Rodney Johnson - Without Warning

The whistleblower. A conduit to justice or a path to humility and dispair? What rights and protections should a whistleblower have? Is the role of the whistleblower gaining or declining in importance? Is the whistleblower the villain, or the victim?

From my perspective, the whistleblower exists for one reason, and one reason alone - to expose and make visible a silent problem. Yes, the silent problem type that is being intentionally silenced (as noted in my book, Without Warning). I write in the chapter,” The Whistleblower,”

In most stories, a major character is confronted with a dilemma, often the challenge between “Doing what’s right” and “Doing the right thing.” The tension between these two is real and visible, and while the desired outcome is clear, the means to the outcome is sketchy and treascherous at best. And the dilemma often feels bigger that life itself. Such is the contentious landscape of the whistleblower.

In a world that has been thrown upside down in the past year, the whistleblower is slowly gaining stature and credibility, because the laws protecting the whistleblower are slowly gaining strength. And this is important, because without laws protecting the whistleblower, the risk/reward ratio is simply too great. This perspective is gaining strength, which is illustrated over at the Whistleblowers Protection Blog. Here are but a few of the captions that illustrates the role and importance of whistleblowers.

Stephen M. Kohn, Executive Director of the National Whistleblowers Center (NWC), is in Montenegro this week calling for enactment of whistleblower protections as a key component of transparency. 

Attorney Dean Zerbe, senior counsel to the National Whistleblowers Center, told Reuters and the ABA Journal that he hopes publicity of this settlement (Pfizer’s Bextra) will encourage other whistleblowers to come forward with information about fraudulent marketing. “The use of whistleblowers has really opened up the keys to the kingdom in terms of what’s going on in these companies,” 

I’m convinced that whistleblower protections and rights will continue to gain in stature and strength under this administration. I believe the whistleblower will become a primary tool for law enforcement in the future. Let me state it again, the whistleblower will become a primary tool for law  enforcement. Think about it. In an era of exploding budget deficits, the whistleblower becomes law enforcements low cost means to enforcing the statutes and laws already on the books. In effect, the whistleblower becomes the low cost alternative to the investigative task force. And organizations that have silent problems will be at risk of the whistleblower in the future.

Bottom line: The whistleblowers role of exposing silent problems in organizations will grow in importance in the future. How organizations guard against this risk is critically important, and will be discussed in Part 2.