Endgame Leadership
  • Blog
  • Resources
  • Contact

The Slippery Slope of Integrity

February 15, 2017Ken WredeCorporate Culture, Ethics, Leadership, Leadership Development, Leadership Principles, Organization Development, Organizational Culture1 comment

caution-slippery-from-wikimedia-commonsThere are basically two kinds of people who get involved in unethical actions in business.

In one case, they are proactive and premeditated in their actions. In the other case, it just sorta happens.

The first type is the common criminal.

You can’t predict who they are or when they’ll strike, because from day one their goal is to deceive. But, you do know that someday you and your organization may become a victim. All you can do to prevent their success is to take the standard precautions (background checks, references, etc.) and make sure you have processes that create checks and balances.

The second type of person is that regular person right next to you. They lapse into a crisis of ethics because they work in a culture or they have a boss that softens the boundaries of ethics and makes the unthinkable seem reasonable.

Their organizational culture gives them the excuse to rationalize what, in any other part of their lives, they would consider “bad behavior”.

The second kind of person is more dangerous to the company because in the wrong culture, it won’t be just “one person” it could be “everyone”.

There are three lessons to take away from this:

  1. To thwart the common criminal, you have the responsibility to take preventative steps. Make it more difficult for a criminal to be a criminal.
  2. Criminal activity is much less common than unethical behavior. Therefore, from a practical point of view, unethical behavior is actually the greater risk and likelihood. Further, unethical behavior can eventually transpose into criminality.
  3. Since there is a greater chance that unethical behavior can happen in the office, steps must be taken to address that greater risk. Setup a culture that generates integrity and ethical outcomes as side-effects. Making a rule that makes people good is impossible, but one can create a system that makes bad behavior difficult.
Ken Wrede
Ken Wrede
K.W. Wrede is a speaker, business consultant, and leadership coach. After spending 27 years overseas in the military, start-up companies, and in a variety of industries primarily Europe, he's now helping clients become effective leaders. He wants to save 5 million companies in the US alone, find out how. When not on the job, he lives in St. Petersburg FL.

1 comment. Leave new

Sundararajan
February 16, 2017 4:36 pm

This is interesting, the article needs to explain also the difference between actions, which are rational and explainable that it is not unethical and that should not get categorized as unethical, and as well throw light on the wisdom, that sometimes the popular belief of something being considered unethical need not be so in certain specific situation.

Log in to Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.

Available on Amazon.com
There are a lot of potential pitfalls when stepping into a leadership role. Here are the 6 most devastating to look out for, and what to do about them.

The Founder

With international leadership experience in high-stakes environments, Ken is an expert in fostering effective teams.

© 2016 K.W. Wrede