Something simple to help wade through some terrible times
I’ve been in the business world for nearly 10 years now. Not enough to call myself a vet, but enough to have been in various kinds of interactions with a sizable cross-section of people. In that time, I have heard a lot of talk about ethics, integrity, and good company culture. I have also seen and heard a lot of unethical stuff, things that lack integrity, and betrayals of good company culture.
Since my background is in ethics (in that I did my graduate work in philosophy, focusing on ethics), talk about business ethics always caught my attention. When it did, I often found myself underwhelmed by the substance of such talk. There was little of it. I saw a lot of slides with way too many bullet points. I heard a lot of talks with abstract and general principals that focused on community involvement, charitable donations, customer service, and employee benefits and perks. What I rarely hear is solid, actionable principles that are given to the people of a company, and not just slipped into marketing material.
After all, I don’t care how high your charitable contributions are as a company, or how many nap pods the people at your company have access to — if shady things are happening in the day-to-day interactions between your people, none of that stuff amounts to anything. What matters is that there is a clear simple principle or set of values that your people know and understand how to follow in all of the business — both internal and external — that they conduct. Without those two things, any talk of ethics and company culture is utterly empty.
Start With the Ground Level
I don’t want to sound too harsh with regard to companies that are trying to be ethical. I don’t think that their respective hearts aren’t in it — far from it. What I think happens, though, is that there is an initially clear idea from a top-ranking person at a company, and it gets mucked up as attempts are made to get that idea down to everyone else. It happens all the time, in various arenas.
The thing about ethical conduct is that it’s not like meeting huge sales goals or conducting complex global initiatives. Ethical conduct is done at the level of the single person — sitting at a desk, making decisions on behalf of a business. It then spills over into interactions with colleagues, clients, and citizens. It can certainly have high-visibility, global effects — but it never starts that way. So the way that ethical codes of conduct have to be derived and delivered must respect the level at which such codes must be deployed: the ground floor — the level of the single person.
A Simple Kernel for Nearly All Ethical Codes of Conduct
Here’s a simple suggestion for a kernel of a code of ethical conduct. It is actually powerful enough as is to stand on its own, and also powerful enough to apply to non-business settings.
The scope of this kernel has to do with making decisions, because that is where businesses must focus their ethical codes of conduct the most. They need to be able to have their agents deploy their code of conduct quickly and easily — even if the decision itself is complex and takes a long time to make — especially if that is the case.
So here it is:
Make each decision as if you had to honestly and sincerely explain it in front of each person that is expected to be affected by it.
What The Principle Is and Isn’t
The goal of this principle isn’t to define right and wrong actions. It also isn’t fool-proof. Will it yield perfect results every time? No. There will be total sociopaths who will be perfectly okay telling a roomful of people exactly how they’re screwing them over. But I don’t think those people are the bulk of the problem .
Often times, it’s the people on the fence — the people behind the scenes who push the buttons and pull the levers — who push through the questionable stuff. They receive orders, they make plans, the execute. They are just trying to get by, keep their salary, and take a few weeks of vacation each summer. They end up doing some harmful things because they don’t have a check in place against their thoughtlessness.
The simple, overriding idea here is that if you’re about to make a decision, you should take a step back and ask yourself: If I had to sit down with everyone this affects, and explain the decision to them honestly, would they be able to accept it?
Notice that the question isn’t would everyone be happy with it? It’s also not would everyone agree on whether it’s good or bad? That kind of question would almost always yield an answer of “no”. The question is about whether people would be able to accept it — given that they, like you, are people who have to make tough decisions, too.
Here’s my disclaimer: I have found this way of thinking to be supremely useful for me. I have passed it along to some people that I mentor, and it seemed helpful. I’m not building a complex bullet-proof theory of business ethics here, I’m just offering up something that I have seen to be missing from most of the business decision-making process to which I have been exposed.
Take it with that grain of salt.
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