She orders these “lenses” along an arc that flows more or less from
shortest-term to longest-term thinking, and from most practical
to most aspirational.
■■ Profit (“Make money”): This lens focuses on traditional corpo-rate
values of financial loss or gain.
■■ Law (“Comply”): Guides organizational activities according to
the minimum standards required by law.
■■ Character (“Be moral”): Centres on developing leaders’ per-sonal
moral integrity.
■■ People (“Care”): Includes respect for the needs and rights of
employees.
■■ Communities (“Serve”): Widens the focus to include the
broader community.
■■ Planet (“Sustain”): Places a high value on environmental con-servation
and sustainability.
■■ Greater good (“Do good”): This lens takes the biggest picture
into consideration and looks ahead to the needs of future
generations.
The ethical expectations of the contemporary world are
changing, which can have dramatic implications for leaders.
Organizations must better define an ethical system appropriate
to their own particular activities and personality, and be constant
throughout that entire system.
“Companies that consistently strive to do business ethical-ly
tend to outperform their counterparts who don’t, and they
outperform in lots of different ways,” said Fisher Thornton.
“When you lead with ethics, you build trust, and that’s when
you transform the metrics. So traditionally, people have
thought of ethics as a burden, but it’s moved to focusing on
their potential and the opportunity that proactive ethics
brings out in the organization.”
Managing people is an important component of ethical leader-ship,
though not the only one.
“There is no one dimension of ethical leadership,” she said. “We
are understanding that people are whole beings; people have many
different aspects of their lives, and we can’t ask them to turn that
off when they come into the workplace.” When a leader demon-strates
that employees are valued for who they are as people, she
says, they feel safe and they can do their best work.
Corporate leaders actually have an ethical obligation to keep
abreast of the latest developments in their fields since, for exam-ple,
it would be impossible to source ingredients, materials and
supplies ethically without being aware of the health or environ-mental
concerns that may have arisen about a given product in the
supply chain.
“Our ethics as leaders are defined by every piece of what our
organization does, and that includes our subcontractors and sup-pliers.
If we have really good values in our own workplace, but
we’re subcontracting to another country, we need to go over there
and check,” said Fisher Thornton.
“We are our supply chain, and businesses are being held ac-countable
for the whole chain by consumers. They’re saying no,
you can’t have this squeaky-clean image and then use sweat shop
labour. People are voting with their purchases. The proactive com-panies
are making the changes now, before the laws require it, and
they are being rewarded by the consumers who want to support
values-based organizations,” she said.
“Ethical competence is always going to be a moving target,” said
Fisher Thornton. “I want to help people build ethical compe-tence,
because it doesn’t just happen. Companies that are doing
that are getting a lot of media attention. They’re attracting con-sumers
who are attracted by the care they’re taking. Companies
who are taking these steps are finding that it moves their metrics
forward in wonderful ways.” ■
leadership
“THE PROACTIVE COMPANIES
ARE BEING REWARDED BY
THE CONSUMERS WHO
WANT TO SUPPORT VALUES-BASED
ORGANIZATIONS.”
– LINDA FISHER THORNTON, FOUNDER
AND CEO, LEADING IN CONTEXT
Brian A Jackson/Shutterstock
46 ❚ SEPTEMBER 2014 ❚ HR PROFESSIONAL