Week 4 Leadership as ethics

Introduction

To introduce the subject of this week, watch the following video, an interview with Nik Winchester, an expert on ethics.

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Transcript: Video 1 Nik Winchester on ethics and leadership.

NIK WINCHESTER:

Defining ethics is actually quite tricky. But as an academic, or probably, say, generally it's about judgments about right and wrong and the good and the bad.

Organisational ethics can be understood in perhaps two ways. It could be considered of us thinking about what we think people in organisations ought to do. Or it could be about understanding what are the foundational beliefs of those within organisations. So there's a sense in which we think about the obligations of business. But there's also a sense of what people really believe, what are their core ethical principles within organisations.

Saying there's such a thing as leadership ethics, an ethics appropriate for leadership, doesn't really help us understand. What we need to understand is the relationship between ethics and leadership. As people, we're ethical beings. So as leaders, we bring in those ethical understandings as we practise leadership.

Now in terms of actual formal leaders, ethics can be really important, not only because these people often have a lot of influence. They make decisions that affect people. So there's always an ethical component in there. But there are also broader issues we might explore about how ethics resonate in leadership, how ethics itself can, one might say, do leadership.

The idea of ethics doing leadership seems quite odd, ethics actually doing anything. It's about people, surely. But imagine I was sitting in a boardroom and we were discussing what we should do. And imagine I was a bit uncomfortable, I mean, emotions are part of ethics, and I said, I don't think that's the right thing to do. People might turn around and look at me and say, that's interesting but that's just one view.

But what if I said, I'm not sure this should be what we should do? I'm actually saying there's something about us as an organisation, our values, our principles. And actually, that's quite a powerful statement. Because it's saying these ethical values are really important and they need to drive our behaviour.

In my view, ethics theory is important. It's been talked about for thousands of years. And we can't ignore it. But it doesn't provide us answers. I think it's best way to treat ethical theory is to see it as lenses of understanding the problems and then explore different ways in to understand some of the ethical dilemmas we experience in our daily life, as leaders, or enacting leadership.

Perhaps if I was going to say one thing about ethics, it's that practicing ethics is difficult. It can be uncomfortable. It can be unpleasant at times. But it's all important in terms of our leadership practise, and indeed, us as humans and our human condition.

End transcript: Video 1 Nik Winchester on ethics and leadership.

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Video 1 Nik Winchester on ethics and leadership.

Nik discusses in this clip how the ethics of an organisation can do real leadership work – that ethics can guide people’s behaviour and decisions. He also emphasises how applying ethics to the workplace is not about coming up with a single correct answer – instead, it is a way of feeling a way through the opportunities and pitfalls of organisational life. These are all dimensions you will consider throughout this week.

This week you will learn about two practices that can help voluntary organisations be led by their ethics. These are leadership through purpose and leadership through dilemmas.

After completing this week you will be able to:

• distinguish between ethics and morality
• define and describe an organisational ethical purpose
• critically analyse your and others’ organisational purpose
• interpret an ethical dilemma drawing on ethics theory
• critically reflect on the aftermath of decisions with ethical implications.

1 What does ethics mean?

Before considering ethics in practice, let’s first reflect on what is meant by ‘ethics’.

2 Leadership as purpose

For the homeless charity Crisis, eradicating homelessness is a clear purpose underlying all of its work:

Note the strength of the language used here by Crisis: ‘devastation’; ‘vulnerability’; ‘isolation’. Through these words, a picture emerges of shattered lives. Furthermore, Crisis believes that ‘everyone deserves’ a home. ‘Deserves’ signals the sense of a home as a fundamental right. There is a strong sense of ethics at play here. Having a home is a fundamental right and not to have one is a wrong – this is about ethics. Furthermore, this is about a sense of ethics leading the organisation.

Figure 1 The charity Crisis is driven by a clear sense of purpose

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This image shows a cardboard 2D house being held in a person's hands.

Figure 1 The charity Crisis is driven by a clear sense of purpose

In the UK, charities are legally obliged to state their purpose. Registering the purpose of a charity is to ensure it is working for public benefit as it will receive the tax and other benefits that come with charitable status. However, the focus of this course is not on the legalities of purpose but on how a voluntary organisation’s purpose can do leadership work.

In a leadership sense, an organisation’s purpose sits somewhere between its morality and its ethics, in other words, between the underlying system of values of an organisation and its judgements about right and wrong. That is what makes thinking about purpose so intriguing.

But a purpose does not result in an automatic set of ethical prescriptions: X is right, Y is wrong. There is significant room for interpretation of a purpose and what it means in practice. Moreover, a purpose may not always be fit for purpose. Sometimes a purpose may lead an organisation in a direction that is consistent but still wrong.

Purposes can also lead people to pursue certain activities over others. Yet purposes are also contested (debated, argued over), which is what makes them such a lively and interesting point of focus for practice and research.

The course now moves on to consider organisational purpose in more depth.

2.1 The forces driving purpose

Let’s now reflect on leadership as purpose in a little more depth. Kempster et al. (2011) make the case that purpose is a greatly overlooked dimension of leadership studies, which, as you saw in Weeks 2 and 3, are usually preoccupied by the personality of people in leadership. The authors draw on the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre, someone who reflected a great deal on the role of purpose in society. MacIntyre (1988 and 1997) makes the case that purpose is driven by two forces. First, it is driven by what he calls external goods. External goods are ‘possessed by people’– things such as ‘money, or gaining power’ (Kempster et al., 2011, p. 321). So, for instance, one person might do good, charitable things with power and money but another might choose to do otherwise, buying a terrific new Lamborghini sports car instead of donating to a local homeless shelter.

Second, purpose is shaped by internal goods, those things that are good in and of themselves. These internal goods are good beyond individuals and can be interpreted as ‘a good for the whole community’ (Kempster et al., 2011, p. 321). For example, preventing homelessness could be considered an effort that comprises several internal goods. Crisis would argue that reducing homelessness improves people’s health (mental and physical), their education and skills, as well as the broader economy. For example, there may also be a less tangible internal good of generating community spirit – seeing vulnerable homeless people on the street can be distressing and improving people’s lives may make everyone feel that little bit better about themselves and their communities.

Organisations tend to veer towards a preference for external goods (perhaps understandably because organisations need to be able to survive in the short-term and doing so requires external goods, primarily money) and so a key aspect of leadership as ethics is keeping the organisation focused on and aware of its internal goods. For example, a volunteer might raise a question about why a charity chooses to fundraise in a particular way; or a board member might query an organisation’s partnership with a business organisation. Having a strong purpose, however, does not mean that organisations are able to avoid tough ethical dilemmas and the next section moves on to explore leadership in relation to dilemmas.

3 Leadership and ethical dilemmas

At the beginning of this week we provided a definition of ethics as concerning judgements about right and wrong. The simplicity of this definition conceals a range of more complicated issues. In reality, ethics is mostly not about right and wrong but about ‘wrong and more wrong’ or ‘almost-right and a-bit-wrong’. In other words, organisational ethics is often about dilemmas that:

• have to take into account complex contexts
• acknowledge that people very often operate from a basis of incomplete information
• acknowledge managers often operate from a basis of insufficient time
• look very different depending on the position from which they are viewed.

Ethical dilemmas are those problems for which there is no straightforward answer: the problem cannot be solved as such, merely acted upon in one way or another. Truly ethical problems do not disappear once a decision is made. However, it can help to have a range of approaches in order to do justice to the complexity of ethical dilemmas.

Figure 2 Voluntary action to help people in poverty (e.g. soup kitchen)

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Volunteers serving food.

Figure 2 Voluntary action to help people in poverty (e.g. soup kitchen)

In the following section we will first rehearse some approaches that are commonly used in relation to ethical dilemmas. We will then make the case, in Section 5, that while reading and assessing ethical dilemmas is important, what may be even more important from a leadership perspective is how one comports oneself within and beyond the dilemma.

4 Three approaches to reading an ethical dilemma

In the following activity you will read a case study of a typical ethical dilemma and three separate ways of thinking about the case will be presented. Each of these approaches suggests a way that you and your leadership team might read and discuss an ethical dilemma.

5 Engaged leadership ‘within’ ethical dilemmas

As you have seen, experiencing ethical dilemmas is an important part of leadership. However, in this section you will reflect on leadership within ethical dilemmas. Note the word ‘within’ is deliberately selected. It is our belief that in leadership you cannot escape ethical dilemmas as such. Leadership is therefore as much to do with the quality of how you engage one another within the dilemmas (the processes of interaction) as it is about the final decision made. To flee in the face of a difficult choice and its aftermath does not count as leadership, as you would not really be leading anyone – other than yourself, in the opposite direction of the tough choices.

Figure 3 Supporting people is not without its ethical dilemmas and choices

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This image shows a number of coloured post-it notes, labelled 'right' or 'wrong'. There are also some white post-it notes with a question mark on them

Figure 3 Supporting people is not without its ethical dilemmas and choices

The situation outlined in the case study is a fictionalised version of something similar that recently faced the charity Glasspool and a decision it took to sell 63 properties that it owned in the Walthamstow area of east London. Tenants were reported to have discovered that the properties they were renting had been sold when they received eviction notices from the new owners. The case was highlighted by the local MP, Stella Creasy, who referred to the situation as ‘a new low for gentrification’ (Creasy, 2016).

Nevertheless, was the charity not in a difficult position? Its press release of 9 February 2016 says as much:

The defence of the charity to a charge of an ethical lapse appears to be an assertion of ethics, which is what makes the case so interesting. The charity’s case is that it acted ethically by sticking to its ethical purpose. Its critics maintain that it suffered an ethical lapse for not thinking enough about the people affected by such an ethical stance. What the case highlights effectively is that leadership involves working through such ethical dilemmas very carefully. An important part of working through and within ethical dilemmas, we argue, is sticking around to lead through the fall-out of any decisions made. This is an overlooked part of leadership but a critical one, nevertheless. The next section considers this aspect of leadership as ‘leading through tragedy’.

6 Leading through tragedy

Now that we have thought a little about the process of making decisions related to ethical dilemmas, it is time to think about the aftermath of these decisions. This is a dimension of leadership rarely considered, but we argue that this aspect is just as important as the decision itself. The ethical dilemma, as most experienced practitioners will tell you, never fully disappears – its effects linger.

The case study you reflected on in the previous section is in fact an adaptation of a dilemma posed by the philosopher Bernard Williams (1973). In Williams’ dilemma you would be faced by the prospect of being asked to shoot dead a single innocent person in order to save the remaining 19, with no option of simply walking away. This is clearly a far more extreme dilemma, but people in leadership positions across sectors do frequently encounter decisions that hold serious consequences for individuals and society as a whole.

Williams (1973 and 2008) refers to these situations as ‘tragic’ because there is no single, correct answer. In these situations you feel the discomfort, the distress and remorse associated with the decisions made. Feeling and emotion are good signs that you are capable of functioning as a mature ethical practitioner – if you did not feel it, then you should start to truly worry. Looking at situations from this perspective, it is important that you and the organisation survives with its sense of ethics intact.

Adopting this perspective tells us that we need to ‘stick with’ (Ladkin, 2011) and stick around to participate in the leadership that follows any difficult decision. This is about thinking how you can contribute to rebuilding and re-energising the organisation in the face of a very difficult decision. Thinking of the tragic suggests an element of sacrifice on the part of those who would act as organisational leaders. You have to absorb some of the pain and act as a kind of lightning rod for the emotions of those who work in the organisation, if that is what the organisation needs.

Sticking with a tragedy can of course become self-indulgent. Again, though, there is no formula that tells you when it is time to start moving on and putting a decision to one side: it is a matter of feeling your way through. You will know better than most what your organisation can tolerate and when.

We therefore conclude this week by reflecting on your experiences in leadership ethics and thinking in more depth about some of the things you can do in leadership to get through a tragic situation.

7 Key practice: ethical reflection

You have already engaged in lots of ethical reflection this week and we now want to underline it as an important practice for leadership. You have reflected ethically by:

• reflecting on organisational purpose as something powerful yet also as something that can be contested and that can and ought to adapt
• considering the complexity and multiple dimensions of ethical dilemmas
• engaging with how you can, in a present and embodied way, stick around after a decision has been made to help your colleagues through the consequences.

In summary, ethical reflection is important because it deals with dilemmas and problems for which there is no straightforward or satisfactory answer.

Ethical reflection allows you to approach a problem from a number of different perspectives. It also invites you to think about problems from the perspective of a number of different people. The idea of ethical reflection is to make a problem more complex and difficult, to see more sides of the puzzle, rather than solving the puzzle itself. Ethical reflection is also very much an emotional and embodied task. It asks you to pay attention to how certain options, issues and people make you feel.

Summary of Week 4

This week we started with the proposition that the ethics of an organisation can do leadership work – that ethics can lead. We explored how the purpose of an organisation can provide significant ethical leadership if it is able to remain open to change and adaptation.

We then switched focus to decision-making within organisations, introducing the idea of an unresolvable ethical dilemma. The week’s learning concluded by putting decision-making to one side and reflecting instead on the aftermath of a decision, something we stated is as important as the decision itself. The week ended by you thinking back on the key practice of the week, that of ethical reflection.

Next week we end the course by offering a way of thinking about and practicing leadership that captures its rich relational dynamics: that of leadership as practice.

Go now to Week 5.

Keep on learning

References

Acknowledgements

This free course was written by Owain Smolović Jones and Carol Jacklin-Jarvis.

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