Preventing Misconduct with an Ethical Infrastructure
My colleague Juan Castañeda recently offered excellent guidance for how to handle an internal investigation—a critical part of responding once a problem has materialized.
But how to keep ethical misconduct issues from arising in the first place—or once something goes amiss, keep it from metastasizing into a full-blown scandal?
Let’s ask the robots.
I thought I’d check what AI had to say about it. But first, I spent a few moments jotting down core principles I anticipated from the computer’s compilation of conventional wisdom:
1. Policies and processes
2. Tone from the top
3. Strong culture promoting speaking up
4. Accountability
Let’s see how well I guessed. (Scout’s honor, I wrote this list before running this prompt.)
***Bated breath***
Four out of four!
Well, that’s that—do I even need to write this article?
If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them
Not so fast. It’s easy to list each of these items on a best practices checklist.
What’s hard is to do them—and do them well. Crossing these items off a list may prevent liability when something blows up—a non-trivial goal most organizations are wise to pursue. But avoiding liability is a low bar. When misconduct arises, it tends to derail an organization from its mission, creating churn and tainting a hard-won reputation. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could simply prevent bad things from happening in the first place?
The truth is, it’s impossible to fully prevent problems from arising. It seems built into how humans operate: sometimes we do the right thing—but all too often, we don’t. Even the best organization cannot control how employees, or even leaders, behave.
Investing in what you can control
But an organization can reap significant prevention benefits by treating these principles not as a checklist, but as investments in what can it control, building an ethical infrastructure which in turn, influences how people behave.
Let’s take a closer look at each item on our list:
Establish Clear Ethical Standards: Set clear and compelling expectations about what kind of behavior is permitted and prohibited through standards and policies that don’t just make rules, but reflect values and are easy to understand and follow. Ensuring people are aware of, understand, and connect expectations to a bigger picture is a baseline requirement for helping people who want to do the right thing succeed. Not to mention that it is significantly harder to have accountability when expectations aren’t clearly laid out.
Lead by Example from the Top: Just as policies and standards set formal expectations, the words and speech of leaders informally set expectations. They build culture, which can make it normal for people to do the right thing. This culture is built through thousands of often ordinary acts: a leader expressly asking for feedback, incorporating a reflection on ethical standards into a recurring agenda item for All Hands meetings rhythms, publicly praising someone’s courage in speaking up about a problem. It’s built into what is funny, what is celebrated, what is silently avoided. Leadership’s role is to ensure this culture is intentional, not accidental.
Create Safe Reporting Mechanisms: Even when an organization has clear expectations on paper, and leadership makes it normal to do the right thing, inevitably something will still go wrong. How can an organization make sure it hears about the problem in time to respond before it blows up? It probably won’t, without a well-publicized, easy to access, safe-feeling place to receive concerns, and a process that ensures the organization responds. This helps unearth issues so that an organization can reap the benefit of the final, critical piece of ethical infrastructure.
Enforce Consequences Consistently: All the policies, inspirational speeches about ethics, and reporting hotlines in the world won’t matter if people know the unwritten rule applies: when the right kind of person does the wrong thing, he or she can get away with it. Organizations can’t control who behaves badly, but they can ensure people are held accountable fairly—even when they are important, well-regarded leaders—rather than justifying conduct that falls short of organizational values and ethical standards in the name of the mission.
The critical thing an organization can commit to is how it responds when something goes wrong, ensuring that 100% of reports are taken seriously, and that consequences are applied consistently when warranted. The ethical infrastructure is how it delivers on this commitment. While an organization cannot control bad behavior, by following through a commitment to consistent response it impacts how people behave.
Leading from integrity
But the language and action must work together. For example, if a leader says feedback is valued, but blows up when he or she receives it—people learn to question authority at their peril, a recipe for a scandal in the making to metastasize. This is why accountability is so important—if staff see people violate expectations without receiving consequences, they learn those rules can be broken with impunity, which leads to more bad behavior.
Which is why leadership is at the heart of an ethical infrastructure. Leaders have a powerful privilege and responsibility for setting the tone within an organization, not only in the precautions they implement, but who they are. Leaders who consciously prioritize building an ethical infrastructure while leading from integrity will create a liability shield—that gets far less frequent use, as doing the right thing becomes the norm.
But even AI knows: “when leaders compromise on ethics . . . it creates a culture where misconduct can flourish.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.
If you have any questions about this article or need counsel on the issues addressed in it, please contact Jeannie Rose by emailing jeannierose@ch-llp.com.