By Adam Turteltaub, Chief Engagement & Strategy Officer, SCCE & HCCA
The death of Hulk Hogan took me back to the 1980s when, like so many others, I really got into professional wrestling. I watched way too much of it on TV. I bought tickets to a pay per view remote broadcast piped into a hotel ballroom when I lived in Washington, DC. Then, while living in New York and working in advertising, my friend Doug, who worked at the same ad agency, got us tickets to sit in the front row for Summer Slam ’88.
That was a night that I will never forget. It didn’t matter that I knew that the matches were staged with pre-determined outcomes. It didn’t matter that, from the front row, I could see how many of the vicious “hits” were actually well-placed near misses. I screamed my head off, rooting for my favorites, and for good to triumph over evil.
Yes, it was a cartoon battle, but the people behind pro-wrestling knew that there had to be a good guy and a bad guy, and that the more it was a battle between right and wrong, the more the fans cared.
What’s remarkable to me is that wrestling is so good at getting people to think about right and wrong and care deeply and loudly about it. But in the workplace, where the stakes are so much higher and so much more real, it’s infinitely harder to get people to care and speak up, let alone scream at the top of their lungs.
I think part of it is that wrestling, unlike workplace ethics discussions, appeals to us at a visceral level. It pulls at our emotions and invites us to care deeply and passionately.
But also, it does one thing very well: it never says that you are about to see ethics play out in a workplace. It takes the message, wraps it in a story and helps us to focus on the people and the effects actions, right and wrong, have on them.
Focusing on the people is also the secret sauce of Drive to Survive, the Netflix series that has led to an explosion of interest in Formula 1 racing. The show is not about the cars, the transmissions or the tires. It’s about the very interesting and all-too-human people in the sport. There are drivers and team leaders that you find yourself quickly rooting for, and others you hope will end up stalled out at the side of the track.
If you watch a few episodes, just note that, like pro-wrestling, its content is most definitely not always compliant. And the language is, well, often more colorful than the shiny paint on the cars. I had no idea that you could hear language like that in so many different accents.
To me, the bottom line is that ethics isn’t the boring topic that employees claim it to be. If we can find a way to make it about people, and to add some drama to the situation, we can get them to meaningfully engage and speak up.
That’s way better than picking them up, putting them into a helicopter spin and body slamming them to the mat, even if it’s okay in pro wrestling.