Cronyism: Another form of bullying Ian's Rural Ramblings

It is said that power corrupts but absolute power corrupts absolutely. Now I’m in to my sixth decade some two and a bit of them in journalism I think the saying is pretty much right and a lot of it can be put down to old fashioned cronyism.

The trouble is that descending from the heady heights of corporate and government cronyism of which our news feeds are full almost every day crony ism can raise its head at the lowest of levels too.

Human beings are emotional creatures with likes and dislikes. It is human nature to like or dislike someone or something sometimes without any rational reason at all? Then, if a person is any position of authority, even with a small organisation or business that person may sadly favour friends or groups of friends for no logical reason other than they friends.

I’ve seen this so many times and I hope that I have never succumbed to it at any level of position of authority that I have held. Indeed, I think my stubbornness in this regard may even have played out to my detriment sometimes. Whatever. I’m not sorry.

I regard cronyism as another kind of bulling and it rarely works out well.The group of cronies often lose sight of what their organisation is all about and are more interested in promoting their own agendas and will sometimes go to almost any length to do it. Sometimes there is a clash between two groups of cronies, redhat sand blue hats if you like and the result is the same. We can take this behaviour all the way to the top to national interests sometimes.

I’ve also seen organisations so tied up in themselves that a person that would have been an asset is shunned, goes their own way to the detriment of the group they would have joined. Go figure that one out.

I’ve often found that some of the worse perpetrators or silly rules and favouritism have been people with little or no power in their everyday lives. Given a taste of the heady power brew can be too much for some.

So, what to do. A crony/favouritism detector? A course, a bit like a hunting course maybe that every officer of an organisation has to pass before holding any kind of office? Sometimes some people don’t know what they’ re doing or how it looks to outside rs. Fair people management is fraught with dangers.

Mostly I think the realisation that one is acting to the detriment of someone else lies within all of us. One just has to step back and look in the mirror, really hard.