Scrutiny

Scrutiny is a broad topic. As an auditor, I think that scrutiny is important. It’s my job to examine what other people have done to find mistakes, and perhaps find fraud or potential improvements. I’m well-rehearsed in the arguments for having review of others’ work.

            But despite all those arguments, people don’t like audit. Why would that be? We can all imagine why: if you have made a mistake, you don’t want it found and reported on. You want to make it right and forget it as quietly as possible, or perhaps just ignore and forget it. You don’t like the implication that you are less than perfect and dislike the contrast between your own self-image and the deliberately critical view of an auditor looking for and reporting mistakes.

            These are my guesses. It certainly seems that people really take issue with the tone of reports, even when they merely state facts that people acknowledge are true. Having all the bad stuff laid out in one place feels wrong to people; they’re desperate to give context and point to the good stuff they did (instead). It’s fundamentally about how the audit presents them; scrutiny that reported how great they are would be welcomed. If my job were to tell the rest of the company about how great people are, I’d have people asking for audits.

            Teachers and business alike know that the best learning comes from mistakes, and simple logic dictates that the areas most in need of work to improve are the ones that are currently bad. But from students, through employees, to politicians, it’s easier, more satisfying and less personally damaging to manage the message, not address the issues.

            Scrutiny isn’t just something from our professional lives. We all experience scrutiny in a different way in our personal lives. When people look at us, they will form conclusions, and just as in business, people intrinsically care about whether they’re judged well, even if negative judgements might also be fair. People want others to think well of them, not to think accurately of them.

            If you’re a child whose work is often poor, you dread the teacher coming over in class. It means more embarrassment, probably in front of the rest of the class. It means facing the difficulties you have with no escape. If you’re a child whose work is consistently good, teacher attention isn’t so bad. Like Hermione the fictional witch, you put your answers out there, confidently expecting approval and acceptance.

            If you’re a child who is bullied, attention from others means unpleasantness. Someone staring at you is a threat; it is a sign that they’re thinking up ways to criticise or attack you. A group of people looking for you is a sign of aggression, not friendship. If you know a child who takes this view, don’t explain away bullying behaviour as friendship. People’s attitudes are shaped by experiences, and that child needs your support.

            If you’re a popular child, people’s attention is a sign of popularity. It means good things. Attention means invitations to parties, compliments and friendship. Laughter means happiness, not mockery.

            When I hear laughter near me and I didn’t hear the joke, I feel a deep uneasiness. For most of my life that has meant people having fun at my expense. Lots of people associate the sound of laughter with general jollity; it’s a relaxing sign that there is no stress nearby. But that’s a learned response, not a universal fact.

            The learned response to audit is fear. Audit is intended to pick on bad things, but in a professional context. It’s there to help people improve. Businesses want to know about errors and weaknesses in order to fix them. Just like teacher attention, staff should welcome the audit. A lack of desire for an audit ought to be a sign of a poor employee: both because it might imply that there are mistakes to be covered up, and because it shows an unwillingness to improve.

            Where the purpose is improvement, the approach really should be ‘if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear’. We need a culture of accepting mistakes, not blaming each other for them; we need to be as open as possible, and treasure the criticism of audits as opportunities to be even better. But most businessmen don’t take that approach. Scrutiny is always nasty.

            What about personal scrutiny? Does bullying merely reflect opportunities for improvement? If you think so, that’s an opportunity to improve your mind. We shouldn’t expect people to welcome personal scrutiny in the same way. It’s not invited, and it’s not purposeful. Audits are a part of business life, and employees should understand that it’s their job. No-one has a personal obligation to undergo scrutiny, although well-meaning friends might suggest it for people who have serious problems.

            When it comes to privacy, the approach that people have nothing to fear if they have nothing to hide simply does not hold true any more. In business, your work is your employer’s; that’s what you’re paid to do, and the employer should be entitled to check it. But the very definition of ‘personal’ implies privacy. As I’ve said before, the people who have nothing to fear from scrutiny in a personal sense are not those who are law-abiding, but those who are boring. There are plenty of private activities for which others will judge you which are legal. Being good at your schoolwork, being fat, having a big or small nose, being homosexual: these are all reasons for bullies to attack schoolchildren or even adults.

            If anything, we should be protecting personal privacy and getting angry with business privacy. But we’re not.

            But the most talked-about form of scrutiny is one I haven’t even addressed yet. The male gaze, which I love so much (because I use it to see) scrutinises women. Or that’s how feminists see it. The feminist intellectual gaze has found error and has judged it. And we need to understand that this isn’t a women’s issue, in which only women can suffer from male dominance. Women are indeed taught to be shy, retiring and not seek the limelight. Women are taught to be chaste, which involves protecting themselves from the male gaze, even to the extent of covering up. In Christian America or Catholic Europe, that might be demure long skirts; in the Middle East, like Egyptian pyramids, it can be a complete cloth wrapping. Feminists recognise that this is a problem, and that women shouldn’t be embarrassed of their own bodies: that it’s not a woman’s job to control the stupid judgements of others.

            But it isn’t an integral feature of being a woman that makes scrutiny feel so demeaning and stressful. There are women who revel in being the centre of attention; who have been popular and well-liked and whose overwhelming experience of attention has been positive. That describes many men, who have been taught to be aggressive go-getters that dominate attention, and whom are praised and rewarded for such behaviour.

            Nonetheless, it is the fear of scrutiny that makes scrutiny of any sort an unpleasant thing. The fear of scrutiny affects all sorts of people, including many young men. Men have the luxury of hiding their bodies, with male clothing not only concealing the size that everyone argues about, but the size of one’s muscles too (if one chooses). I also think that amongst themselves, men typically have a very tolerant attitude; an attitude not shared by some women, if surveys showing that women are a bigger source than men of gossip about other women are correct.

            I do think it would be nice to audit a man who asks a woman on the street to return a smile when he asks for one. I doubt he’d be so happy about scrutiny in his professional life, even though I’ve just described reasons why we should welcome it so much more at work. The men who rise to the top, who are brash and seek attention and do well from it can’t imagine why attention would be a bad thing.

            We need to teach everyone why attention can feel bad, and it seems that audit is a perfect example. I do know people who were happy about audit; who genuinely welcomed it with confidence. But they didn’t strike me as the most brash attention-seeking type of people. These were thoughtful people who weren’t relying on subconscious training into an approach to life.

            We need to recognise that scrutiny is vital in business, and that auditors like me will find room for improvement. Those of us who have experienced negative attention at school, or as women, already know how to deal with it. It is the loud attention-seekers who are currently driving their way to the top of business who hate audit and its focus on the negative, because they haven’t had to build the emotional resilience to negative scrutiny. For them it’s weird and outrageous to think of negative things when there are positives. For some of us, it’s other people’s standard way of thinking of us.

            We also need to recognise that although we should welcome negative scrutiny as professional adults, we do far too much of it in person and as children, and we do it to women and men. We have it exactly the wrong way round. Women should not have to enjoy the attention of men, and men should take the responsibility for teaching them not to enjoy it. It’s the long years of telling women to be modest that makes them reject men who are genuinely intending to be pleasant.

            Finally, women need to understand that not all men are malicious, and that most attention simply doesn’t understand what women have had to deal with through their lives. If I can re-learn how to deal with people (or, at least, control my instinctive reactions), so can others. And, above all, we need to realise that anyone can fear scrutiny, and that if they do, we can’t change that lifelong learning overnight.