Loyalty

Dr. Deborah Birx’s email revelations of today show that, at worst, she was criminally timid in representing the mandates of her profession or, at best, is running with a loyalty ethos that prioritizes loyalty to the person above loyalty to the mission. Neither scenario covers her in glory, but I suspect she was caught up in trying to be loyal to the person, although she might reframe it as her being loyal to ‘the position’ of the office of the President. Loyalty in the workplace is a siren song; there is an alluring pride both in having loyal employees and, in some ways more so, in being seen as loyal to your own boss. (Or to the mission―we’ll get there).

Birx didn’t agree with the Trump Team’s medical plan to push ‘herd immunity’ as the way forward through the Pandemic and so sought a way to not participate in a Trump-endorsed medical conference wherein a focus would be the advocacy of herd-immunity strategies that she believed were scientifically unsound and very dangerous to the U.S. population. She was at the time, notably, the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator and was of course presumed to attend. But her decision to evade the conference and give ‘cover’ to the White House to account for her absence speaks to something that may seem surprising: she thought she was expressing loyalty to the President by not frustrating his intentions, and, worse, she didn’t then perceive the dishonor in that expression of loyalty. And that dynamic, that specific blind-spot of feeling, is ‘workplace cultural’ and is where ships crash into rocks.

Birx’s actions should have been informed by her Hippocratic Oath as a Doctor, her Oath of Office as an Army Colonel, and whatever further declarations of duty attended her ascension to the position of White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator. The Hippocratic Oath states in part: “I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine” and the Oath of Office for an Army Officer states in part: “I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic“. I doubt any induction to her Coronavirus Response Coordinator position deviated materially from these basic premises. Nowhere would it say that ensuring the psychological comfort of the boss is the priority—regardless of the mission or circumstances.

I believe Birx’s actions were informed by something other than her oaths: the nebulous but strong and prevalent workplace culture of ‘supporting the Boss’ or ‘supporting the Commander’.

I’ve dealt with this for decades in the military, and from early on, I’ve always factored in loyalty towards the mission versus loyalty to the Commander specifically. (I acknowledge that in theory they are supposed to be aligned.) As the stakes increase, I find myself factoring in the mission even more. This is dangerous stuff in the Army Officer world and has sometimes inured tangibly to my detriment; I’ve been hurt by this and feel sufficient standing to opine. Perhaps my tack is nebulous as well, but it doesn’t violate any oaths and no mission has suffered by my snuggling up to the justification of ‘being loyal to the Boss’. Though I’ve certainly had some allies along the way, I found that my peers were generally uncomfortable with the subject of supporting the mission versus the Commander and default to the prevailing culture of wanting to show that they’re supporting the Commander.

Proof of Birx’s entanglement in this culture is her candid admission to her peers about what she was doing and why. If she felt any shame or dishonor, that email being dissected in the news today would never have happened. Perhaps she was aware also that she’d even engender some respect from her peers over her martyrdom towards engineering a way to not counter her boss. And now look how far we’ve strayed from the mission of advocating science in service to saving lives during a national emergency.

Birx no doubt thinks she was ‘respecting and protecting the position of the President of the United States. And I really mean ‘no doubt’―I’ve seen this too many times and every time someone is called on this they talk about respecting the position “even if I don’t like the person”. Some even expect, as a result of this declaration, to be respected for their magnanimity in this regard! Certainly, Birx didn’t like Trump (how could any real scientist?) and was aware of his flaws as a human, let alone a leader. But this is missing the point; the mission of coordinating the Coronavirus response in the United States should trump Trump’s personality traits -be they good or bad- and following that mission’s North Star would have had her in that conference advocating scientifically and ethically sound courses of action while refuting scientifically and ethically unsound courses of action.

The ‘respecting the position’ argument deflates further when one thinks about the workplace environment with granularity. It is not the position, but the person, that one encounters at meetings, and in the halls, and it is the person one communicates with―it is not the position. For Birx, it would be Trump saying nice things about her or not, inviting her to meetings or not, enhancing her career or not. It would not be the abstract concept of a position that does these things for her or to her.

A final argument that some give in these situations is that they must behave so in order to remain on scene (versus resigning in protest) to prevent things from getting even worse. This color of hubris tries to believe that their special brand of expertise is more valuable than sending a message, with either candid argument or resignation, that the mission is at risk. Besides being ultimately a disservice to the boss, and by extension the mission, this argument smacks of cowardice. And we’ll never know how things could have turned out better had everyone involved had the spine to recalibrate their loyalty off of flawed humans and towards the actual job mission.

What’s the fix? We could start by devaluing the notion of automatic loyalty to people of position. And we could consider in advance exactly where we would willingly subordinate our own need to be seen as loyal to the boss in order to prioritize the larger needs of mission accomplishment. It’s a tough sell, I know ―everybody wants to be seen as a good little boy or girl.

How will you know when you are at that crossroads? You’ll know. And then remember that you have a choice that might be different than the one you’ve been trained to feel.

I can’t believe I got through this without mentioning bleach.

Whoops.