Over the last seven months, I’ve worked with several groups of businesspeople, at various times needing to answer the question, Why be ethical?

And we’ve done that. There are good reasons:

• Because it’s the good and right way to be
• Because it’s aligned with one’s personal values and brand
• Because it’s best practice and makes business sense. We win business and (sometimes) enhance our profits because we’re ethical.
• Because it’s the law.

The groups I’ve worked with include recent graduates starting out in their first jobs, the entire 70-strong team of a private company, key persons in a State-owned entity who wanted to check whether their policies are aligned with best practice, and a project team developing learning materials.

While some members in these groups engaged deeply on what it means to be ethical, not one person disagreed with either the need to be ethical or the reasons for being ethical. The majority were desperate to do the right thing, and do it the right way. (That’s encouraging, isn’t it, in the mess of corruption and lack of respect we find ourselves in in SA?)

For these businesspeople to be really effective, we could not stop at ‘Why be ethical?’, or stop at answering the question only with moral philosophy. We had to progress to the practical things an ethical person can do at work in a corporate, a small business, or a State-owned entity.

Here are three practical things we identified:

1. Know your own values, the principles you hold dear and which guide your behaviours. What do you stand for? I don’t just mean you should mouth the principles or values of people significant to you. Or your peers. Or your religion. I mean that you must be able to say exactly what values you hold, and why.
2. Write a list of the ethical things you will never compromise on, and put it in a place you will see it frequently. Or tell some people close to you, who will hold you accountable.
3. Practice using an ethical decision-making framework. I’ve written before about one which draws on a concept in Rossouw and Van Vuuren (2013). I call this the four-finger test, in which you ask yourself of an action you intend to take: What will this look like on the front page of the newspaper, or as a Twitter hashtag, tomorrow? Is it fair to all stakeholders? Does it meet my standards and the standards of my employer? Is it legal?

These three practical steps are just starting points.

In a classic essay in Harvard Business Review in the 1990s, Andrew Stark quotes ethicist Joanne B. Ciulla who said, “The really creative part of business ethics is discovering ways to do what is morally right and socially responsible without ruining your career and company”.

I like that. After listening to many people think aloud through ethical dilemmas faced, I don’t believe there is a magical elixir you can apply to solve difficult ethical issues whose solutions are not obvious, or to neatly reconcile ethical imperatives with business realities. As Stark says, we work in a “messy world of mixed motives”.

But in the last few months, I have found the best way to help people navigate their messy worlds is to:

1. Promote an awareness of personal values
2. Encourage value-led organisations which also clearly guide the people in the middle and the people on the ground, and to
3. Take a practical approach, which Stark calls “participating with managers in designing new corporate structures, incentive systems and decision-making processes that are more accommodating of the whole employee, recognising his or her . . . motivations”.

Such structures, systems and processes should not be seen as the personal yielding to the corporate or the corporate giving in to the personal, he says, quoting another ethicist, Lisa Newton. I like that too. That’s where, in the work with my clients, I find the recommendation of King IV that those in governance should employ an “apply and explain” approach, most pragmatic.

References

Institute of Directors in Southern Africa, The. 2016. King IV Report on Corporate Governance for South Africa 2016. [Online]. Available from:  https://www.iodsa.co.za/page/KingIVReport Accessed 11 February 2019.

Rossouw, G. J. and L. van Vuuren. 2013. Business Ethics 5^th edition. Cape Town: Oxford University Press

Stark, A. 1993. ‘What’s the Matter with Business Ethics?’ in Harvard Business Review May-June 1993 issue. [Online}. Available from: https://hbr.org/1993/05/whats-the-matter-with-business-ethics?

Accessed 29 April 2019