Ethical leadership
The Ethics Centre
Sports bodies, academic institutions and, increasingly, banks and financial services organisations have turned to The Ethics Centre (ethics.org.au) to co-develop leadership training.
Typically, groups of 20 people from a company gather to consider what the Sydney-based centre regards as the foundations of ethical leadership – awareness (which includes empathy), courage (to speak up and to question customs and practices), influence, imagination (to conceive alternatives) and wisdom – which, says Victoria Whitaker, the centre’s co-head of advice and education, starts with self-awareness.
Whitaker, who joined the centre in 2015, distinguishes a moral temptation from an ethical dilemma, which the centre defines as a choice between two wrongs or two competing rights. For some people, “the outcome is the most important thing to consider in a decision,” she says. “But another part of the population won’t care about the consequences; they’re focused on their duties and obligations, what the rules say they must do. Those tensions play out all the time.”
The Ethics Centre has been providing professional development for public servants in Papua New Guinea, who “have to navigate relationships to family and kin, which come first in a tribal community, while being in government – how to deal with conflicts of interest and favouritism”. So training is not just concerned with individuals responding to situations; it’s also about helping to develop systems so people can navigate conflicts while upholding their values.
Whitaker has identified several big ethical concerns that today’s leaders face, including the implementation of increasingly formal processes to control poor company behaviour, which “has resulted in the inability of people at the front line to make decisions at all and has increased costs as every decision is escalated upwards. An adverse outcome can be that no-one is making the decision.”
She has also witnessed a shift in focus around social licence, a term that emerged in mining to describe consent that a community gives (or doesn’t give) a business to operate in its environment. “We’ve seen a significant decline in trust in recent years,” she says. “There’s a strong appetite from business to arrest the decline. What we know is, whether it’s having to be more transparent, or needing a different communication framework or paying compensation, when trust goes down, the cost of operation goes up.”