November 1996 Article 3

Healing Texaco

Is Texaco toxic? Not the gas at the pump, the company in the office. It seems so.

What can be done about a toxic employer, a hostile environment, an abusive workplace?

These are the questions Texaco now faces. Up until and after the settlement with six African-American employees and some 1400 others in a class action lawsuit, Texaco will not be able to just go back to work. Work won't be the same. Those days are over.

It needs to be turned inside out, to look into its darkest and deepest places.

The company needs to make peace with itself. It needs to heal-- but not too soon. Before healing, it has to acknowledge its injury, its wounds, its sickness.

Before making peace, it has to recognize its conflict.

Often, we want to just get the healing over with. But that skips a step. First, you've got to deal with people's pain, trauma, and rage. You've got to deal with complicity and collusion in injustice. You've got to address rampant unethical conduct, mismanagement, incompetence, and criminal activity. You've got to realize how you have violated trust and confidence.

This is not something for which most business managers have any training. Even the personnel department doesn't have many qualifications in these areas. But it turns out that this is precisely, clinically, what is called for in doing diversity work.

The system is broken for Texaco and for all the corporations that so closely resemble it. All the king's horses and all the king's men won't be able to put it back the way it was.

That would be a good place to begin--with the burial of the old system. Give it a funeral. Mourn its passing.

We've got a meltdown, a corporate Chernobyl. We've got to contain it, decontaminate it, and declare it off limits. We've got to keep people out of there.

All that will take awhile. Texaco has a clean-up effort that will occupy the CEO for the rest of his time in office. He could be the person who presides over the transformation of the company, or the person who sees it collapse.

They will need tools, resources, support. The work that now has to be done is, by definition, work that they have never done before. We are not innocent bystanders. We've got to at least wish them well.

[ previous article ] [ back to homepage ] [ next article ]