I have also seen men of character who worked for lesser men. Who gave loyalty a faithful service. Never shirking from their responsibility, striving to do their best even when they knew they could get by with less. These men taught me the true meaning of loyalty to ones self. The idea that you do not need to be loyal to the company, because the company is not loyal to you, hurts you and those who work with you. It expresses a value to your children and friends and anyone who might admire or look up to you as a man, that is selfishness. It propagates the “whats in it for me” mentality that is the cause of corporate disloyalty in the first place. Employers have an obligation to their employees, corporations have an obligation to their shareholders, and the public in general, and the government, including the bureaucracy have an obligation to the people which they serve.

These ideals have been fading from our world. This has not happened over night, it has been a gently erosion of a few grains at a time over the course of decades. It’s starts in the life of one man, the example that man sets not with words but by example, effects the future actions of many. This grows exponentially and spreads like a disease.

I say that loyalty to ones employer is best shown by simply being an honest man. Work to the best of your ability when you are at work. Do the best job you can do always. Never shortcut anything. Give the time, and skills you are paid for to your job. Take pride in your work not matter what it is. This to is loyalty to yourself and your family. If you must leave your current employer for a better wage, or greater opportunity, that is not disloyalty if you know that you gave the best while employed by them. Loyalty shown to an employer in deed and action will instill loyalty in future generations. Those who come after us will be the new CEO’s and leaders of the world. What they learn early will be the litmus that they measure their future decisions against.

Loyalty in the work place boils down to:

Keeping faith that you will perform 100% the work you are paid to do.

Keeping the secrets of the company to which you are priviliged.

Doing all things at work in the best interest of the company. This sometimes includes whistle blowing. Illegal or dangerous practices are never in the best interest of a company.

Do not talk ill of your employer to those outside of the company. It hurts the company and you.

It doesn’t take away from the message, just wanted to clarify. please press on :)

Loyalty is a lifestyle. It manifests itself in all the things that you do. It becomes a measure of your integrity.

I think your question about disloyalty also provides an answer. A man has to justify being disloyal. Justification is subjective. You can justify just about anything, but if your justification flies in the face of honesty, integrity, courage, faithfulness, fortitude, strength, honor, respect, or any number of other adjectives that describe loyalty, then i think justification just becomes excuses. Loyalty is a core, or an ideal, I don’t know if it’s possible to justify your disloyalty to anyone but yourself, as loyalty is a personal decision, executed under unique circumstances.

I’ll see your Dante and raise you one Shakespeare, a very familiar set of lines from Hamlet (Act I, Scene 3). This is Polonius advising his son Laertes, who is leaving for college:

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

It seems to me that the range of excellent, thoughtful responses to “On Manly Loyalty” makes the wisdom of these Shakespearean lines apparent. If I ask myself what is truly important – those “core values,” as Brett terms them — then questions of how to handle loyalty issues in relationships or career or politics all fall into line. I can’t be false to any man.

But this takes a willingness to live with some gray areas. And we risk being unpopular when we determine values for ourselves, not accepting the “truth” handed to us by a set of scriptures or a political party or a talk-show host or an educational system or a boss or even William Shakespeare or Dante Alighieri. Something about manliness has to do with independent thought, knowing yourself, making sure it’s your “core” that chooses your “values.” That’s the best meaning of “authority.” You have it when you know who you are.

And even when you’re cool with your compass, your loyalties may not be black-and-white. Look how many good knotty problems we’re all raising. Brett, you’ve formulated a whole set of interesting scenarios in your exchange with Nik. And a lot of guys are chiming in with really heartfelt dilemmas. I feel like I spend half my life redoing or rethinking or revisiting something I would have done a different way if I’d just been true enough to myself at the outset to admit it wouldn’t work out. But instead, I got all loyal-ed up for some plan or effort or resolution or whatever, and went charging out to do it … only to realize months later that I hadn’t started with a really clear idea of who I was on the issue and what I needed to make happen.

Janus, I really hear you on the fabulous disloyalty of the corporate and political worlds we’re in today. My industry, journalism, is now a goner. The Founding Fathers could foresee governments wanting to control the free press, but not multinational corporations. So entertainment companies (Time Warner, Viacom, Disney) have bought the major news networks of my career – and a lot of us who went in loyal to the principles of genuine journalism find ourselves ordered to cover “Hollywood bad girls” and share our professional world with “citizen journalists” (the euphemism of choice for amateurs). Would you let a “citizen surgeon” take out your kid’s tonsils? Or might you not feel that your hospital had abandoned a sacred loyalty to its patients when they handed the scalpel to that hobbyist? The corporate-owned news media now are “in bad faith” with you, another cool old phrase for disloyalty, when they ditch professional rigor to invite in amateur “journalists” — because their advertisers like the audience-building effects of interactivity.

All this for me, Brett and Kate, says you’re right on the money with your criticism of the shopping mentality. It’s easier to be shoved around by fads, trends, media-inflated issues, “gurus” of this and “czars” of that than it is to get a grip and keep it. And the sheer explosion of means, modes and menus is part of the problem. No one else in human history has been exposed to as many ideas, effects, potentials, platforms, options, versions and commercially artful distractions as are crowding in on us today. (This goes back to your “Curing Your Restlessness” piece of last month.)

But rising to that challenge — turning off the Values Shopping Network and getting down to whatever really means the most inside each of us – is the only way. If we can just figure that out, just sort out what it is to be true to ourselves, then we’ll be loyal to other men, too. We’ll show them the honesty of what we are and what we respect. And maybe that’s really manly loyalty. Getting strong and straight enough to admit that in order to be loyal to anybody else, we need to learn how to be loyal to ourselves.