How Business Can Be Good

Tweet

So ethical decisions can be said to be decisions that ensure the safety of a society's sense of order and justice. But trying to determine what falls into that sense of order and justice can be difficult. The range between right and wrong can be vast. We generally recognize -- or at least we hope we do -- when we're operating at the margins. We can tell when we're going well beyond what's expected in the way of right behavior. And we also know when something falls squarely into the category of questionable or wrong behavior.

What we struggle with every day is operating between the extremes. How completely right do we really need to be in our behavior?

In business, the pressures are magnified, because business owners and managers are faced with competing demands to keep a company going. Does the need to make a profit outweigh the need to reward our employees fairly? Does making payroll count more than paying vendors? Do we cut corners on manufacturing processes to keep costs down when our shortcuts may result in unsafe or polluting outcomes? Does our commitment to an employee in trouble outweigh the financial burden he places on the company?

A story told by the CEO of a $14 million computer consulting company points out how grueling and complex such decisions can be. A high-level employee failed to show up at a client's location one morning for a software installation. The employee was an alcoholic who apparently had had a relapse. In the end it cost his company half of its $200,000 fee.

The CEO received conflicting recommendations about whether to fire the employee. Some suggested giving the employee another chance and enrolling him in a rehabilitation program. Others said the only way the employee would get help would be if he were allowed to hit rock bottom. After much agonizing, the CEO decided to offer the rehabilitation program.

Everything seemed fine for about eight months after the employee finished the program. Then he failed to show up for work again. This time he cost the company about $5,000. Again, the CEO had to decide what to do. The advice he received skewed toward letting the employee go, but, after some agonizing, the CEO decided to help him again.

While the CEO may have been prolonging the alcoholic's resistance to getting sober, his decision brings to life how good people in business try to do good by the people in their world, in this case a troubled employee. "Business is easy compared to life," the CEO said when retelling the story. "We're just laymen with good hearts and crossed fingers."

Invariably people who run or manage businesses find themselves facing decisions that will clearly affect their employees' lives. Navigating through these relentless dilemmas is a day-to-day, moment-to-moment process.

First, the Lawyers

When we talk about ethical behavior in business, too frequently we're really talking about the kind of behavior people need to avoid litigation. We put behavior policies in place so that we don't get sued for sexual harassment, penalizing minority workers, or slandering poor-performing employees.

With workplace litigation exploding over the past several years -- more than 24,000 wrongful termination suits were filed in 1997 alone, up from 10,000 in 1990 -- the actions of businesspeople too often are driven by what will keep a cap on legal costs rather than by what we really believe is right.

When this happens, we relegate many ethical decisions to the human resources or legal departments and stop thinking about it for ourselves.

The fear of discrimination suits may be legitimate. A 1997 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management found that of 616 personnel executives who responded, 53% said their organizations had been sued at least once by former employees in the last five years; nearly half of the 611 suits they reported involved claims of discrimination.

Fear of litigation makes even the most self-enlightened manager question his or her own judgment about employees, how to manage them, and how to be fair in the workplace. The solution is to go back to making decisions based on the merit of a candidate rather than the fear of what may happen should this candidate not work out or not like the way we manage. It may seem perilous to take such a stand, but it's the only way to break free of the management gridlock that has overtaken so many businesses.

Finding a Place

The deeper challenge is not merely to get businesses or corporations to change, but to get the people who are making decisions within these organizations to change the way they think -- to realize that the same care they take to behave ethically in their personal lives should drive the decisions they make in their professional lives. One of the good things about the blurring lines between our personal and professional lives is that it makes who we are and how we behave seem more connected to our beliefs and the way we interact with other people and the community at large -- whether we're at work or not.

The whole concept of "business ethics" is brought more sharply into focus when we recognize that such a notion is inextricably tied to the individuals who make up that business. It is ridiculous to think that we can fob off onto others ethical decisions that must be made without taking responsibility for our own inaction.

"Ethics is how we behave when we decide we belong together," writes Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers in their book, A Simpler Way. "Daily we see this interplay of ethics and belonging in our own lives. We want to be part of an organization. We observe what is accepted or rewarded, and we adapt. But these ethics are not always good. We may agree to behaviors that go against personal or societal values. Months or years later, we dislike the person we have become. Did we sacrifice some essential aspect of ourselves in order to stay with an organization? What was the price of belonging?"

At the end of the day, that's the true question: In our effort to belong, have we become the people we swore we never wanted to be?

Jeffrey L. Seglin is the author of The Good, The Bad, and Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart, forthcoming in March from John Wiley & Sons. He writes the monthly "Right Thing" column for the Sunday New York Times. He is a professor of magazine publishing at Emerson College and an editor at large for Inc. magazine.

Copyright © 2000 Sojourners, January-February 2000, Vol. 29, No. 1.

 PREV  1 | 2