Breach (of Trust)

I went to see the movie Breach recently. If you haven’t seen the film, it stars Chris Cooper as FBI agent Robert Hanson – who was a double agent for the Soviets for 22 years while working for the FBI as an intelligence analyst. It is characterized as the most destructive case of spying in the history of the United States.

What interested me most was the apparent motivation for Hanson to spy on his own country. The movie offers several clues – most of which point to his perception of how poorly he was treated as an FBI agent. He was employed on the “intelligence” side of the bureau rather than what he calls the “gun” side of the agency. His disdain for organizational politics is clearly evident – he claims that no one from the intelligence side has every been made Director; he claims that, despite his enormous contributions to the agency, it is still the field agent that gets the “corner office”. As he sneers about his superiors, he clearly feels slighted, unappreciated, and unrecognized.

Hmmm. I don’t want to stretch this too far, because there is obviously something wrong with someone who betrays their own country, but I’m left to wonder if things might have been different if Hanson would’ve been valued as an employee. That is one of the core concepts of our training for managers – employees who are not valued, recognized, and encouraged to develop eventually leave for a better offer (taking their knowledge and your investment in their training with them) – or worse, they become actively disengaged and create significant issues inside the company.

Survey data continues to underscore the idea that employees will not be loyal or strive to do their very best work for managers they do not trust – and they simply do not trust managers that don’t value their contribution to the company. Without trust, a manager has no capacity to influence an employee positively – and, as has been asserted by John Maxwell, Stephen Covey, and Ken Blanchard (just to name a few), leadership is influence.

It is one of the compelling reasons why a company must train its managers to be effective leaders.