At a glance
As told to Susan Muldowney
Question: “I’ve recently joined a company as CFO, and I want to set the tone of my leadership, which includes transparency and intolerance of unethical practices. In my previous workplace, people were afraid to speak up about questionable behaviour. How can I create a culture where people feel safe to speak up?”
Answer: “The first thing we recommend leaders do to create a strong speak-up culture is to shift the mindset around ethics from something that is simple and easy to something that is complex and sometimes difficult.
“While this can be hard to do as leaders, because we want to exhibit strength and certainty, research shows that moral humility is associated with higher follower ethical behaviour.
“When we acknowledge that sometimes doing the right thing is hard, and each of us have had times during our lives when we have both acted on and not acted on our values, we create space to strengthen our skills and improve.
“Once we acknowledge that ethics can be difficult, and that work environments – particularly high-performance ones – can make it challenging for us to act on what we think is right, we have an opportunity to build skills to give ourselves a better chance of behaving in a way that is consistent with our deeply held values.
“Mary Gentile has done some excellent work on this topic through the development of a business curriculum for values-driven leadership, Giving Voice to Values™. She talks about the importance of strengthening our ‘moral muscle’ when it comes to ethics.
"Once we acknowledge that ethics can be difficult, and that work environments – particularly high-performance ones – can make it challenging for us to act on what we think is right, we have an opportunity to build skills to give ourselves a better chance of behaving in a way that is consistent with our deeply held values."
“This is not a vague reference – she encourages legitimate practice, saying out loud what we might say to one of our top performing employees who tends to undermine tone at the top on ethics, for example, so that when it comes time to actually engage in that conversation, we are confident and persuasive.
“The last recommendation, as it relates to setting the tone of leadership, comes down to having honest conversations about where individual members of the leadership team might see ethics coming into tension with performance.
“It’s also important to help leaders see ethics and performance not as concepts that are in tension, but rather as polarities that can be strategically leveraged to support one another.
“This is not a Pollyanna exercise – sometimes there are clear win-win situations when it comes to ethics and sometimes difficult choices need to be made, so creating a culture within the leadership team where members can share where ethics gets hard is critical both to protecting personal and corporate reputation.”
