The Business Ethics Test: What Would Your Employees Do?

As a police commissioner once said when he turned down the 20th bribe offer he had received that day: “Ethics ain’t easy!” We all face those moments when doing the right thing is very different from doing what is easy or what would be most profitable. That is one of the reasons a company has a mission statement and/or a code of conduct: so that employees understand what is expected of them when faced with the choice between what is right or what is easy, what is ethical or the profitable

The problem is that so many options fall into the gray area in the middle! What do you do when making the ethical decision will surely hurt someone? What if doing something a little wrong will help create a very large “right”? Take a few minutes to read the examples below and answer the questions they raise, and you’ll see what I mean.

• Your coworker asks you to cover for him so he can sneak out of work early to your son’s baseball game. Do you agree? If it were anyway, would you keep quiet?

• You are almost ready to hire a great new customer worth over $50,000. Your boss is under a lot of pressure to increase sales. He calls her into his office and tells her that his job is at stake, and asks her to include the income from his contract in the sales figures for the quarter ending tomorrow. You know the contract is secure, but the client is out of town and can’t sign it tomorrow. What do you do for a living?

• The manufacturing cost of the widgets your company makes has been reduced by 50%. One of his customers, Sam, tells him that he knows because he is the best friend of his company’s vice president of production and asks for a discount on his order. Your boss approves the discount. His other customer, Sue (who is one of his best friends and knows nothing about falling manufacturing costs) makes the exact same widget order as Sam. Does she offer you a similar discount? Are you talking about falling manufacturing costs?

• Company policy prohibits co-workers from being in a romantic relationship. You go to the same church as someone from another department and you are attracted to this person. Do you continue the relationship?

• Your best friend is the vice president of one of the companies your firm does business with. You take her out to lunch just to catch up on personal stuff and pay the bill. Do you declare that it is a “business lunch” and present the receipt for reimbursement?

• While in the bathroom, you overhear your boss telling a colleague that Bob will be fired at the end of the term, in about two weeks. Bob is a good friend of yours. do you tell him?

• One of the newer salespeople in his division is a real jerk, never getting to work on time, distracting other people with his antics, etc. You complain about him to your boss, who tells you that the boy is the son of the president of the company. His boss instructs him to not only leave the new guy alone, but also make his sales numbers look good by throwing him some obvious accounts. What do you do for a living?

Now, in case you’re feeling very virtuous because know would always make the ethical decision in such cases, ask yourself:

have you ever

… lie to your mother? Her boss her? the IRS?

… lied to avoid hurting someone’s feelings?

… lied to get out of a business or social commitment?

…taken a questionable deduction on your income tax?

… falsified the figures in a report to make the results look better?

… took a sick day when you were not sick?

… lied to a customer (“we shipped your order yesterday”) or to a creditor (“the check is in the mail”)?

… cut corners in quality control?

… blamed another person for something for which you knew they were partly responsible?

…used any of these phrases: “Everybody does it”, “It’s the lesser of two evils”, “It’s just a little white lie”, “It doesn’t hurt anyone”, “Who will know?”

… put inappropriate pressure on others?

In the real world, “ethics is not easy.” Somehow we have to devise a way of looking at even the most difficult situations and evaluating them with an eye toward what is right, not what will cause the slightest problem. We need a foundation on which to build the kind of success that feels good because we know that what we’re doing represents us at our best.