I have written and recorded over 30 books and tapes, some of them (e.g., Million Dollar Consulting) achieving "best seller" status. My "worst seller," however, has been a booklet called Doing Well by Doing Right: A Handbooks for Ethical Management. It has sold barely a thousand copies, despite the greater success of its sister publications in the same series on leadership, innovation, diversity, and so on.

Now, it could be that I’ve written a perfectly dreadful ethics booklet, and I’m ready to admit to that. But I’m a consultant skilled at finding distinctions and, since everything else I write sells quite well, I’m immodestly willing to believe that it ain’t the writer, it’s the subject.

Ethics, despite the inevitable lip service and values statements, does not interest a whole lot of people. Part of the problem is that human resources professionals tend to give the topic short shrift because, they tell me, that ethics and ethical conduct are:

o Situational

o Subordinate to business goals

o Solely within the province of the executive suite

o A function of the organization’s culture and history

o So indeterminate that every individual must be sole judge

In fact, all of those reasons are nonsense. There are behaviors, actions, and decisions that are purely right or wrong. (In fact, one approach to ethical conduct, called "deontological," holds that some actions are inherently right or wrong, no matter who may benefit or how many may benefit. Murder, for example, would fall into this category for most people.) I’ve run ethics workshops for scores of organizations within my OD work, and I’ve found that boundaries are not all that hard to create if you force managers to deliberate on actual examples.

Creating the line

"Culture" in organizations is simply that set of beliefs which govern behaviors. Change the belief system and you change the "culture," a dreadfully overused and abused term. While working with one insurance client’s top management, the CEO demanded that his team devise some ethical guidelines. The vice president of sales—probably the second most powerful person in the team of 25 senior executives—said that ethics changed from day-to-day, and were dependent on the sales situation. (Now there is a belief system!)

I pulled out a recent documented case of a sales agent forging the signature of a potential insurance customer on an application. I asked if there were any circumstances at all in which he could justify such an action. After unsuccessfully trying to evade the question, he finally said, "Yes, sometimes it may be necessary. You can’t simply rule out behaviors when you don’t know the sales situation."

That officer immediately lost the respect of the room and the backing of the CEO, because every person there knew that a line had been crossed (as well as a law broken, but what’s unethical isn’t always illegal, and what’s legal isn’t always ethical). The next day he apologized, and the group got serious about establishing ethical boundaries (e.g., "We will never exchange one policy for another if the result is both a loss of cash value and coverage for the insured.").

On another occasion, a group of senior people were freely admitting that it was quite proper to read material from a competitor marked "confidential" that an employee from the competitor brought to a job interview and offered as an inducement to be hired. (On average in this case in my workshops, the vote is 70% to read the documents, 30% to refuse.) The president said that he found that behavior indefensible, and that it could not be tolerated. He was then told sheepishly that his monthly intelligence report on competitive activity was composed largely of documents secured under similar circumstances to my case study. He was aghast that no one knew he opposed such measures. I was aghast that no one had told him up to that point.

Organizations have to create boundaries for ethical behavior. There may be occasional "gray areas," but they can be dealt with by acknowledging that particular murkiness where it exists. However, those areas had better be the exception, and not constitute the dim light of the entire environment.

Also in the neighborhood

There are other behaviors and actions in the "ethics neighborhood" which need to be constantly monitored, since abrogation of one can lead down a slippery slope toward ignoring all boundaries. Here are just a few examples:

Plagiarism

Quoting someone (public figure or unknown doesn’t matter) in speech or writing briefly, with clear attribution, is fine, but using others’ material without attribution AND permission is not.

I recently heard a speaker at a major conference (of professional speakers, no less) deliver an hour’s talk on a methodology that I knew wasn’t his, had been written about in at least two books that were 20 years old, and utilized examples I had heard and read from other sources long ago. When I confronted him later, he said that, "I’ve taken the others’ work and made unique changes to it." Not that I saw or heard. He went so far as to publish a book on the material, without an index, without attribution, and without a single acknowledgment of his sources.

There are those who read his book or hear him speak who believe he invented the techniques. This is unethical conduct.

Last year, a consultant was found to have copied pages of my marketing materials word-for-word, and even copied my listings in buyer’s guides and used them as his own. He failed to see—or ignored—the ethical implications, and it took legal action to stop him (his attorney realized the gravity of his position immediately). Of three professional associations we jointly belonged to, one tossed him out, one asked him to resign after deliberating, and one said, "It’s none of our business." Then whose business is it?

Original vs. secondary sources

For years and years, people have been spouting off about the work of Albert Mehrabbian, and the fact that his research determined that only 7% (or 14% or 12%) of a speaker’s effectiveness is in the content of the talk, and the rest is all due to body language and platform technique. One misinformed speaker said this several years ago, and lazy ones have been repeating it ever since. Speaking coaches use it to boost their sales.

If you go to the source, Mehrabbian studied people in social situations, waiting in lines, and so forth, and their reaction to smiling interlopers vs. rude interlopers. He did nothing with formal speeches or talks from a stage, and it’s completely inaccurate to mix him or his work in that venue.

It isn’t ethical to repeat mindlessly what you’ve heard, unless you can check out the origins and convince yourself of the authenticity. That applies to rumors at work as much as it does to psychological research.

Rudeness

In the consulting community, HR people are famous for not returning phone calls, correspondence, and email. It’s easier to get a response from a CEO than it is from a human resource manager. I’m not talking about ignoring people who are haunting you and won’t take "no" for an answer from past experience. I’m talking about common courtesy.

I return every one of my calls, because I’m not smart enough to know what they’re about without doing so. One time I found that the insurance person who I was certain wanted to sell me something I didn’t need, actually was a manager who wanted me to come and consult for his office (which I certainly do need!). Hubert Humphrey said once that the first sign of a decline of a civilization was a breakdown in manners. Deliberately poor responsiveness—whether to colleagues, customers, partners, or vendors—is inexcusable, and part of the ethical milieu.

What are some guidelines for the HR community?

In egregious and notorious cases, such as the sexual misconduct at Astra or the racial epithets at Texaco, one has to wonder where the human resources expertise was hiding. Even at less obvious events, such as the massive and often brutal downsizing that went on for a decade, where was the voice of HR? (Downsizing thousands of people to atone for executive mistakes in corporate strategy is, indeed, unethical when those people are jettisoned without regard for competence, seniority, contractual agreements, etc.).

There are three elements necessary for effective ethical management to take place:

1. Environmental awareness. You must be sensitive to and aware of what is happening in the workplace environment. Have you noticed that women do not get promoted above a certain level under any conditions? Have you observed that the sales that resulted in record bonuses last fiscal year were almost all returned from customers at the beginning of this fiscal year? Are you even approachable, so that people can report issues to you? In one of my clients I found that a fully staffed and highly capable HR staff was never told of ethical problems by employees because one of the staff routinely had violated confidences and reported issues back to line management, where retribution ensued. Hence, the entire department was avoided.

2. The proper value system. This harkens back to my original point: What does the organization truly believe in? Where is the line? The "black and white" areas should far outnumber the gray. What behaviors do the top exemplars exhibit? No one believes what they read and hear, only what they see. (Which is why a vice president accepting a forged signature is so damning for the entire organization.) The values are never those platitudes listed on the wall plaques or in the annual report. They are what people actually do every day. As a rule, show me a reward system, and I’ll show you a value system.

3. Competencies to deal with the issues. If I know that sexual harassment is occurring, and I believe it’s wrong, but I have no idea how to deal with the harassers, then I can’t support the ethical standards at all. Do people—especially HR professionals, but also line managers—know how to resolve conflict? Do they know how to facilitate meetings? Are they able to stand up to line managers using observed behavior and factual evidence? Are they comfortable confronting unethical behavior?

If you are aware of the environment and have a proper value set, but don’t have the skills, you would take action, but can’t; if you have the value system and the skills, but don’t know that anything is wrong, then you could take action, but can’t; and if you have the skills, and are sensitive to the environment, but don’t believe the actions are improper, then you would take action, but won’t.

What is the "ethical IQ" of your department and professionals? Do you and they have the environmental awareness, the values systems in place, and the requisite competencies to identify and take action against ethical transgressions? Are you helping your colleagues with preventive actions to avoid the more painful reactive measures?

Remember that what might seem like peripheral issues—plagiarism, rudeness, lack of full disclosure, etc.—are really the inroads which enable larger scale unethical actions to flourish. As information and the speed of its access have increased, so has our "sloppiness" in allowing for copying, poor research, and lack of attribution. This is not solely or even primarily a legal issue, it is an ethical issue.

What are your values, and how do you exemplify them?