In his telling, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had a confrontation with the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that ended in the following way. He asked her if she was trustworthy. She frankly said no. He fired her. She is now bitter about that and telling everyone that she is the good guy in this struggle.
I must say, I have doubts. Kennedy was asking for that crucial thing: loyalty. Especially given the stakes of the moment, this is absolutely essential. No workplace can operate without it.
A quick story.
A highly successful entrepreneur of 40 years, with a long track record of managing giant companies, once passed on to me what he said was his most valuable piece of advice. He said that throughout his entire career, his success had come down to a small team of deeply loyal people. He completed his advice by telling me to look for loyalty first and accept no compromises. That’s the key to building any institution.
I never doubted that he was right, but I’ve also had years to think about this. Somehow the demand for loyalty in business and professional relationships sounds a strange note. It doesn’t immediately strike us as a virtue to which we should aspire. Indeed, the claim that it is a first principle seems vaguely menacing, as if it is being demanded by a possible despot.
Does loyalty mean going along with practices that are dishonest or unjust?
Does it mean blind obedience and the discarding of individual initiative or one’s right to speak freely?
Does it mean being part of a machine rather than exercising free will?
These are the common misperceptions of the meaning of professional loyalty. None of this is true. Professional loyalty is, in fact, a great and essential virtue. Those who cultivate it go places, whereas those who neglect it fail and fail.
One way to unpack this observation is by juxtaposition to the opposite idea: disloyalty.
We all know what it means to have a disloyal friend. It means that in a moment of vulnerability, you pass on a weakness you have or tell a story that doesn’t put you in the best light. Over the coming days, other people hear about it. You hear thirdhand that the news has spread far and wide. You are mortified.
You try to figure out how this private information got out. Then you come to realize: The friend you believed would keep your private truth private actually spread it to others. Why did he do this? Maybe the goal was to ingratiate himself to others. Maybe it was to act like a big shot with inside information. Maybe he never liked you that much in the first place.
Regardless, you have been betrayed by a friend. He was disloyal to you. It’s a shocking thing to happen. Friendship is an implicit bond of trust. That is its core and foundation. The closer you are as friends, the more is expected of you.
You can even see friendship as a series of loyalty tests. The more tests a person passes, the more you are likely to trust the person. This grows over time with experience.
It’s not just about keeping secrets. It’s about knowledge, awareness, and confidence that your friend would not knowingly do things that would harm you. Your friend has your back. He defends you at every crucial moment. You earn his trust and he earns yours.
Friendship means depending on that confidence and seeing it confirmed again and again as the years pass.
This is why betrayal can be so rattling. It means that you have misjudged or that the person has changed in ways that you did not expect. Regardless, the bond is shattered. You can later forgive, but rebuilding trust as it was is unlikely. You can never really trust again because of this experience.
This is the consequence of disloyalty in friendship. It’s devastating. This is true in love and marriage, too, of course, in which each spouse owes fidelity and deference to the other.
It stands to reason that the same is true in business. Loyalty to the enterprise and to the boss is an essential feature of success. Another and more revealing way to put it is that disloyalty in business is always and everywhere ruinous.
When I first entered a professional environment in my teen years, I came to realize that all fellow employees could be easily divided between two groups. There were those who were happy for the job and grateful to be paid. They had an understanding that payment was for services rendered well. They did what they were told as quickly and completely as possible. They showed up on time. They did not engage in petty theft. They did not sneak around. They worked hard, looked for work to do, and improved.
Then there were the others. Let’s call them the disloyal employees. They resented their low pay. They complained about work conditions constantly. They found every excuse for bitterness. They rolled their eyes when the boss walked by. They argued with their managers and wasted time in petty acrimonies over nothing. Complaint was their main mode and slipshod product was their output.
I noticed another thing: These people in the workplace tend to find each other. It’s like they develop a signaling system. They know each other. They become fast friends with a root connection of disgruntlement. They sow discontent. They drip poison in each others’ ears. They love and attach themselves to workplace politics.
I noticed another pattern. These disloyal employees who could never stop causing trouble don’t tend to last long. Those who do their work happily and feel gratitude and excitement tend to move up the hierarchy. Why is this? Because disloyalty is destructive of enterprise, while loyalty builds companies.
What about the observation that excessive loyalty leads to obsequiousness? A good boss will always invite criticism and welcome many points of view. This is especially true if the person passing on the comments is known to be loyal to the enterprise. Loyalty is a trait that leads to trustworthiness. With that comes credibility and hence more opportunities for speaking one’s mind.
There is nothing blind about loyalty. It’s the opposite. An employee of proven loyalties is in the best possible position to observe and report problems and have his words taken seriously. Why? Because the hearer knows for certain that the criticisms come from a good place.
Indeed, loyalty and truth telling should go together. You know how sometimes only your best friends are capable of telling you the hardest truths about your life and behavior? This is because they have earned the right to do so. The hearer can know for sure that the speaker wants what is best.
It’s true for employees, too. If you cultivate deep institutional and personal loyalty at work, you gain credibility to voice disagreement to a degree that others cannot. That’s because the bosses and owners have confidence that you are speaking with the best interest of the goal in mind. You are risking personal capital to say an uncomfortable truth. You are likely to prevail.
In government, I have no experience, but I can completely imagine that the stakes are high. This is why President Donald Trump demands loyalty. It’s not because he is a despot. It’s because he is competent and therefore knows for certain that there is no replacement for loyalty. He also knows that disloyalty comes at a premium in this environment. Knifing the boss seems to offer a big payout in the short term.
The fired Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director will soon be everywhere claiming that Kennedy demanded the impossible. Actually, he was merely demanding what is essential. He wanted to know if he could trust her, if she was loyal to the mission, to the goal, and to the management. She said no and therefore left him no choice.
There is every human right to be untrustworthy and disloyal. People exercise it all the time, much to their detriment. A free society permits people to be backstabbers, influence peddlers, unreliable jerks, duplicitous deceivers, vagabonds, and two-faced disloyalists. And yet there are consequences for this type of action. You will never earn trust, you will not have authentic friendships, you will not be authentically loved, and you will not build a career of integrity.
Putting together a great professional team in business or government requires loyalty as a first principle. If you do not have that, you have the opposite: distrust, disloyalty, and disintegration of all that matters.
