Reaction to a Murder

by MARK OHRINGER

_{SPRING 2025 |}_FEATURE

Reaction to a Murder

How a public tragedy provides a lesson for reducing corporate ethics problems and increasing psychological safety for everyone

by MARK OHRINGER

On December 4, 2024, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was fatally shot in the early morning hours in New York City, while walking to a shareholder conference. The shooting prompted polarizing public reaction, especially online.

A remarkable feature of Thompson’s brazen murder was the glee it immediately produced in online commentary from people who have had frustrating experiences with health insurance providers, even expressing hope that the shooter would never be found and advocating that anyone having incriminating information about him should keep it to themselves. Even after the accused killer was arrested, significant vitriol was aimed at the restaurant employee who had identified him to the police. Such was the obvious volume and extraordinary tone of these posts that all the major news outlets reported on it, and op-ed writers used it as further evidence of the decline of American society.

MARK J. OHRINGER was the Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary of Jones Lang LaSalle Incorporated from 2003-2018. During that time, he oversaw the firm’s legal, compliance, ethics and insurance programs on a global basis. He is retired.

It is hard to imagine a similarly communal lack of sympathy for the killing of an otherwise innocent husband and father of two who worked for a benign company that most people appreciate, such as a bakery or a children’s clothing retailer. It is also hard to imagine that the vast majority of those who posted snarky comments online, if they calmly thought about it for a little while, or if they were being interviewed on TV, or personally met with the slain executive’s widow, would still say it is OK to shoot someone because he is employed by an aggravating corporation.

So, what we can learn from this disturbing reaction to a murder, beyond the fact that the internet brings out the worst in people, and that our healthcare system is broken?

For many years, having been deeply involved with the ethics program at a global corporation, I have been interested in the following question: Even though organizations of all shapes and sizes regularly spend large amounts of money, time, and energy on their ethics and compliance programs, why do there continue to be so many, and such significant, legal and ethical violations by their employees and customers?

One might think that all of those efforts would put a meaningful dent in the frequency and severity of misconduct that occurs within corporate operations. But a quick glance at any given day’s headlines says otherwise. And for every breach big enough to merit major news coverage, many smaller ones never get publicized. Why haven’t our prevention and detection systems been more effective? Is this the best we can do, or are we missing something? Are there untried approaches we could be taking that would actually be much more impactful and lasting?

One answer is that in our efforts to drive ethics and compliance, organizations are not sufficiently taking into account (nor taking advantage of) what we know about psychology and neuroscience as a means to promote optimal behaviors and decision-making abilities among their employees and customers. We know from our own experiences the feeling of anger (and even rage) that results when someone else treats us poorly in some way

For every breach big enough to merit major news coverage, many smaller ones never get publicized. Why haven’t our prevention and detection systems been more effective? Is this the best we can do, or are we missing something?

Mark Ohringer

or recklessly cuts us off in traffic. And when we get angry, the ability to control our impulses seriously diminishes, prompting us to say or do things that we would never have allowed ourselves to do while in a calm state when we could better regulate our emotions and that we may really regret having done only after it is too late.

We can see from the response to Thompson’s murder that one of the best ways to anger customers is to treat them in a way that they perceive to be disrespectful or unfair. No one likes to wait forever to get an agent to talk to you, if you can even figure out how to get around the automated answering system, and no one likes to be denied reimbursement for an expensive medical bill in a way that they perceive to be arbitrary, thoughtless, or cruel.

When it comes to employees, they really don’t like learning that they are being paid less than someone else who is doing the exact same job or when they perceive that a top salesperson got a pass on some bad behavior for which a lower-level person would have been summarily sacked. And those are just two of the many ways in which we all know that it is easy to annoy employees.

Once an actual or perceived organizational injustice has inflamed our reptilian brains with a rush of neurotransmitters to our amygdalas, our ability to control our emotions and reactions degrades sharply, which in turn can lead us to make some very bad, very irrational decisions. It is at this point that we may say things we shouldn’t, take vengeful actions against others, or even become physically violent.

This can happen to anyone, to one degree or another, since this is simply how we are built, including those of us who are proud of our usual morality and thoughtful rationality. When it does inevitably happen, that’s when you can expect your organization’s ethics hotline to light up, if not also a call to 911.

And yet, even though the trip from organizational injustice to poor impulse control is naturally quite short, neither of these concepts has taken center-stage as core principles in the ways in which most corporations either filter their operations, treat their customers, or train their people. This is, of course, not meant to blame a company for getting its CEO killed—a deranged, delusional act that can never be rationalized. But it is meant to place at least some responsibility on every kind of company for the more mundane adverse behaviors that will predictably result from its willful ignorance about how its unfair or frustrating actions may negatively affect everyone psychologically.

So: (i) a much-heightened awareness of, and intentional management by, any organization for how the actual or perceived unfairness or injustice of its activities will likely inflame passion and reduce rationality within its communities, combined with (ii) assertively promoting impulse control among employees, customers, and everyone else with whom the organization comes into contact, should (iii) together significantly reduce the quantity and severity of the unethical or illegal acts of which that organization (or its people) will be the target.

These efforts are not a central part of how most organizations currently approach either their operations generally or their ethics and compliance efforts specifically, and as a result there is a meaningful scope for potential improvement and a huge potential return on what need only be a relatively modest investment of time and thought. The bottom line: a new paradigm for promoting an organization’s ethical culture.

Identifying and Reducing Organizational Injustice

In order to reduce the psychological toxicity that it has the potential to impose, every organization can consciously make the assertive effort to identify how any of its operations are, or may be perceived to be, unjust or unfair. This will, of course, manifest itself differently across different organizations given the diversity of their missions, but there are some basic principles that any organization can follow to avoid causing aggravation and the poor impulsivity that leads to damaging behaviors. And while these may seem to be mastery of the obvious, anecdotal evidence suggests that many organizations are not approaching any kind of effort like this in an overt, organized, or holistic way.

Employees, for example, will perceive organizational injustice if they believe that: someone’s gender, age, or any other inappropriate reason is impacting compensation decisions more than the quality of their work; that rules are not being consistently enforced across all levels of the organization; that senior managers are treating lower-level employees poorly or abusively without consequence; that creature comforts like office space or expense accounts are disproportionately or arbitrarily allocated to the undeserving; or that employee terminations are conducted capriciously or without empathy. Even if an organization is sure that none of these situations are true in fact, it should consider whether it may have inadvertently created the perception of injustice by being less transparent or communicative about its activities than it could have been.

Similarly, customers may conclude that a company has acted unjustly if they perceive a lack of respect for them as equal individuals or for their business. As we have seen in the UnitedHealthcare situation, social media quickly magnifies public perception (whether or not it is correct) of bureaucratic or arbitrary decision-making in a way that no organization can truly manage.

And customers can also easily develop a negative view of an organization, even though they are not themselves directly affected, if they perceive it has acted irresponsibly, including as the result of how the organization treats its people or how it responds to crises (an example of which is the public venom directed at Boeing after its defensive response to 737 Max crashes that ultimately proved to be its own fault).

Successfully managing internal justice efforts need not require an organization to spend a lot of money, retool its infrastructure, or radically change its business practices. Rather, it will go a long way to use regular communications processes (including messages from its CEO and other senior management) to (i) maintain awareness around the issue and take an intentional approach to considering its significant operations through the lens of how they will be perceived as a matter of fairness and justice, and then (ii) thoughtfully making such changes as necessary to avoid the appearance of impropriety.

To further this effort, an organization might consider a filter process where major decisions or activities are reviewed by individuals within the legal, compliance, ethics, or HR teams to screen for fairness issues. This does not mean the organization must do what they say, but it will undoubtedly be better off for at least having asked the question in an intentional way and listened to the response. Another way to think about this effort is that it could simply represent a regular aspect of the organization’s overall enterprise risk management efforts to actively mitigate the specific risks that it identifies within its particular environment.

Promoting Impulse Control

Even if an organization were able to eliminate all of the injustices that could spur negative emotions and consequential damaging acts against it, this would not also eliminate all of the other ways that the flaws inherent in any organization’s practices may cause ill-will in the minds of those who may not be able to stop themselves from lashing out in detrimental ways, even though unethical or illegal. Companies with significant product liabilities as the result of faulty equipment or toxic chemicals know all-too-well that this can lead to existential crises. So while the first lesson from the UnitedHealthcare reaction is the importance of promoting organizational justice as a means of avoiding psychological toxicity, the second lesson is that entities of all kinds, regardless of what kind of business they are in, would benefit from expressly promoting impulse control in its employees, customers, and the other individuals with whom it comes into contact in the ordinary course of its operations.

Customers can also easily develop a negative view of an organization if they perceive it has acted irresponsibly.

Mark Ohringer

Most teaching of ethics has historically been focused on educating people on what rules they must follow and then summarily telling them just to comply with those rules or there will be consequences. This is true whether it is a church preaching the Ten Commandments (thou shalt not kill) or a corporation giving mandatory ethics and compliance training (thou shalt not commit insider trading).

But typically this kind of training does not also acknowledge that virtually every human being, by the very nature of their psychology and brain chemistry, is apt to be tempted to break one rule or another from time to time, whether as the result of anger at unfair treatment, greed, envy, sexual desire, or any other kind of raw emotion that all of us, if we are being honest about it, know that we experience as a regular part of life. Importantly, the training does not coach people on how to mindfully and constructively manage those feelings in ways that will keep them from taking the next step of impulsively and detrimentally acting on those emotions.

It is one thing to think about how exciting it would be to have extra cash as the result of buying shares based on insider information, to take revenge on your evil boss, or to sleep with your direct report Pat in Finance; it is another thing altogether to actually do any of them, none of which will likely end well for you. Most of us probably feel that we are moral people who are perfectly able to stop ourselves from doing bad things, and that anger management school is only for that other guy who could not control his road rage, but that does not reflect the reality that all of us are likely underestimating just how prone we are to letting our feelings get the best of us given the right brew of circumstances, and that all of us would benefit from some explicit impulse control training.

The trick is to have the self-awareness to realize when your deep-seeded, animalistic impulses are starting to take over your emotions and decision-making capabilities, and then to have some simple techniques to calm yourself so that you don’t take irrevocable actions that could, and I’m not exaggerating here, negatively alter the course of the rest of your life.

It is one thing to think about buying shares based on insider information, taking revenge on an evil boss, or pursuing romantic relations with a direct report. It is another thing altogether to actually do any of them.

Mark Ohringer

Because most people have not actually had organized impulse control training from their families or from their secular or religious education, organizations that want to minimize the extent to which they might be the victim of poor impulse control would do well to incorporate this kind of training into their own employee education programs. Although a little more complicated, they should also consider ways in which to promote impulse control in its customers and other third-parties whom it cannot formally train but whose impulsive actions can be damaging to the organization or its people (consider the anger an airline gate agent gets to deal with when thousands of flights have been cancelled on Christmas Eve due to a computer outage). None of these efforts need be hugely expensive or distracting, since thoughtfulness and cleverness more than anything else will go a long way to getting the job done effectively; the critical part is realizing it needs getting done in the first place and then starting to take actions in a concerted and intentional way that will continue to build on themselves over time.

When it comes to employees, the ultimate goal should be to get them to make impulse control techniques a habitual part of their behaviors when they are at work. Different techniques work well for different people and are dependent on the circumstances, but the overall message is that whenever they are making decisions in stressful situations or that may involve any kind of legal, ethical, or moral issue, they need to slow down to reduce impulsivity and allow themselves to decide in a calmer and more rational manner how best to proceed. They need to understand how their fight-or-flight brains are trying to get the best (or worst) of them, which may feel good in the short-term but could be a really bad idea in the longer-term given the potentially major adverse consequences. Overriding their toxic impulsivity can be achieved with various slow-down and visualization techniques, including the following:

Visualize telling your closest family members—partner, children, parents—about what you have done, and how they will react. Will you feel ashamed? Will they reject you?

Think about how you would feel if what you did were published in the media or on the internet for all to see. Will you be embarrassed to leave your home? Will you fear for your own security or that of your family?
Never send an email or post anything in social media while in this state since you can never take it back. You can write something while angry, but then put it away for a day; if it's really the right thing to send, share, or post, it will still be so once you have given yourself a chance to calmed down and think things through.
Before you do or decide anything that you know may be controversial or have potential adverse consequences, run it by a trusted colleague or family member and then take their input seriously.
Take care of yourself to the extent possible within a stressful world. Understand that you will never make the best decisions if you are exhausted, under significant stress, or under the influence of a foreign substance.

In order to embed these concepts into organizational DNA and generally raise awareness about how impulsivity will negatively impact decision-making, these self-management techniques should not be limited to training programs but rather should become reminders within managers’ communications to their people, and could, for example, serve as good messages at the start of team meetings since that is where decision-making needs to be at its best. Many companies already start their meetings with safety messages, why not add a brief comment about ethical behavior and impulse control?

When it comes to customers and other outside constituencies like vendors who can’t be formally trained, each organization will need to consider which techniques it can employ to reduce the kind of impulsivity that may lead to bad behaviors damaging the organization, its people, or its reputation. These will largely consist of communications and incentives designed to prevent and defuse negative feelings. The communications should accomplish, at the least, the following goals:

Many companies already start their meetings with safety messages; why not add a brief comment about ethical behavior and impulse control?

Mark Ohringer

Acknowledge and empathize with the reactions that third parties are feeling, and readily apologize for any wrongs before external stakeholders force you to do it, after which it may ring hollow and backfire (recall Boeing). Don’t worry about overcommunicating: tight-lipped CEOs who say it just once, grudgingly and with their arms folded, are not going to do the job.

If you are in an industry known for regularly generating ill will that may not be entirely your fault (insurance and airlines come to mind, but there are plenty of others), start by recognizing the dynamics at play and then use every opportunity, before you are in a crisis, to educate the public about why your mission is more complicated and difficult than it looks and what you are continually doing to improve it. Your customers may still be annoyed, but at least if they more fully understand the reasons, then they will have more respect for the organization and will likely give you more slack before getting to the lack-of-control point.

In addition to communications, incentives, even small ones, can go far in defusing bad feelings. If your call center is backed-up and wait times are long, the communications part might be managing expectations by regularly updating callers on remaining wait times, and the incentives part might be to tell the callers that if the wait time ends up being over 15 minutes, then they will receive a gift card. Or if customers are standing in a long line (or endlessly waiting on the tarmac), hand out some free food or offer them something else they will appreciate. The point is less what it is than there being an acknowledgement of a problem and an effort to do something by way of compensation that respects their discomfort, rather than ignoring the issue and just trying to gut it through as so many organizations typically do. If you don’t like these ideas, then at least try to translate them into ones that will have the intended effect in your own organization depending on the myriad ways that you, too, can aggravate the public.

Conclusion

The troubling reaction to the tragedy of Thompson’s murder demonstrates the extent to which any organization or industry ignores at its peril the psychology of those that it interacts with. Doing a better job, actually a much better job, of intentionally precluding organizational injustice from occurring in the first place and then enhancing impulse control in those impacted by its operations will go a long way, with relatively low investment beyond some focus and creativity, to reducing the incidences and severity of unethical or illegal acts that can cause irrevocable damage.

This will likely become an even more critical priority as organizations embrace artificial intelligence as a way to further reduce human interactions. These are turbulent and challenging times, and the social license to operate on which every organization depends is more fragile than we imagine. As organizations face their various challenges and opportunities, let’s all remember that every business is about relationships. And every relationship is about ethics. ■