Business decisions feel more complex than ever, and identifying the “right thing to do” can seem impossible.
I spoke with the global head of people and culture of a large professional services firm last week, and she summarized it like this: “We’ve always talked about using our values as a guide to do the right thing, but it feels like the constant questions facing us now are: Whose values? How are those values being interpreted? And with our financial pressures, I’ve had several partners confidentially asking me why we’re even bothering to factor values into our decisions.”
Even with a challenging economy and a volatile social and political landscape, most organizations are publicly committed to some form of responsible business and recognize the benefits of acting with integrity. This places new and challenging demands on leaders, requiring greater judgement and skills for when and how to engage on issues with conflicting stakeholder viewpoints.
This is often felt most acutely in the workplace. Boards and executive teams are recognizing the impact of social and political issues on daily interactions among their employees and on the broader organizational culture. Employee groups with firmly held differing views on the legitimacy of certain products, clients, or markets present a common challenge. Decisions on responding to these views, alongside competing customer or investor considerations, do not have an obvious correct answer. Leaders find themselves in reactive mode, trying to balance encouraging a speak-up culture and belonging while struggling to handle the resulting tensions and adverse effects on team collaboration.
What Does It Look Like to Bring Ethics into Decision-Making?
The ability to consistently engage with and navigate conflicting views on “right thing to do” is an emerging requirement for leaders, which brings us to ethics.
The field of ethics has a range of resources to draw from and use as a guide for making “more right” decisions. Ethically fraught choices are hard or seemingly impossible by their very nature—no decision will be entirely satisfactory to every stakeholder group and meet every requirement.
There are three key questions that leaders can use to bring ethics into decision-making:
- Can we see what’s at stake? Moral perception is the ability to see the values issues at play, the conflicting interests, potential tensions and conflicts among them, and the potential effects and consequences for different stakeholder groups. Many leaders may have their moral compass. Still, it is challenging to bring different (and at times diverging) individual value commitments together as a group, much less in a way that upholds a consistent organizational identity.
- Do we weigh the effects and trade-offs of various options as we make our decision? A number of useful tools and practices can guide leaders as they navigate the range of issues and consider what course of action to take, including designating “challenger” roles in the room to bring in different perspectives and setting up parallel decision-making groups to compare the outcomes.
- Can we take our decision forward in a way that demonstrates values and ethical consideration? A key marker of ethical action is the extent to which the “moral remainders” are addressed—the way potential adverse side effects of the decision are mitigated, especially any implications for stakeholder groups. Also, bringing people along with the decision requires clear communication, explaining the different factors considered in the decision-making process, and why leaders ultimately chose this course of action. Not every stakeholder will like the decision, much less agree, but they will trust or respect leaders who take the time to unpack how they arrived at the decision and what they are doing to address remaining concerns.
How Are Organizations Developing an Ethical Decision-Making Approach?
A simple, structured framework can help leaders address these questions in a way that draws on their organizational identity, values, commitments, and strategic priorities, as well as considering emerging norms and the views of different stakeholders.
Discovery Group developed a guiding framework for weighing various ethical considerations and worked with its executive committee to test it on past decisions, live issues, and two hypothetical future scenarios. Salesforce set up guiding principles for complex ethical decisions regarding the development and use of its products and developed sample use cases for its teams to put them into practice.
Skill-building sessions with leaders and teams to apply frameworks to ethically charged business scenarios can help them practice without the pressures of urgency and the heat of the moment emotions. Lendlease held sessions for regional leadership teams to engage with external case studies and explore a set of test questions to apply to complex, ethically charged decisions. The sessions also helped leaders be more prepared for the changing ethical landscape globally and the emerging issues specific to their market.
Impossible decisions show no sign of abating in the coming years. Building the skills and structures to incorporate ethics into how we see, weigh, and act on complex decisions can help equip leaders to do the “most right” thing possible, in the right way.
