Published CommPro.biz 2014.04.29

Ethics, Easy, Right? Wrong!!

Nothing to it, ethics is simple. All you have to do, is do “The Right Thing.” The problem comes when “The Right Thing” is not all that simple. It isn’t easy to speak up when your job is on the line. It isn’t even easy to speak up when a friend drops an inappropriate “F-Bomb” or worse makes an always inappropriate racist joke. A lot has to do with personality. Some are gifted with the ability to speak up in such situations. Others, who would never behave unethically, are just not able to speak out against unethical behavior. Some don’t want to alienate anyone.

And while the day-to-day situations we face are important, there are other cases where we must act; especially in the workplace. We have to act if a fellow worker is taking shortcuts that could endanger others, or just not providing service at the level promised. We have to act when we know the company is cooking the books as they did at Enron, or in the Libor scandal. When millions are being ripped off as they were when Enron manipulated energy costs. Even worse, hundreds of millions were hurt when a handful of traders manipulated Libor, impacting every entity and every person paying interest in every corner of the globe.

Some of these examples are illegal, others are unethical. Too often people fail to understand that the ethical line is drawn far from the legal line. Compliance and ethics get mashed together; corporate responsibility for ethics is given to legal counsel. Bad move, attorneys are trained to stay inside legal bounds. Some companies never learn. Hewlett Packard hired another lawyer to oversee ethics replacing Kevin Hunsaker, a lawyer who narrowly escaped jail time when he advised that a witch hunt for a Board of Directors leak was legal. It wasn’t legal and it was miles from ethical. If Hunsaker had based his advice on ethics, it would have saved all those involved worlds of trouble.

High speed trading, the practice of literally manipulating the stock markets could not be more unethical. Its practitioners dart in and out in milliseconds seeking those about to buy a stock, beating them to it and jacking up the price the buyer ultimately pays. Grandma’s pension fund and others lose. These buccaneers of our capital seas cry out that what they do is legal. At the moment so it is, however, it is far from ethical.

It is not always easy to see the ethical line and sometimes it is not easy to hew to that line. It takes practice and sometimes courage. It takes a willingness to risk everything from the loss of a friend to the loss of a career. You will likely find other friends, but you may not find another job. However, if you remain silent to keep a job, you will forever wish you had spoken out. And that job will grow heavy and seem sour every day when you cross over the threshold to your workplace.