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Diversity through ethical leadership |
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 Organisational consultant Christopher Keeble explains how ethical leadership is vital for diversity within an organisation, and also how diversity can inform ethical forms of leadership
AN ENTERPRISE’S ULTIMATE PURPOSE IS the efficient provision of the goods and services that society wants. Maximising the shareholder interest or achieving the desired return is obtained by striving to meet the needs and concerns of as many stakeholders as possible. The reward for this is to maintain a reputation for corporate performance, and establish public trust, both of which should contribute to long-term prosperity.
Recent high-profile events have illustrated how compliance and ethical issues are now key strategic concerns for business's social contribution and their ultimate purposes. To these can be added the rising social expectations of accountability; protective compliance in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 for the controls of the financial reporting chain; increasing influence of shareholders on corporate governance; pressure from employees concerned about their company’s values; social responsibility challenges; investor pressure demanding ethical decisions and defensiveness of CSR approaches. (Not to mention customers whose buying patterns reflect their principles and beliefs).
Not Lip Service
Ethical strategies created by leadership and sustained corporately are not mere damage limitation. Nor are they about paying lip service to key stakeholders, or even legal compliance. The ethical business strategy maximises opportunities such as higher productivity levels from better-trained people, gaining access to new markets through an improved understanding of consumer needs and developing an enhanced reputation that leads to greater staff, customer and investor loyalty.
Responsibility here lies with the strategic leadership who have the primary responsibility for living the principles, attitudes and behaviours that will sustain the desired corporate ethic. The foundational ethical challenge is to know how things ‘are’ ethically in order to implement the action that ought to be undertaken to sustain goodwill for the delivery of performance, and support compliance to maintain the bonds of trust. This in turn deters reputational damage, financial loss, and the rupture of stakeholder and shareholder respect. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the legal demands for diversity are but the outward responses to the more profound moral challenge of acquiring the truth of ‘corporate social legitimacy’, within which leadership is required to provide compelling evidence for its moral claim to lead. It is also required to provide clarity about the ethical criteria by which leaders are judged, and transparent justification as to why people should entrust the organisations with the labour of their living and the aspirations for their lives.
The strategic leadership’s claim to lead is sustained by delivering on its declared promises – that is to say the obligations towards what is right and good for the enterprise and its people, such as stakeholder satisfaction, reputation protection and the maintenance of goodwill.
Duty is sustained by virtue: the collective cultivated attitudes evident in the moral dispositions that seek the moral goods necessary for all peoples’ fulfilment. The corporate ethic is thus founded on the integration of the duty and virtue of the strategic leadership – or in other words, its integrity and leadership wholeness. (Integration comes from the Latin 'integer', meaning whole or entire). Integrity itself is founded on the basis of order. All modern organisations are forms of social ordering, constructed in order to deliver transformat
Ancient Ideas
Historically, social order is a blend of two ancient foundational ideas that create a sense of order in change, upon which people can collectively create some predictability about life and some certainty for their flourishing, in an ethically confusing, uncertain, ambiguous and (some would claim) evil world. It is upon this basis that modern men and women endeavour to transform resources into material goods and so make a living.
The first compelling idea for social ordering came from the Greeks in the contract made between citizens in the form of the polis, which aimed to satisfy, using different resources, individual interests in the search for material goods. (Polis meaning ‘city state’). The centralised power sought compliance, and used coercion if required, to resolve conflict to establish the foundations for a more just order from notions of justice and peace.
The signpost contribution of the modern polis is to create a focus for action. That is, a purpose, often described as the ‘vision’ (a term taken from moral philosophy), supported by certain moral preferences called values, and activities that achieve organisational performance and enhance the institution’s reputation.
The second narrative which created predictable social cohesion had its origins in the theist Judaic/Christian/Islamic religious ideals of the civic. This was expressed in a covenant between peoples held together by the obligations of fidelity and faithfulness in ‘community’, whose inspiration was compassion and charity. The obligations of moral authority sought obedience, and used arbitration to resolve disputes in order to encourage communal goodwill, for the acquisition of desired moral goods for human flourishing.
‘Life Project’
Modern forms of the civic sustain the ‘life project’ of each individual through the network of relationships established with others, to create the context for the expression of the person’s vocation. This vocation is expressed through the prudent use of talent for the common good and for eventual securing of communal well-being.
The basis for modern society, I would suggest, rests on these two societal arrangements. Since all organisations are but fractals of society, the ‘polis’ (political, economic, scientific etc) and the ‘civic’ (moral, ethical and communal) ought to be represented and sustained in harmony. Managing the polis favourably creates ‘service capital’, an investment of service. Leading the civic meanwhile creates ‘social capital’ – which for me is nothing but duplicitous jargon for the ethical reality of goodwill. Goodwill ought to be understood, not in its weak emotional form of the ‘feelgood factor’, but in the deeper ethical sense of the will to the good. That is, a demanding and intense moral challenge.
On the basis of these ideas, I would claim that every modern organisation is identified by its purpose, holds certain values, and is obedient to the legitimacy of its authority to obey specific rules. However the dignity of the human person ought to be the principle, the subject and the end of every communal institution. Thus the civic is not primarily constructed for the benefit of the business, but for the benefit of human beings.
When individuals recognise that the endeavour is congruent with the pursuit of their own and others’ fulfilment, through the sustained well-being of the community, then individuals are morally engaged. (That is, what management theory calls ‘motivated’ from the Latin for ‘to move’). The individual is ‘moved’ by the ‘ethical goods’ that emerge from becoming involved in the enterprise. It is, therefore, the individual who makes the moral move. This is a challenge to the vacuous platitude that the ‘leader’s job’ is to motivate people, or in other words provide ‘motives’ for people to work. Leadership, supported by the institution’s community of people is a prime authority for maintaining civic goodwill (morale), and, although goodwill is a moral good in itself, it is critical to achieving performance success.
Creating Moral Narratives
Ethical leadership duty of purposeful structures (economic, political, legal and scientific) would be to create the moral narrative that may be turned into the individual’s own good, as well as providing the environment in which this move can take place successfully.
Dignity for people entails respect for the rights that flow from their significance as human beings. Respect proceeds by way of honour for the principle that everyone should look upon their neighbour as another 'self', since all enjoy an equal dignity. There is therefore a unity between all humans, which makes a direct demand for a more just social order, where tensions are better able to be reduced, and conflicts more readily settled by negotiation.
Any person claiming to lead would also have to embrace the burden, privilege and virtue of authority. Authority could be described as the quality, by virtue of which, persons (or institutions) have agreed to make laws and expect obedience (rather than compliance) to them.
Leadership also involves the idea of setting an example, not simply of behavioural competence, but of ethical excellence, that is to say virtue. Virtues would be the firm attitudes, stable dispositions and habitual perfections of intellect and will that govern action, order passion and guide conduct according to reason and belief. In today’s organisations of moral ambiguity, diversity and complexity, the leader’s creative capability is to act in virtuous duty through authority by personal example. This is in order to strengthen the values and well-being of the community, and be at the service of others so they in turn can participate in order to achieve the common good. Through this, the organisation’s purpose is fulfilled, and everyone involved flourishes. Leadership duty would be to govern, exercising in peace and gentleness, the authority given in service to the common good of the communities committed to their charge. This will in turn provide people with reasons for optimism, through attention to both policies and principles.
It is upon these ethical arguments that the moral and legal appeal for diversity rests, rather than merely the expression of difference. It is the basis upon which leaders fulfil their responsibility to understand, know and use their moral judgment for the good.
About the Author: Christopher Keeble has had a challenging military and commercial career. Born in India in 1941, he was educated at Douai Abbey, the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst and commissioned into the UK’s elite Parachute Regiment. He was awarded the DSO in command of 2 Para during the Falklands War. He now runs a unique consultancy and lecturing practice that has worked successfully for senior leaders from national and international public and private sector institutions and corporations. |
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