Our resident corporate Agony Uncle, CEO Ken Cheng, tackles business challenges – so you don’t have to.
Dear Ken Cheng,
Someone scratched my company car in the office parking lot and nobody is admitting to it. How can I get people to fess up without encroaching too much on their rights?
– Brad, Manager, Southampton
Ken Cheng:
Firstly, there is no such thing as going too far to find out the perpetrator of a crime. And there is no bigger asset for a manager than his company car. You might as well have scratched his wife or his newborn child.
A car is everything. You might think it’s only just a form of transportation, but it’s not. It’s also there to project an image of success. If I see a manager rock up on a bicycle, or riding the tube to work, I immediately think: failure. That branch is going under in 3 months.
As for extracting the info out of your employees, think of your employees like the French Resistance, and yourself as the occupying force. They are your enemy and you must wipe them out at all costs.
Here, it really is a case of turning them against each other. Unfortunately, this is hard to do in British culture: whoever invented the phrase “Snitches Get Stitches” has a lot to answer for. Here are a few ways to get someone to crack:
- Bring in an employee and say “I know you scratched my car.” They might confess. This works 1% of the time, but 1% is better than 0%.
- Bring in an employee and say “Sandra said you scratched my car.” This will turn them against Sandra, whether she did the scratching or not, sowing disarray.
- Chinese water torture. Illegal and use at a last resort.
- Subtly hint they may get a new work Laptop or keys to the executive bathroom.
I learned all these from a book I read about the CIA.
As you can see, there’s a lot you can do here, from manipulation, to coercion, to bribery. Snitches don’t get stitches. Snitches get a Christmas Bonus.
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