The Credentials of Impatience

A payment request arrives without the usual approval. From a colleague, the omission invites a question. From someone who sounds like the chief executive, it can seem to answer one: this must be business too important for the usual process.

When leaders routinely bypass safeguards, an impostor’s evasions can make the impersonation more convincing.

In some of your organizations, employees learn rank by learning who owes an explanation. The junior person supplies the form. The senior person supplies impatience. After enough repetitions, urgency, secrecy, and skipped approvals can stop looking like reasons for doubt. They become familiar signs that an important person is handling an important matter.

An impostor can then borrow two things at once: an identity and its exemptions. The voice makes the claim plausible; the exemptions make checking it seem improper. A demand for secrecy also discourages the second conversation in which another employee might notice what is wrong.

A newcomer might find the request alarming; an experienced clerk may have spent years learning that this is how the executive behaves. The employee can be wrong about the caller while being right about the workplace. An organization can punish verification for years, then describe a deceived employee as insufficiently cautious.

Fear, urgency, and a convincing voice can deceive people in any workplace. Routine executive exemptions add a narrower danger: behavior that should provoke doubt becomes a reason to believe.

Real emergencies sometimes require exceptions. Permission to depart from a procedure and evidence of who is requesting the departure are different things. Urgency may explain an unusual order; it cannot establish who issued it.

Synthetic speech can make a stranger sound like the boss. In such a workplace, the organization has supplied another part of the impersonation: the expectation that the boss should not have to prove it.