Category Archives: Blog

Being an ethical leader isn’t easy, and sometimes it’s unpleasant. Terminating an employee who cuts corners or uses company property for personal projects is necessary, but not enjoyable. To maintain your integrity is paramount, and acting ethically across the board is essential. As Andrew Leigh, author of Ethical Leadership: Creating and Sustaining an Ethical Business Culture points out: “To be an ethical leader is indeed to be different. This kind of leader acknowledges the complexity of running a responsible business, yet tries to do it anyway.”

When you and your organization do the right thing consistently, employees know. They have proof that management acts with integrity, which makes them much more likely to feel heard when expressing concerns — a valid anxiety for those afraid to rock the boat. According to the 2018 Global Ethics Business Survey by the Ethics and Compliance Initiative, “Employees who see evidence of proactive communication and workplace trust are 15X more likely to think that their company measures and rewards ethical conduct.”

When a company effectively communicates the organization’s culture, values and beliefs, it tends to promote high standards for honesty, integrity and fairness. These concepts have to allow for open and honest feedback from your team, your division and even from your own managers. When leaders build that level of trust and camaraderie, colleagues can feel comfortable sharing the good and the bad. Ethical leaders should actively encourage candor, thoughtful dissent and diverse opinions from all sectors of the company.

Having a good and genuine example to follow gives employees the confidence to deal with their own ethical dilemmas, both work-related and personal. When they observe management promoting reward systems that are based on company values and ethical conduct, they understand the organization’s commitment to actually walk the walk.

As Ann Skeet, Senior Director of Leadership Ethics at the Markkula Center of Applied Ethics, explains in an article, “Ethical leadership creates an environment where the goals and values of people working in the organization align with its mission.” If a leader is committed to ethical behavior, he or she should be able to make the decision that’s best for the company — even if that decision is against the leader’s best self-interest. It’s often a case of choosing the greater good and putting your own ego aside.

The path to being an ethical leader isn’t free of pitfalls. Skeet cautions, “Falsely identifying decisions as monetary or business decisions when they are ethical ones, working too quickly to allow for moral reasoning, or asking people to act when they are tired or scared are all tendencies that can lead to ethical missteps.” If leading with ethics is not something your prior employers valued highly, it may take practice on your part to become comfortable with this level of transparency, honesty, and collaboration, but the future benefits are well worth the effort.

As novelist, dramatist, critic, and essayist John Berger pointed out: “Without ethics, man has no future. This is to say, mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.”

The concept of psychological safety, according to William A. Khan in his 1990 paper on personal engagement and disengagement at work, is “being able to show and employ one’s self without fear of negative consequences of self-image, status or career.”

The actual term was coined as early as 1999 by Amy Edmondson but popularly cited from her 2002 paper on the subject. She explains, “In psychologically safe environments, people believe that if they make a mistake, others will not penalize or think less of them for it. They also believe that others will not resent or penalize them for asking for help, information or feedback. This belief fosters the confidence to take the risks described above and thereby to gain from the associated benefits of learning.”

It has become readily apparent in today’s technologically intensive and rapidly changing business landscape that conditions that will support the psychological safety of all employees in an organization are necessary for ongoing success. Despite this, there are companies out there that haven’t yet embraced this philosophy.

Have you ever worked for an organization that had no intention of providing even cursory psychological safety? If you haven’t, you probably know someone who has.

I know a manager who worked at an international company for three years. This organization proclaimed its values were diversity, truthfulness and trust. Posters in the hallways promoted this, and performance reviews were graded on it.

Unfortunately, it was, for the most part, a myth. When the results of the annual, center-wide, “anonymous” survey came out, middle management was routinely criticized for the dismal employee ratings for the statement, “I trust management, and feel safe expressing my ideas and concerns.” Then middle management was chastised a second time for the dismal survey ratings they gave upper management for the same statement.

Now more than ever, companies are learning to cherish the valuable input created by fostering cognitive diversity in their organizations. Cognitive diversity is the inclusion of people who have different ways of thinking, different viewpoints and different skill sets in a team or business group. Many of these same companies have already realized the benefits of encouraging diversity in age, gender and ethnicity for years but are perhaps new to the idea of cognitive diversity.

Unfortunately, there are still holdouts that tend to hire employees who think alike. Perhaps they want to hire an exact replica of “Ted” from accounting because he was so good at his job. Or, there are managers who feel comfortable hiring people who graduated from their own alma mater. There are even those who attain a new position with a new employer and then proceed to hire their former colleagues from a previous employer, one at a time, until the old team is all back together.

There is no doubt that people feel comfortable surrounding themselves with others who have business styles similar to their own. Unfortunately, when you get more of the same, what you end up with is … more of the same. Lack of innovation can lead to a slow, painful death in any organization. Sara Canaday writes in a recent article on the subject for Psychology Today, “A culture that encourages (explicitly or implicitly) conformity of thought breeds stagnation and imperils a company.”

It would seem on the face of it that more viewpoints, varied experiences and different ways of approaching a common problem would be preferable to a team of “yes men,” but old habits die hard.

In the Harvard Business Review, Alison Reynolds and David Lewis wrote: “Colleagues gravitate toward the people who think and express themselves in a similar way. As a result, organizations often end up with like-minded teams.” After studying the subject for several years, they point out that unfortunately, “This lack of cognitive diversity has two impacts. First, it reduces the opportunity to strengthen the proposition with input from people who think differently. Second, it fails to represent the cognitive diversity of the employee population, reducing the impact of the initiatives.”

It may not be easy to overcome these natural tendencies but it can be accomplished. First and foremost, teams, management, and organizations as a whole must not stifle “different.” They need to encourage it. By realizing that there is a positive measurable correlation between teams who embrace cognitive diversity, and teams who exhibit high-performance levels, companies can improve their productivity by inspiring management to provide a robust level of psychological safety for their employees. For cognitive diversity to be successful, the organization needs to make it “safe” for associates to try new things in new ways without fear of repercussions.

An important part of the progression is the role that management (or the designated team leader) plays in the process of harnessing the power of cognitive diversity. If the leader continues to allow each team member to play the part they find most comfortable, the group may be missing out on a wealth of energy and participation.

For example, if one team member is naturally upbeat and easily falls into the “cheerleading” role, the ongoing repetition of this optimistic behavior may eventually annoy some other team members who begin ignoring his input. If one member is analytical by nature and wants to paralyze other members with mounting facts, figures, and research, her input may not be heard after a time.

One method to avoid this role stagnation is to shake things up by assigning different roles to different team members by project or by milestones during the timeline of the project at hand. The team as a whole will still be getting an assortment of input to stimulate their ability to innovate, but getting a certain type of input from a different individual can wake up the process and allow participants hear something fresh.

Another way to leverage the synergy of multiple viewpoints is to encourage building relationships with other teams, other departments and even people from other companies in similar fields. Working in the vacuum of your own division’s structure can cause a groupthink condition. By exploring how others face similar challenges, it’s possible to see the strengths and the weaknesses of their methods. These newfound insights can be used to bolster your own team’s successes.

If you really want to jumpstart your team, initiate some innovative brainstorming and look at things from different perspectives for creative solutions. Find some people who aren’t afraid to be different and aren’t afraid to disagree with you.

Too often, due to a lack of information, people don’t understand what they’re supposed to do. In the end, it doesn’t matter that we have all the tools if we can’t use them properly to make them work in our favor.

If poor communication is the root of all evil, the question is: how we can change and communicate more efficiently? There are multiple ways to try to get a point across while avoiding misunderstandings:

First, choose the right form of communication for the right occasion. If the subject is important and sensitive, choose an in-person meeting or at least a phone call to discuss the matter. Additionally, always double-check that the other person understood everything, and leave space for questions.

Be aware, and don’t presume that your attempt of communicating was successful. Maybe even hit the “mental button” and think things through. Seek to gain perspective and know who the receiver or audience is, and then communicate in their language. Ask yourself how they might interpret certain information, based on their experience, language, religion or culture, and explain more detailed if needed.

When in the role of the receiver, reflect back, and don’t hesitate to ask for further clarification if something is not understood on your side.

Effective communication could be considered a long-lost art in the 21st century. Things come at us from left and right, and we often don’t take time to think, reflect and set an intention for a conversation. But if we want to speed up processes in the office, be well understood and have people execute properly, it’s important to know the fundamental principles of communication.

When we know the person we’re communicating with, we can seek to understand things from their point of view and then clearly explain the matter, leaving less space for miscommunication and disappointment.