Practice for the real game

Making ethical decisions can be difficult.

The difficulty increases when you are facing a real decision.

So practice making these decisions when you don’t really have to make them. Pretend that the cashier gave you change for $20 when you handed him a $10 bill. Pretend that you overheard your aunt make a racist joke at the family gathering. Pretend that your boss turns a blind eye to your colleague’s expense fraud because your colleague is the top salesperson.

These or similar situations will happen to you. Practice them in your head. Decide now what action you will take. Note that I am not asking you to decide what the right thing to do is. You already know what to do (return the extra change, tell your aunt that her joke is inappropriate, report the fraud). The real difficulty is in deciding how to do it. It’s difficult even when it’s not for real.

So practice for the real game.

Where is the top?

I’ll never forget a discovery I made during an international trip early in my career as an Ethics & Compliance Officer.

I was traveling with the Corporate Vice President of Global Ethics & Compliance and a few other senior leaders from our US headquarters. We were touring Asia to conduct program reviews and provide training. During a presentation, our VP referred to our company’s CEO by his first name, George, several times. Later on, a junior manager timidly approached me to ask who that “George” was. When I told him George’s last name, he still had no clue who the CEO was.

E&C teams in large organizations need to keep this in mind when creating the all-important “tone at the top”. For many employees, the top is their boss’ boss. Or perhaps their country manager. But rarely is it the Regional President or the Business Unit President, let alone the CEO. These people mean nothing to them.

I’ll grant you that things are changing with the increased use of video messages from senior leaders that are delivered to employees’ mobile devices, a trend accelerated by the current pandemic. Nevertheless, the importance of middle management being visible and vocal on the importance of E&C remains today.

What specific tools are you providing them?

Over-communicate

More than a million people in the Rakhine state of Myanmar are unaware of the coronavirus pandemic because of an internet shutdown. To make things worse, 100,000 of them are tightly packed in camps.

Withholding information can put lives at risk. In the case of Myanmar, it is a deliberate attack by a Buddhist majority against a Muslim minority. In other non-nefarious cases, even an unintentional lack of information is likely to lead, at the very least, to poor decisions.

Are there parts of your organization that are at risk because of a lack of information? Are you being as transparent as you can? Do your direct reports, peers and bosses know everything that you know? Do you have a column in your company’s newsletter? Do you post on Slack or Teams or Yammer? Do you speak at all-hands meetings? Do you encourage your colleagues to connect with you if they have questions?

If you don’t do some of these things, make sure you ask yourself this question the next time something goes wrong: Is there something I knew that, if properly shared, could have prevented this?

Helping the community

We all know that treating our colleagues with respect is an essential element of a good corporate culture.

But we often forget that showing respect to the communities where we work can also send a strong message to our employees about what we truly value.

In his latest post on Forbes, Bill Higgs tells us how his company gives back to the community. An interesting practice is the “adoption” of a junior high school student every two years. Employees not only mentor the student academically through graduation, but also the student’s family by helping parents find better jobs.

This is a great framework: help yourself by helping others.

And finding ways to help others is not difficult right now.

Create your own earthquake

Many shaky business practices have been destroyed by the current pandemic. At the top of the list is the “necessity” for most employees to work at the office 5 days/week.

When the dust settles, some of these practices will remain and others will have been born with the creation of a new normal. Will we wait for another global shift to knock them down?

A leader’s job is to challenge the status quo. What needs your attention today?

(And now is also a good time to look at shaky home practices)

Say it like you mean it

A goal in your head is fine but unlikely to be reached.

A goal written down has better chances.

A goal shared with others creates accountability and cheerleading, and is much more likely to be reached.

So those goals of a more just society we all have right now, they need to be written down, backed by metrics, and published on our organizations’ websites.

Otherwise it’s like we don’t mean it.

Bring it on

Difficult conversations are exhausting.

So when people see all around them statues coming down, protest marches, changes to college athletics logos, and calls to defund some programs and fund others (and the list goes on), they want it to stop.

And I say bring it on.

Yes, having these conversations will be difficult, especially for those who have long benefited from the status quo. But even they carry a burden they are often unaware of.

Let’s have those conversations. A better world awaits.

Ask for a better world

If you work at a large corporation, two things are likely:

  1. You have an ethics & compliance department, and
  2. You never took a business ethics class in school.

If that’s your situation, you’re in luck. Your company is keeping people on the payroll to educate you about business ethics and to answer any question you might have. Take advantage of it.

If you pay attention to what’s going on around you, you should be able to come up with a business ethics question every day. Listen to the news, listen to your colleagues, think of a friend’s situation at work, and you’ll soon find a question to ask, like:

  • What are we doing to fight racism within our company?
  • What measures do we need to take before employees can safely return to work post-COVID?
  • Can we work a second job to make up for furlough days?

In fact, even if you don’t feel the need to ask a question of your compliance guru, you should come up with one – every day. Write them down in your Notes app or on a piece of paper. Just one, but every day. Let them pile up until you have dozens or hundreds. Develop the skill to see what could be better, safer, more just. This will build in you an urge to do something.

If everyone imagined a better world, it would come faster.

Listen

To the youngster talking nonsense, Zeno said: ‘The reason why we have two ears and only one mouth is so we might listen more and talk less.’

Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 7.1.23

Just like the storied fish who doesn’t know what water is, my white privilege has been invisible to me for 50 years.

This is why the Black community, in response to so many like me wanting to do something, is asking us first to educate ourselves and to truly listen. There are books on racism and white privilege. There are documentaries and films. There are podcasts. We must take ownership of our education.

In a recent open letter, my CEO explained how, after truly listening to some of our company’s senior-most Black leaders, he understood the importance of – wait for it – more listening. In his words:

So, what comes next? […] What comes next is an intense weeks-long period of listening. I, my senior leadership team and managers across our enterprise will now canvass our global footprint to hear directly from our Black colleagues and others who face discrimination in our communities. And then, we will build a plan for action. A plan that will turn ideas into results. A plan that will help drive near- and long-term societal change.

So let us all educate ourselves and listen. Listen to our relatives, our friends, our neighbors and our communities. We all know someone who faces discrimination on a daily basis. Let us listen to them, so that we may replace cruelty with humanity.