In the last posting, I talked about the sacred responsibility that goes along with being an HR professional. Now I'm going totake this idea one step further: As an HR leader, you can cultivate a deep trust—a confidence—that sets you apart from everyone else in the company. Maybe even from everyone else in your community. When it comes to the vital importance of keeping your own counsel, there is more at stake in your position than in that of any minister, priest, rabbi, imam, lawyer, or CPA in town. You hold more in your hands than even your CEO. Why? Because the information thatyou hold in confidence has multidimensional implications for the company, its future prospects, its growth potential, and its position in the market place, and, last but certainly not least, for the effect that all this has on the personal life of every one of your employees.

When you go into HR, you must realize that, first and foremost, you are responsible for people's livelihoods. The decisions you make determine people's futures. Every day you make plans that affect individuals on the most intimate levels. Every time you choose between one candidate and another, the decision you make sets off a chain of events that determines the rest of both their lives—even that of the candidates you never see again because they're not a right fit for your company. You decide whether an employee stays or goes. You decide who gets promoted and who doesn't. You decide who gets a raise and who doesn't. By establishing the compensation guidelines or advising management, you influence who gets a generous raise and who doesn't. And you make all these decisions in a larger context of understanding the internal structures and secret plans of the company as a whole.

If you're doing your job well—and if you're running your career well—you are going to know a lot. And you’re going to know it before almost everyone else does. You're going to hear what businesses your company might be getting into or out of. You will be one of the first to know when a plant will be opening or when a plant will be closing. Maybe your company is going to stop making a certain product. These are all important things, and you are going to know them before almost everyone else you know—before the people you have lunch with, the people you meet in the hallways, all those people who are making the comfortable assumption that their job is safe. And you have to smile and chat over your sandwich and iced tea, all the while knowing a Big Secret that's going to turn their whole world upside down.

But you're not ready to say anything. You are bound by the legislations to say nothing to anyone until you're ready to say something to everyone. These are the moral and ethical filaments of your calling. The good news is that most days you will not be facing such a crisis. But there may come a day when you're face-to-face with your most closely held principles, and you must also represent the corporate conscience to senior leadership that isn't necessarily in the habit of thinking through the human ramifications of its decisions.

Suppose, for instance, that you know that senior leadership is thinking about abandoning a certain product line. Okay, so far so good. But a year before the company is ready to close the line, the head of that division leaves for a different job and you must fill that spot from the outside. A search is conducted, and you're about to hire are placement. You're inviting that person to leave a perfectly secure position, uproot his or her family, and require the spouse to change jobs—and to make all of these life-changing moves without knowing about the impending shutdown. What do you do? The line must still run profitably, it needs a leader, but how can you justify the ruination of an otherwise successful career?

Because of your HR perspective, you may be the only one who realizes that personal lives and healthy careers are at stake with this recruitment. So you approach someone in senior leadership who knows as much as you do and shepherd the company through a difficult decision-making process: "Do we really want to do this?"Then you use your position and power to guide the decision-making process in away that's both smart and right. That is your sacred trust, because only you are in a position to understand and truly know the entire situation and its ripple effects. And by speaking up, you may be the one who is looking out for the company's long-term objectives without compromising a candidate's personal and career interests.

As I write this, the nation is focusing just as much on corporate breaches of trust as it is on dealing with terrorism. Corporate leaders are worrying about it, news anchors are pontificating about it, and shareholders are frantically obsessing about it. And, depending on their relationship with their companies, individual employees are hoping that their trust continues to be well invested. But there's one small change that has resulted from recent rulings that puts these employees at a disadvantage, although they may not be aware of it: Management just can't share its plans with them as freely as it used to. Because many of us worked so hard to cultivate an open-book workplace environment in the past years, this is a huge frustration for us. CEOs used to be able to stand up in front of their employees, ballyhoo a fantastic quarter, celebrate everyone's hard work, and predict great expectations for the next quarter. They can't do this anymore. Not unless they have the analysts and the stockholders on the line at the same time.

This makes it very, very hard to establish a relationship of trust with our employees and our communities. Employees don’t understand this shift in leadership behavior. Some may regard this sudden lack of information as suspicious, as a disingenuous game of smoke and mirrors with their jobs at stake. How do you reconcile this legal disclosure requirement with your personal HR-from-the-heart philosophy of taking care of both the company's long-term objectives and your employees' personal needs for knowledge, stability, and relative security? Start by making sure that you make no long-term, across-the-board promises that you can't be confident you'll be able to keep. Never promise that your company won't ever have layoffs, for instance. There's just no way you can know that for certain. If you have to have one, you have to have one. But if you're one of the few remaining employers who are promising their workers cradle-to-grave job security, trust will break down in a big hurry when the layoff notices begin.

And, since you have to keep your mouth shut until the company is ready to make a public announcement anyway, make sure you use that extra time wisely. Make sure you've considered all the possible avenues to achieving the company's desired outcomes. As you make your choices and decisions in the pre-disclosure period, make sure each one can be justified from a fair and rigorous business point of view.

Move cautiously, move thoughtfully, and achieve buy-in where you can. Then, when the time comes to break the bad news companywide and throughout India and internationally, you will know that you will have at least kept the trust.