The Difficulty of Being an Honest Business Leader

While coaching business leaders, one issue that comes up quite often is the battle of conscience, or, the battle of Ethics vs Morals. But first, let us understand the distinction between the two.
Ethics: Many many years ago, as Man moved from being a hunter forager to settling down in groups and communities, a need was felt of putting together a code of civilized living. The code was based  on notions of socially approved conduct, behaviour and duty. One could cite the Manu Smriti in India and the Ten Commandments of Christianity as examples of such codes of conduct.

Morals: As opposed to community -based ethics, morals are personal choices we make. It is about good vs bad, right versus wrong.

In sum, therefore, Ethics are community-defined whereas morals are more personal choices or inclinations.

The Battle of Conscience:
Doing business in India has unique challenges - and the problem faced by every single business leader is of dealing with the cancer of corruption. And this is where the battle of the conscience starts to rear it's head. This was evident at a recent workshop on Personal Mission and Values I was doing for  a group which included a few front-line executives. One of the activities required participants to identify their personal values and the importance of  identifying and living our values in our life. After my presentation one of them asked, "If the value of my time to my company is Rs 3000.00 per day, and I have an option to pay a tout Rs 1000.00 and get a ticket (or a form etc.) delivered at home instead of waiting in a queue to buy one, what should I choose to do?

And that's the battle of the conscience I am talking about - should the business executive/leader forgo his personal value (morals) of not paying a bribe  and settle for the 'efficient' and 'cost-effective' option of saving his time and pay a bribe? Or should he he stick to the ethical standards of conduct no matter what it costs?

 Fighting the Cancer of Corruption
Indian business leaders have learned to deal with this cancer in their own ways, and we can map them on a a matrix as follows:

The Upholders: Believe in going by their voice of conscience, whatever it takes. E.g. Narayana Murthy of Infosys, who resisted the temptation of greasing palms to get work done and yet came out a Winner.

The Wilters:  They do a trade off with their conscience as in the case of the participant above. They believe in the dictum, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em!"

The Tainted: These are the ones who thrive in a corrupt system. They are deaf to their voice of conscience and milk the system for all it's worth.

The Contaminators: These people with low morals, in the pursuit of their own interests, contaminate an uncorrupted system. An example is that of the pharma industry, which in trying to get doctors to prescribe their products, resorted to gifting them all kinds of fancy things from cars to jewellery. The previously noble profession has very few now who abide by the Hippocratic oath. The  industry now cribs about the increasingly fanciful demands of doctors, but they themselves are to blame.

In Conclusion
Every business leader doing business in India, has to take a call and do peace with his conscience in his own way. Some fight successfully, some succumb, many thrive while a few corrode the system.

Each does battle with  his conscience in his own way.






 

Is Your Organization Future Ready?

One of the foundations of business improvement strategies is to align business activity against organizational objectives, customer requirement and business strategy. However, very often, this alignment does not exist and the reason? The teams do not know what the organizational goals and objectives are! 

Evan Apfelbaum, of the Kellog School of Management, once asked a a group at a top American consulting firm what the goal of the team was. He got eight different answers! Which was exactly my experience with the findings of a survey I carried out recently. The survey, conducted on a client’s key executives, was to gauge the organization’s ability to focus on and execute their most important goals. One of the questions in the questionnaire was, “If you know any of the top three goals of your organization, please list them..” To this, 22% said they did not know the top three goals, The rest responded as follows:

 

Goal #1

1.      It should be system driven

2.      Be the biggest ....supplier in India

3.      Number 1 in world.....

4.      Achievement of target set by..... for year

5.      Sound customer base

6.      To be #1 and capture 80-90%.... market in India

7.      Brand image

Goal #2

1.      Individual responsibility for ...  success

2.      Educate the customers

3.      Customer satisfaction through technical assistance

4.      Best customer service

5.      Sales target

Goal #3

1. No compromise on quality product
2. Stand with the competitors with good profit margins
3. Fastest and profitable subsidiary of .... India
4. Collection

This diversity of  views on the goals of the organization is one of the most common occurrences in teams that don’t perform well – if people are not focussed on that one common goal, it becomes difficult to achieve the purpose that it has been assembled for.

According to Locke and Latham, clear common goals affect individual performance through four mechanisms. First, the goals direct action and effort toward goal-related activities and away from unrelated activities. Second, they energize employees. Challenging goals lead to higher employee effort than easy goals. Third, goals affect persistence. Employees exert more effort to achieve high goals. Fourth, goals motivate employees to use their existing knowledge to attain a goal or to acquire the knowledge needed to do so.

In the case of this particular client, as a first step to bring about alignment in business activity, we recommended and executed a Visioning workshop, along with some more initiatives based on other findings of the survey.

Clear common goals that everyone understands, are critical to every organizations business success. They provide organizations with a blueprint that determines a course of action and aids them in preparing for future changes.

Is your organization future ready?

Reference: Encyclopedia of Business 2nd Edn.