Shredding documents, destroying or recycling hard drives, and altering records are examples of destroying evidence of what the organization is concealing. Even when evidence destruction is the primary concealment strategy, it's effective only if all evidence is destroyed or rendered unobtainable.
The testimony of witnesses is one kind of evidence that cannot be destroyed as long as the witnesses are able to bear witness. Testimony can be prevented by intimidation, brutality, bribery, and other means, but if prevention fails, what then? From the concealer's perspective, two techniques can be effective even if the whistleblower blows the whistle.
- Indirect personal attacks
- Most whistleblowers anticipate direct personal attacks, but personal attacks can be directed at loved ones, too. Children, spouses, parents, siblings — all are potential targets. Spouses can be seduced. Legal, emotional, financial, marital, or other difficulties of close family members can be exposed and used to discredit or apply pressure to whistleblowers.
- If you already know of vulnerabilities of this kind, consider carefully how to protect yourself. Finding employment elsewhere is not protection from those who fear exposure. If the organization or its employees believe that you might someday become a problem, they might preemptively destroy your credibility in advance of any action you might take, no matter where you go for your next job or assignment. Effective protection usually involves convincing them of your ability to do more damage to them than they can do to you. That strategy often requires assembling evidence and seeking professional assistance.
- Direct disinformation
- Employees not directly implicated Finding employment elsewhere
is not protection from
those who fear exposurein the concealed activity (or inactivity) are potential candidate whistleblowers, because they often feel — justifiably or not — that they haven't themselves transgressed. From the perspective of those directly involved, even candidate whistleblowers constitute risk. To limit risk, false information of a seemingly incriminating nature is sometimes made available to them. Passing along this disinformation to investigators or media could then damage the whistleblower's credibility. - Don't assume that everything you think you know about the concealed activity is actually true. Be especially careful about material that came to you too easily, or uncorroborated, or which had a "stage-managed" feel. If you suspect that you've received disinformation, interpret it as an indicator that you're being targeted proactively as a potential whistleblower. That could mean that the organization, or individuals within it, have taken other actions as well, such as investigating you or your family members, or tampering with your work products or records. When you do pass along information to counsel, investigators, or media, be careful to indicate whether you suspect that any of it is disinformation intentionally passed along to you.
These tactics are rarely obvious. Intuition and good judgment are required. Trust the Force, Luke. First in this series Top Next Issue
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Related articles
More articles on Workplace Politics:
- Dealing with Org Chart Age Inversions
- What happens when you learn that your new boss is younger than you are? Or when the first two applicants
you interview for a position reporting to you are ten years older than you are? Do you have a noticeable
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- The High Cost of Low Trust: II
- Truly paying attention to Trust at work is rare, in part, because we don't fully appreciate what distrust
really costs. Here's Part II of a little catalog of how we cope with distrust, and how we pay for it.
- Hostile Collaborations
- Sometimes collaboration with people we hold in low regard can be valuable. If we enter a hostile collaboration
without first accepting both the hostility and the value, we might sabotage it outside our awareness,
and that can render the effort worthless — or worse. What are the dynamics of hostile collaborations,
and how can we do them well?
- Unwelcome Workplace Hugs
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- Incoherent Initiatives
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See also Workplace Politics and Managing Your Boss for more related articles.
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Beware any resource that speaks of "winning" at workplace politics or "defeating" it. You can benefit or not, but there is no score-keeping, and it isn't a game.
- Wikipedia has a nice article with a list of additional resources
- Some public libraries offer collections. Here's an example from Saskatoon.
- Check my own links collection
- LinkedIn's Office Politics discussion group