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.
