Stop Talking about Ethics!
It's still the case in many organizations that a senior leader is lauded for embodying "tone at the top" when, in a communication, he or she mentions the company's values or uses the word "integrity."
Don’t get me wrong. Better to mention ethics than not. But focusing on words alone may let leaders off the hook. They may come to believe that they are doing what’s expected of them in to set the right tone. It’s not enough.
What is enough? What is leading with ethics?
A good start is to focus on time. Time is one of the most valuable resources inside an organization. How a leader allocates their time is an obvious indicator of what is important to him or her. Do leaders themselves participate in ethics training? Do they lead training sessions? Do they discuss how the organization's values are impacted by business decisions? Employees are watching. They can easily see who is sincere and who is going through the motions. Allocating time for discussing ethics issues is a very good start.
But it's still not enough.
The typical stock photo depicting ethics are scales of justice. You’ve seen that image hundreds of times. It’s misleading. The image of a scale depicts ethical behavior as a trade-off against something else. Is the organization going to dismiss a high performing executive who violates a provision of the Code of Conduct? What percentage of a leader's performance evaluation is based on how well they create an environment where employees feel safe raising difficult issues?
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A better metaphor is a gate. Ethical leadership demands that integrity be a gate through which no decision or action can pass without meeting the organization's standards for ethical behavior. This gate is not just a best practice, it's expected. In its guidance to prosecutors in evaluating corporate compliance programs, the US Department of Justice wants to know:
How have senior leaders, through their words and actions, encouraged or discouraged compliance, including the type of misconduct involved in the investigation? What concrete actions have they taken to demonstrate leadership in the company’s compliance and remediation efforts? How have they modeled proper behavior to subordinates?
These expectations are not going to be met through words alone, or by mere participation in training. We are way past the era when meeting best practice standards can be done through a checklist of actions. The DOJ wants to know HOW leaders are going to model proper behavior.
Leaders must do the hard work of first understanding the organization's culture to know where integrity is challenged and then taking active steps to overcome those roadblocks.
It's not easy, but this is time well spent.
President of Shafner Law Office, P.C.
1yThe key element in the symbol you mention -- the scales of justice -- is not the scales itself, but rather the blindfold upon the one holding up the scales. As you rightly observe, scales alone portray a zero sum game: one side up means the other side is down. But the blindfold on the imposer of the scales symbolizes an impartial system of ethics, where the leader has the courage to do justice regardless of the outcome, no matter whose ox is gored. I have always thought that courage is a necessary element of true leadership, and the scales of blind justice can be seen to represent that.
Collaborator | Contributor | Connector | Curious
1yI still see too many leaders, and businesses practicing "situational ethics". I appreciated your article, too many words and not enough action! "Ethics" can be boring when delivered by an academic, or as part of a "compliance" program...Ethics ✅. I've shared my personal story with a variety of audiences and as people see themselves in me, it's a wake-up call to the insidiousness of temptation, to rationalizations. Leadership's wake-up call, checks & balances yes but to their people, the organization, protect people from themselves. Culture eats Compliance for breakfast every time!