I don't think ethical issues are uncommon or that they should catch you by surprise,
I will say they are difficult to deal with.
Too often,
we tend to think of values conflicts or ethical challenges
as aberrations, the exceptional situation
that we hope we never have to encounter. This way of thinking
can leave us unprepared and overly emotional
when the conflict actually presents itself. We might, for example, just freeze,
like a deer in headlights, when someone asks us to lie or to cheat.
Being unprepared, we are more likely to just give in,
with the hope that we don't get caught and perhaps never have to face the
situation again.
If we recognize that values conflicts are a
normal and predictable part of business and of life,
we're more likely to be able to calmly anticipate and
prepare ourselves for the kinds of challenges that we are likely to encounter.
One of my clients was a big hotel,
one of our contractors and I dealt closely with those people.
And I know at some point we had so many frequent meetings
and I was doing a lot of work for them, I was working with them personally,
and there was a time,
I had some representative from that hotel be like,
"Oh, you should come have free lunch in my hotel some time."
And, I knew it wasn't a big deal but I didn't quite feel comfortable with that.
I did not go into detail,
I totally heard what he said and I just
pleasantly heard his offer and did not give him a response.
It's important to be kind of armed and prepared for those situations
when they come up.
The kinds of values conflicts we may face can often be anticipated,
depending on what we do — work, school,
sports, friendships, family, etc.
At school, we might be asked to cheat.
On a sports team,
we may be pressured to cover up the rule violations of a fellow teammate.
In business,
we may be pressured to tamper with the financial reports,
or to lie about a product's true capabilities and so on.
I think that when you're faced with an ethical issue
the first time, maybe it is
a little surprising in a job, but I think what I've learned in business is
that a lot of times you are faced with the same issue over and over and over again.
So, if you make the right choice the first time and you walk away from it and feel confident about it,
it makes it a lot easier consecutively because people expect that from you and
you expect from yourself.
I think you get into trouble when you impulsively make a bad ethical choice
and then people expect you going forward to do that every time.
The reasons that people use for making unethical requests
are pretty predictable, and so there's an opportunity to think them through
in advance and to consider what might be a credible response,
and then we can literally rehearse or practice our response
so we feel ready when the situation arises.
Early in my—let's see I guess that was the beginning of college—
I sold electronics for a major retailer and
we were highly encouraged to up-sell…
to products that customers didn't really need.
If you didn't hit your quotas, which were very high,
and you kind of had to cut corners to reach them,
you'd get written up or warnings.
You get a few of those, and then they start
cutting your hours, which happened to me, and eventually it was
a conversation that, you know, there's probably a better fit for me out there.
First of all, I rehearsed what those conversations were going to be like each time.
I don't naturally speak well off-the-cuff, so
I needed to prepare.
I think that understanding what could come from those conversations helped me a lot
because, at least—well actually in all three of the main conversations—
it was pretty predictable about what was going to happen and the type of push back
that I would get.
And I had to go into the final meeting prepared to walk away
from employment, which like I said, it's challenging.
But at least if you had taken the time to think through how you can
prepare for that conversation and what leaving the company looks like,
what are the next steps...
It's much less intimidating than going in
blind and being blindsided by their response.
Too often, we tend to assume that ethical conflicts require us to
stamp our foot, and shake our fist, and speak truth to power
in an emotional, or even an accusatory way.
But actually, if we can remain calm and avoid
overreaction and prepare ourselves to make
reasonable and helpful responses to these situations,
we're more likely to both find the confidence to remain true to our values
and also a way to influence others without shaming or blaming them.
I think ethics is one of those things that also needs to be added onto the portfolio
of self-improvement, so
everybody should be contending those exercises, going through situations,
debriefing, seeing where they fall short, seeing where they need to make improvements.
I've learned to be more shrewd through a career.
I think that I went into things very innocently and just sort of assumed
that everybody operated in a very black-and-white world, and I learned very
quickly that that's not the case.
So that's something which I've been actually becoming a little bit more aware of
as I interact, whether it's in a business world, whether it's in a family space—
it happens in my family dynamic, as well. I think it's a…
common thing where people end up slipping or people end up acting a certain way
and being able to just be ready and prepared for that.
You know, sometimes when people bring up ethics as a subject, people steer away from it.
"It's too philosophical! Doesn't pertain to me."
But if you really think about it
ethics discussions come up every single day, every single moment of your life,
whether you're making a decision of this
company to work for, or that company to work for...
Or whether you're deciding how you should be studying for an exam
or whether you should be endorsing a friend for something they wanna do or not.
Those are ethical discussions, so instead of thinking about ethics as a vague,
far-reaching, philosophical issue,
you need to think about in terms of everyday actions.