People protest to keep what they have.
People protest to gain a new right.
People protest when they see injustice.
But sometimes people protest too late and they lose the fight.
There is a cause worth fighting for in your organization today. Are the employees mobilizing effectively? Will they make their demands in time?
As an ethical leader, are you part of the solution?
Mergers and spinoffs
– and acquisitions –
testing the culture.
Before the Wells Fargo scandal broke out, the company fired 5,000 employees engaged in opening fake accounts.
Imagine if after the first 100 terminations the CEO had held skip-level meetings and asked “You know my ‘Eight is Great!’ slogan? Is that making your job impossible?”
From time-to-time, every organization has its version of “Eight is Great!”. It can be a revenue goal, market share, organic growth, or some government approval. Whatever the initiative, leadership needs to include in it a process by which employees can provide feedback on its effects.
Where is the pressure in your company today?
Some people work in a team or a department with a good culture. Let’s call them the Happy Ones.
And some don’t. The Unhappy Ones.
Therefore, inside a company, the Happy Ones are rubbing elbows with the Unhappy Ones, and it always seems that the latter affect the former, and not the other way around.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. The Happy Ones do not have to resign themselves to being the only ones happy in the company.
Instead, they can start a series of experiments trying to answer the following question: “How might we turn the Unhappy Ones we interact with into Happy Ones?”
Try and try again until you succeed with one group. Now your group of Happy Ones is larger and it rubs elbows with more people than before, including new Unhappy Ones.
Continue the experiments until you have a Happy Company.
(Warning: It could take years)
When my organization updated its Code of Ethics two years ago, we included a number of Q&As to help employees understand what behaviors we expected them to adopt. We knew that simply sharing our rules and values wasn’t enough. Sometimes, you need to illustrate what a value-in-action looks like.
We didn’t realize it at the time but we were writing the first pages of a playbook. As explained by Robb Osinski in this Forbes article, a handbook is nice but a playbook is better. A handbook will point to the rules and to the resources. A playbook will walk you through, or more accurately walk you out, of an ethical dilemma step-by-step. It’s like a guide who knows her way out of the maze and calmly shows you what turns to take to get out safely.
We should start with a handbook but we should soon follow with a playbook. People often know what the right thing to do is, they just don’t know how to do it. As E&C professionals, if we truly want to help our employees, we need to give them more than rules in a handbook.
Most organizations believe that you can’t improve what you don’t measure.
Which means everything gets measured.
Or almost everything.
When it comes to corporate values, the absence of metrics is almost shocking.
After launching a policy and training employees on it, we could survey them and ask “Does this new policy make you feel more or less trusted as an employee?” But we don’t ask.
After interviewing the source and the subject of an investigation, we could ask each if they felt respected in the process. But we don’t ask.
After a big commercial win, we could gather the team and ask “Did we win this the right way? Did we walk the talk?” But we don’t ask.
Is it because it’s hard? Is it because we are afraid of the answer? Is it because we don’t care? Other good questions that don’t get asked.
At Mekong Capital, this made-up word embodies a value and its outcome. The word elevates an over-used value by depicting a desirable future.
In the coming years, companies will furiously create or beef-up their ethics and compliance programs. They will rush to adopt what others have done or sign big checks to newly-minted consultants cashing in on the new gold rush. Despite all the DOJ warnings (that they haven’t read), they will create paper programs.
You can’t get the right ethical culture without expressing it in terms of what makes your organization unique. You can’t just download a code of ethics template from the internet. You need to know who you are and who you want to be. You need a story – your story. And having your own jargon can help.
So go ahead, create new words to express your culture. But don’t use beautegrity.
When a financial goal is set at the top, it travels at the speed of light all the way down to the frontline manager, who immediately feels accountable for her part in reaching this goal.
But when the CEO speaks of the importance of business ethics, the news doesn’t travel as fast. No one leaves the meeting with an urgent desire to share the boss’ latest wisdom on the value of doing the right thing.
Why is that?
Clearly because it is not seen as important as financial results, even when it’s clear that unethical practices hurt financial results in the long term. And there you have it: the age-old discussion about the short-term outlook of corporations. Which suggests that a CEO’s job is not simply to talk about business ethics but to talk specifically about the importance of sacrificing short-term gains if ethical compromises are necessary.
The speed at which information travels tells you the value of that information for the organization.
People want to fit in.
For centuries, if we didn’t fit in with the tribe, we could not survive. We lost access to food, shelter and fire. We had to fit in or die.
This instinct is still with us. And so we want to fit in with our family, with our friends, with our colleagues. This means that we’ll sometimes do things we don’t believe in just to be accepted.
This heightens the importance of corporate culture. If the culture tolerates small acts of cheating, lying and stealing, newcomers will soon understand what they need to do to fit in. Add the snowball effect, and eventually you have big acts of dishonesty.
Why not create a culture of trust, respect and integrity instead?
People know what to do but they often struggle with the how.
The employee who is harassed by her supervisor knows she needs to report it but she struggles with how to do it without suffering more. The employee who can’t reach his sales target knows he can’t cheat but doesn’t see any other way around.
The ethical leader understands and gets ahead of this. She shares her commander’s intent with her team, makes it explicit that she wants to hear from them if she deviates from it, and points to HR or the hotline if subordinates do not feel comfortable speaking with her directly. And, whenever something bad happens in another part of the company (or in another company), she’ll take five minutes at the staff meeting and ask “how would we deal with this if it happened to us?”
There’s little value in telling people to do the right thing because they already know. It’s better to show them how to do it.
The Ethical Leader 