? Decisions they would not make if they knew what you know? Or if by withholding information today, your people will be personally worse off tomorrow? And then there is the pressure that other people can generate when they know you are the keeper of Victoria’s secrets.

The Victoria’s Secrets Dilemma

The merger activity is really heating up now, and the pressure is starting to show—not just on the executive team but across the organization. It seems that everyone has a view on what is going on behind the scenes, and some of the conspiracy theories going around are quite bizarre. Our employees are savvy enough to have figured out a lot of what is going on already, ...