You are interviewing for a senior professional post in your organisation. The skills and knowledge required are considerable and the job is demanding. A male candidate is next up, equipped with a brilliant CV and a designer suit. On paper and in his suit, he looks great. The questioning begins.
Clearly he is very bright: this looks promising. Then he informs the panel that his overriding motivation in life is how much he is paid. Not that other factors don’t matter, of course, but he wants to make it plain that money matters. The interview questions continue. He is most impressive. But again, he makes a point of telling you that he will be expecting top pay if he takes the job. Well, that is for negotiation, you reply. He tells you firmly that people like him are in such demand that he will have no hesitation in quitting if offered more money by another organisation, even if it is on the other side of the world. The interview ends awkwardly. As he leaves, he takes his final opportunity to stress that he will be off the moment he is dissatisfied with his salary and the expected bonuses.
Does he get the job? What would most interview panels make of such a candidate?
I assume and hope most would think this man is gravely deficient as a senior professional. He has all the qualifications, but he is obsessed with money: how much he is paid overrides all other considerations. In a profession, those other considerations are at the heart of the role. They are professional virtues – the characteristics of vocation. People aspiring to the heights of a profession care, and rightly so, about their earnings, but they care also, and more intensely, about the core values of their work. The virtues of a professional life include concern for ethical standards, trust, loyalty and the transmission of the right values to the next generation of professionals.
Someone for whom top whack pay trumps all of these in all cases is not a rounded professional. We would not hire such a person to be a head teacher, or a doctor, or a senior nurse, or a civil servant. But apparently we now have a cadre of senior bankers for whom professionalism means nothing but securing top whack with menaces. No doubt the recent crops of banking chief executives and senior executives said all the right things in their interviews. But once installed in their offices, they give the collective impression of being disturbingly one-dimensional in their motivations.
The message from the elite ranks of what used to be seen as a respected profession is that the only thing that keeps them motivated is cash, and lots of it. Any suggestion that restraint might be in order, or that bonuses might be treated as discretionary instead of mandatory, is met by veiled or overt threats to quit the company and/or the country, as in the case of Stephen Hester’s bonus at RBS. There is never a word about non-financial motivating forces - for example, of loyalty to colleagues, employees, stakeholders, public interest, national interest, or even to the shareholders.
Representatives of the banking sector apparently share this outlook. We are constantly told that we risk an exodus of top talent if anything is done to reduce the immense rewards scooped by senior bankers. We hear next to nothing about the professional virtues expected in banking or the non-monetary factors that ought to motivate self-respecting senior people. Stephen Hester, I assume, is an honourable man who has other motivations in his job than accumulating cash. He has a vastly difficult job, but he also has a huge salary and, it is fair to guess, lifelong financial security. The same goes for his peers across the sector. In these circumstances, money should become less important as a motivator and professional virtues more significant. But all we hear from the banks and their association is that money outweighs all else. The ‘best people’ by definition are those who demand the most pay. This is not how a profession should conduct itself, or wish to be seen.
How is it that banking has reduced itself to this state, where its collective sense of professional virtue has been so badly damaged? The industry is now desperately short of public trust and respect, and one reason for that is that its own sense of professional self-respect has been so diminished. Until the banking sector starts to reflect and act on what it means to be a true profession, it will have only itself to blame if its top executives are seen as mercenaries with one-track minds. For that is what their representatives and apologists are telling us they are.
Ian Christie is Research Fellow in the Centre for Environmental Strategy at the University of Surrey, and Coordinator of the Sustainable Lifestyles Research Group. He has focused on questions of sustainability since the 1980s and worked with Theos on issues of Christianity and sustainable development. He writes in a personal capacity.
