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Ethics is about how we treat each other, the way we impact each other. Whenever we are faced with an opportunity to do something good or prevent something bad from happening to another person or the world, ethics enters the picture. Human flourishing in the workplace, the holy grail of corporate culture, is unimaginable without ethics.
History clearly demonstrates that Civil law, which is a code of conduct, is insufficient for human flourishing in society. The ‘rule of law’ enables the general population to live together civilly, but that’s as far as it goes. For example, free speech may be legal but what people are legally permitted to say is often unethical. To achieve human flourishing, a much more refined code of conduct, i.e. rules for behaving ethically, are required.
The same holds true in the workplace. Of course employees must comply with the corporation’s code of conduct as defined by its values, purpose, policies and procedures, however, 100% compliance of this sort is insufficient for optimizing human flourishing in the workplace. Compliance as currently envisioned in the enterprise is the tip of the ethics iceberg. The next wave of business ethics innovation is beginning to emerge from beneath the surface, where the vast frontier of ethics remains untapped. Just as the ethic of charity obligates the rich to help the poor survive, so ought the ethic of business obligate employers to help employees become more human, which is ultimately a matter of ethics.
I never heard anyone say “my dog is very ethical” or “my neighbor’s cat is very unethical.” Have you? If a hungry bear escapes from the zoo and eats the nearest person for lunch, would you accuse the bear of being unethical? Of course not, because bears, like all other creatures, except humans, lack two features upon which ethics depend. The first is the ability to know the difference between right and wrong. The second is to be equally free to choose the right thing or the wrong thing in any given situation.
Paradox, Integrity, and Contradiction
If the decision-maker is not equally free to choose, that means some other agent is determining the decision, in which case the decision-maker can’t claim to be ethical. In order to be ethical or to accuse someone or something of being unethical, the decision-maker must possess these two features. Integrity is an ideal entry point for addressing an important aspect of this confusion.
What paradox and integrity have in common is contradiction. Paradox is a condition in which contradictions arise internal to what people think, say, and do. For example, “Change is a constant” is a paradoxical statement. Hypocrisy and passive-aggressive behavior are marked by contradictions. Cognitive dissonance is an internal psychological state characterized by contradictory beliefs or attitudes. Likewise, the human condition of integrity arises to the extent a person’s behavior does not contradict their word. Contradiction is the common denominator.
It is paradoxical that we dislike when others contradict us. A person who values the truth should welcome others who contradict them, because contradictions logically indicate something is false and/or some of the truth is missing. Shouldn’t an ethical person of integrity be equally interested to learn when they are wrong or right? Ironically, most people, even some who value ethics and integrity, prefer those who agree with them and avoid those who contradict them. Why?
According to Professor Daniel Goleman, who introduced emotional intelligence into the mainstream of societal discourse, the human brain is biologically designed for survival. Our ability to survive depends on our ability to perceive the world accurately. If we don’t perceive when something is false, and/or when some of the truth is missing, it may impact us adversely, which is the reason we have adverse emotional reactions to cognitive dissonance, hypocrites, passive-aggressive people, and when others contradict us or lack integrity. The inverse is also true, in that we tend to feel safer with people who have integrity.
The Survival Imperative
Because most people seek job security in order to survive, employees are reluctant to contradict the people with whom and for whom they work, to avoid the risk of being perceived adversely. To the contrary, employees unconsciously learn to talk like, to act like and to agree with their superiors who have the power to adversely affect their careers. Simply put, the survival imperative discourages employees from speaking up, including when they observe behaviors that contradict or do not comply with company rules and policies. This leads to a classic business paradox, in that job security demotivates the employee from speaking up, which in turn causes the corporation to underperform, which in turn could cause the corporation to downsize, causing the employee to become unemployed, which is what the employee was hoping to avoid in the first place. In other words, employees and their employers who are driven by survival are less likely to survive.
It is a common mistake and potentially harmful to conflate ethics and integrity. The ethic of integrity is the singular code of conduct to “walk the talk. That is, to honor your word. A person can have integrity yet be highly unethical. For example, a crime boss has integrity if he always does what he says, even though what he does is principally unethical. However, when someone claims to be ethical but doesn’t have sufficient integrity to comply with their own code of conduct, they lack both integrity and ethics. Herein lies the paradox: ethics requires integrity but the ethic of integrity doesn’t mean a person is or makes a person ethical. The ethic of integrity is the first prerequisite for being a truly ethical person, but that’s as far as it goes. If a corporate culture is unsafe for people to talk and to walk their talk, this is indicative of a suboptimally ethical corporate culture lacking in human flourishing.
Integrity Isn’t Necessarily Ethics
Because people are more comfortable around people with integrity, people with integrity naturally have more opportunity to serve or disserve others. Since leaders with integrity are not necessarily ethical, if employees conflate integrity and ethics they may innocently follow leaders who have integrity but lack ethics. To safeguard the corporation from this vulnerability, ethics trainers must teach employees the potential ramifications of conflating integrity and ethics.
Another common and often underappreciated chronic ethics problem in the workplace is the insidious and clandestine but often unintended negative superpower of gossip. Because gossip is done behind the employee’s back, the unspoken message is to “watch your back.” A corporate culture infected with widespread gossip can take down the entire enterprise if employees, especially executives and managers, do not sufficiently appreciate the underlying dynamics of gossip and do not explicitly promote the ethic not to gossip.
Negative gossip is inherently paradoxical, in that unbeknownst to the targeted employee, the gossiper creates a contradiction, internal to the workplace, between the way the targeted employee wants to be perceived and the way the gossiper is causing others to perceive them. Given that the way we interact with and impact each other is a function of how we perceive each other, negative gossip is indirectly manipulative and potentially destructive—it can ruin an employee’s reputation and livelihood. The person with whom the gossiper is gossiping is right to suspect that others will gossip about them too. To survive in a gossip-infected workplace, employees will be inclined to defend against becoming a target, instead of saying and doing what is in the best interest of the company. Gossip is a negative superpower that can grossly diminish productivity at scale.
In a liberal democratic society, the civil law of free speech permits negative gossip except in the extreme case of slander which can cause irreparable damage to the victim. Likewise, workplace gossip can cause irreparable damage to a valuable employee. Gossip is inevitable unless the ethic not to gossip is explicitly included in the corporate code of conduct and reinforced through ethics training that extends beyond classic compliance issues. Human flourishing in the workplace is hard to imagine without an explicit anti-gossip code of ethics.
Ethics: The Natural Motivator
Because it takes courage to be ethical in an unethical world or workplace, ethical employees are by nature highly motivated. Since motivation is positively correlated with productivity, companies who explicitly incorporate ethics into their business model and culture would outperform those that don’t, as Ethisphere’s Five-Year Ethics Premium—the five-year financial performance of the publicly listed World’s Most Ethical Companies honorees against a comparable index of large cap companies—consistently indicates.
Ideally, employees should be motivated to do the right thing because ethics is about how we treat each other, whether or not money is involved. But if an employee is doing the right thing because it’s profitable, they are missing the point. If faced with the choice to do what’s more right or more profitable, an ethical employee should value ethics more than money. But if the corporation’s most important value is the bottom line, an ethical corporation has within itself an internal contradiction. To reconcile this workplace paradox and prevent the confusion that would naturally follow, ethics needs to be explicitly added to the corporation’s values and purpose narrative as an equal if not more important component, to improve employee motivation and human flourishing throughout the enterprise.
Beliefs constitute information that describe and explain how to survive in a risk-laden world. To consciously believe something without having any certainty of its validity is reckless, or to consciously believe something that is known to be false is irrational. Conversely, when we are rational and cautious, we won’t believe something unless we have sufficient certainty that the information is true. For this reason, under normal circumstances, all our beliefs are coded true, even the false ones. For example, when we believe someone who is telling a lie, we unknowingly acquire a false belief. Therefore, by definition, our false beliefs are unknown to us. If we don’t know which of our beliefs are false, we also don’t know which of our beliefs are true. We literally can’t differentiate our true beliefs from our false beliefs. Perhaps this is the reason Socrates said, “The only thing I know is that I know nothing.”
Given that our belief system is an undifferentiated mixture of true and false beliefs, we are bound to make suboptimal decisions including when the decision has the potential to impact the way we treat others, which is a matter of ethics. Perhaps this is why it is imperative for all decision-makers to consult a source of wisdom, such as a tried and true code of ethics, to create a more certain and sustainable future.
The Era of Ethics
The 21st century is entering a new Era of Ethics. Civil law and classic business compliance are essential. Even though ethics improves profits and is necessary for human flourishing, ongoing ethics training beyond compliance should be elective. Exceptional human skills do not come naturally; they require the server to authentically improve his or her own character, an act of self-development that is impossible to impose on an employee. For this reason, human skills—especially ethics—cannot be mandated. Instead, it must be a vision—evangelized by leadership that walks the talk—to which the organization aspires.
An employer should mandate compliance training, but not ethics training beyond compliance, because ethics is meaningless if not freely chosen. As Ethisphere has proven that ethical corporations tend to be more profitable, it behooves employers to provide and encourage continuous ethics training on an optional basis. After all, any human invention or innovation can be used ethically or unethically. Even employees who are highly trained in ethics, can apply ethics unethically when used as a cover. Since employees follow their leaders in order to survive, leaders with integrity and ethics naturally mitigate against the potential misuse of ethics.
History has clearly shown that humanity is not going to become more ethical naturally. Ethics explicitly entered the human condition approximately 4000 years ago, yet the human condition continues to be chronically unethical. We can send men to the Moon and robots to Mars, but we still struggle to flourish on our own turf. Unless we have the fortitude to proactively include ethics explicitly in our daily narratives at home, at work and in our community, and invite others into the ethics tent, the chronic unethical nature of the human condition will endure.
The World Ethics Organization salutes Ethisphere for driving ethics into the enterprise at unprecedented levels, and is grateful to be given this opportunity to contribute.
Make ethics your competitive advantage!
Author Bio
Richard Messing | Founder and President, World Ethics Organization, Guest Contributor
Richard Messing is a published writer, invited conference speaker and thought leader on the human condition in general; free will and ethics in particular. In 2019, Richard formed Kotel® Group LLC, an ethics-based consulting firm, to rehabilitate and transform underperforming business and private clients that resist conventional methods and interventions. In 2021, he organized the ethics-based Kotel Business Community. In 2022, he founded the World Ethics Organization Inc., a 501c3 nonprofit.
