In my opinion, the manifestation of an ethic is both involuntarily and intentionally reflexive. One that is naturally formed from the dynamic tension that exists between what a person values and the demands that the environment is placing upon those values; and second, one formed out of ego, or a simple conscious belief that a person already knows the difference between right and wrong. For those leading in organizations, the same pattern exists albeit much more complex in terms of aligning one’s existing ethical worldview with the unique norms, attitudes and practices of the organization or corporation. For Dov L. Seidman, business leader and ethics expert, training for ethics should expand beyond a simple seminar or generic HR brief, but should unfold as a habitual practice resulting from daily struggle, discussion and reflection.
In Kenneth R. Thompson’s (2007) interview, Mr. Seidman shares his reasoning behind why a new training paradigm is needed to help organizations and corporations understand, support and engage their people in terms of ethics and compliance. Seidman believes conventional ethics training is flawed because it presumes that people lack a certain instinctual ethic; thereby manifesting a fallacy that, “they need to be trained in something they already know” (Thompson, 2007, p. 79). As an innovator in ethics and compliance management, Seidman promotes his goal to help people reframe the conversation of ethics to engage with it as an approach versus “just making people aware” (Thompson, 2007, p. 80). In other words, Seidman suggests that ethics permeates through, and connects with, every part of our life; therefore, ethical thought should be integrated, discussed openly and applied in practice in every workplace.
Mr. Seidman supports a transition to a more pedagogical approach because the history of ethical thought has been more about “compartmentalization” and less about a way of reasoning through ethical decisions, inspiring and integrating more respectful, appropriate conduct (Thompson, 2007, p. 80). Seidman suggests that education behind ethical thought has dwelled far too long upon generalizing what we should, or should not do; but instead “differentiating the should”, suggesting that ethics transcends rules and laws and needs to be integrated to address many situations and under varied conditions to build better understanding.
In our modern-day “hyperconnected and transparent” world, we certainly share in an excess of varied conditions available to exercise our values, develop our ethic and experience how it aligns with the moral compass of an organization (Thompson, 2007, p. 82). In Thompson’s (2007) interview, Mr. Seidman argues that the global context and its enhanced competitiveness is constraining the urge to make the right decision because it can be very unpopular, dangerous and unprofitable for most organizations (p. 82). While the context is valid as it relates to how the increased market pressures upon organizations to constantly perform inevitably dilutes their moral sense, I personally believe that the global demand for corporate transparency actually provides a greater opportunity for organizations to demonstrate, not shirk, their moral sense, and in turn generate profits on the backs of an extremely loyal culture of clients and customers.
Any decision to move an organization from a strictly compliance-type ethics program towards one that nurtures a process to create a self-governing culture should begin with a corporate culture audit that would “attempt to loosely measure how open the channels are between ethical values stationed at the top, and the actual practices down below” (Brusseau, 2011, p. 439). In our organization, this process of moving towards a “value-based culture” would need to be initiated from the President’s office and executed through leadership within each department (Thompson, 2007, p. 88). Shifting an entire organization’s culture, especially one that is family owned, from a rules-based system to one which intentionally trusts people with the space to honour and build an ethic worthy of themselves, their peers and reports would take time. However, with available opportunities to integrate the organizations core values through print, meetings, social media, awards, synchronizing a new corporate cultural approach to ethical behaviour with individual beliefs would be quite seamless. As Mr. Seidman expressed, “we don’t need to train people on ethics”, we need to train people for ethics; therefore, in the context of our organization, it is my responsibility to inspire an ethic transcending a simple page of the employee handbook to an integrated model spanning every act and thought (Thompson, 2007, p. 79).
Matt
Brusseau, J. (2011). The Business Ethics Workshop. New York: Flat World Knowledge.
Thompson, K. R. (2007). An interview with Dov L. Seidman, CEO of LRN. Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, 13(3), 79-91.