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On ethical management:

With some reflection on an Australian response

by Simon Longstaff

Introduction

It may be appropriate to begin by saying something about the nature and meaning of ethics. Quite a few people will automatically think of ethics as providing a system of guidance based on a set of principles or rules. These rules will help us to determine what is good, bad, right or wrong. There is a good deal of truth in this perception. However, it needs to be viewed in a much broader context.

Have you ever noticed that a lot of people seem uncomfortable when the discussion turns to ethics? Sometimes, the reason for this is that they think that the whole subject is too theoretical or that ethics is the same as morality - and therefore a private matter. While understandable, both positions need to be reassessed.

Ethics is about as practical a subject as you can get! History tells us that the first question to be asked in ethics was put by a Greek philosopher, called Socrates. Socrates lived in Athens at around 500 BC. His question was a deceptively simple one. He asked: “What ought one to do?” As you can see, it's not a question of theory. Instead, we are asked to think about how we should live our lives (in every aspect) and about what kind of people that we want to be.

This leads to a second point. Ethics is not the same as morality. To be talking about ethics is to be involved in a conversation about what we ought to do. Moralities provide alternative answers - different moralities are like different voices in that conversation. So there is a Christian voice, a Jewish voice, an Islamic voice, and so on. Then there are the voices of secular philosophers and all the others who think that they have something to say on the matter. Perhaps the most interesting thing is that most of these voices share a lot in common - often saying the same thing in a slightly different way.

Yet there are real differences and the tricky part, for all of us, is to pick out those voices that seem to be speaking to us with the most sense and inherent truthfulness. We are also faced with the challenge of joining in the conversation. If we are going to do that, then we will need to feel comfortable about using the language of ethics. How many of us feel comfortable about speaking of these issues at all?

Many feel that they will be looked down as being a little 'weak' or pious if they institute a discussion about ethics. Others think that it is all irrelevant; just a waste of time. This can be the context in which people find themselves unable to ask even the simplest of questions, "Is it right?".

However, part of the power of Socrates' question is that it shows that we cannot avoid ethics - even if we want to! We might pretend that we aren't involved in the conversation. However, every time we make a choice, and every time we take a decision, then we unconsciously reflect our values and commitments. That is, we send a signal about what we think one ought to do in such-and-such a situation and at such-and-such a time.

It's not difficult to demonstrate the way in which ethics underpins everything that we say and do. Just imagine asking each person to explain why they pursued one course of action over another. People will give all sorts of reasons. Some of them will sound like ethical reasons, others will not. For example, a person might reply by saying, "I did it because it seemed like a good idea at the time' or, "I did it because we've always done it that way".

Both answers tell us something about the person's ethics. We learn something by noting their assumptions and the values that seem to underpin their approach to the matter in hand. We can go on to ask, "But why do things just because you think them a good idea at the time?' and "what's the fact that 'you always do it' have to do with the correctness of your decision?".

To repeat: you can't escape ethics. Ultimately, everything comes back to that primary question: "What ought one to do?". The way you live your life tells people something about what you believe a "good life' to be. Even if you never utter a word - the way you live your life tells people a considerable amount about your ethics. The pity is that some people never really think about this and instead operate on auto-pilot. They follow patterns and instructions designed by others.

This is not to suggest that it's always going to be easy to tackle issues in ethics. One frequently encounters an ethical dilemma. Such dilemmas can arise in various ways - most commonly when two or more principles call for contradictory responses to the same set of circumstances.

As the word 'dilemma' indicates, if not left totally in the dark, we certainly experience the 'grey' region of judgement. In many situations our choice is restricted to the lesser of two evils. There is little that can be done about this. All the wisdom of the ages is powerless to rescue people from this particular aspect of the human condition.

But before moving on, let me suggest one really important insight about ethics; namely, that it is all about individuals and how they choose to live in community. Ethics is about relationships and, in particular, whether or not we recognise the way in which other people are affected by our actions, and that they may have a claim on us.

Ethical management

All of this leads me on to offer some comments and observations about what might be termed ‘ethical management’. Ethical Management is not a new idea. Indeed, there bound to be many people here who apply its principles as a matter of course.

Ethical Management is an explicit form of management that is concerned not only with the technical, financial and legal aspects of a business, but which recognises and manages the values that operate at the heart of any enterprise. These values affect everyone in the organisation and all of those with which it has some association.

In point of fact, there is no such thing as a value-free organisation. The values adopted by an organisation can be for good or for ill. That is, they can contribute to the organisation's ability to achieve its objectives or they can act as a hindrance. Given that values shape an organisation's ‘climate’ or ‘culture’, it is important that they be identified and managed in the best interests of the organisation and the people that it is there to serve. One of the key objectives of ethical management is to create the conditions and competencies through which an organisation's values can be harmonised in a way that best serves its mission.

Much current management theory implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) recognises the importance of the ethical dimension. For example, the principles of Total Quality Management contain the seeds for sound ethical management. The TQM approach is based on a recognition of the need for continual review of the processes of production and provides diagnostic tools of measurement to determine performance and measure progress. The tenets of TQM are readily applied by management to the technical areas associated with the systematic control of goods and services that are produced for internal and external customers.

However, this same approach can deliver impressive results when applied to the task of examining the prevailing culture of an organisation and its constituent parts. In this respect, it can be seen that the principles of TQM can be extended beyond the technical aspects of the business to the values that are operating there.

This is to take up the challenge of developing a climate of open communications in which constructive criticism is welcomed from all quarters, instead of being feared as an assault on order and authority. But to be serious about managing values, one also has to be serious about consistency across an organisation. Otherwise, there is the risk of creating what has been called a ‘values gap’.

A 'values gap' can occur at the level of the individual manager or it can affect the whole organisation. Andrall E. Pearson (1977) gives an account of the danger:

Managers need to ask the tough question: Do we have the right values for right now? And the place to begin is by honestly confronting the ‘values gap’ that has developed in most large companies, the pervasive difference between what the company says it stands for and what it actually delivers. The values gap is the largest source of cynicism and scepticism in the workplace today.

But there is another reason for examining matters to do with the management of values. Leaving aside questions of increased productivity, higher retention rates, improved compliance and so on; there is also the issue of simple decency in the way in which we organise our social institutions.

We sometimes act as if businesses can exist as totally independent entities. This dangerous fiction obscures the fact that businesses, governments, indeed all of our institutions are created by and for people. To take a serious look at values and ethics is to make a statement along the lines that we recognise the importance of the human dimension in what we do. It says that whilst notions of efficiency are important, they are not the whole of the story. It recognises that people are not cogs in a machine. It says that we are concerned about the kind of communities that we want our organisation to be. It says that people matter.

It might seem to some that the very idea of ethical management creates problems for those who would conduct a successful business. This seems to be doubly so when considering, the not unreasonable view, that a successful business will be run in a cost-effective and profitable fashion. Where, in all of this, is there room for ethics? Indeed, one could be forgiven for thinking that business and ethics are like oil and water - they don't mix.

One of the key components of successful management is a capacity to respond to change. Response time is retarded by inefficient or entrenched structures. Thus, the process of keeping a manual inventory of stocks and stores may be fondly thought of as possessing a certain kind of quaint charm.

However, this should not be allowed to obscure the fact that the cost of maintaining an outdated work practice is to be borne by the whole enterprise. In some cases, where the tail wags the dog, such a system may even work to frustrate change at a more general level. Management expert, Peter Drucker, has stressed that an ability to manage change is going to be the defining characteristic of the successful business of the future. If this is so, then it will mean building in a capacity to take a constructively critical look at all of our policies and practices.

Whilst it is important to reserve a place for healthy traditions, it is equally important that businesses release themselves from the shackles of habit. It is easy to see the significance of this when it comes to manufacturing processes, management procedures and all the other 'surface' characteristics of an enterprise. However, there is an even more fundamental level that, being taken for granted, is frequently overlooked.

This is the level of the organisation's culture or character (ethos). Custom and practice can be just as stultifying at this level. An uncritical environment can lead to a situation in which custom and practice are used to justify the indefensible. The temptation is to look to others for tried and tested solutions. But is it possible to respond to the challenge by using resources that are distinctively Australian?

An Australian response

I have tried to suggest that ethics is a topic of immense practical importance. Ethics is about what we ought to do and who we want to be. How we decide such matters will have a significant impact on the kind of society that we develop. And it is for this reason that we have to look for solutions that make sense in our own culture and environment.

I would be the first to agree that there is much to learn from the experience of others. And I am not one to argue that everything Australian is automatically superior to everything foreign. However, in the case of ethics I think that we ought to exhaust our own resources before turning to other sources of guidance and inspiration. My reason for this is simple enough. To the extent that there are resonances with our past or with the curious cultural space that we live in, then there is a better chance that the insights and solutions that we develop will take root and flourish.

Needless to say, that which follows is open to objection and I must confess that these observations are not especially original. The core idea that I wish to explore is that we no longer have the opportunity to experience the depth of our society (if deep it still be) but, instead, are relegated to an exploration of an increasingly multi-faceted surface area and that this is because of the way in which an abiding sense of belonging to a community has been replaced by the notion of atomistic individuals who live primarily for themselves and only coincidentally as part of a society.

Whilst I do not want to fall prey to the vice of romanticising the past, I think it fair to say that there used to be a time when Australians had a proper appreciation of each other. Indeed, there was a time when people would write with approval about an Australian society in which the traditional virtues of justice and benevolence had found a new and distinctive expression in the notion of giving the other person a fair go and that of mateship.

How it came to be that these characteristics came to the fore in the public mind will remain a matter of contention for many years to come. Some will look to the formation of bonds of solidarity formed by the ill-fortune of ending up as a convict in New South Wales. Others will point to the pioneering spirit that was born in the bush. Others will see the idea as having its genesis in an explosion of idealism that flowered, somewhat paradoxically, once people found liberation from old ties in a new land (that just happened to be a penal colony). I suspect that the truth is an amalgam of these three, and many other, influences.

Whilst there might be doubt about the provenance of these 'Australian virtues' and although they may have been abused and debased in later generations, there can be little doubt that they were perceived as being real features of the Australian character in the middle of the last century and on into the early years of our own.

For example, in a book entitled Settlers and Convicts written in the 1830s, Alexander Harris wrote:

There is a great deal of this mutual regard and trust engendered by two men working thus together in the otherwise solitary bush: habits of mutual helpfulness arise, and these elicit gratitude, and that leads on to regard. Men under these circumstances often stand by one another through thick and thin; in fact it is a universal feeling that a man ought to be able to trust his mate in anything.

As I said a moment ago, this perception of Australians persisted into the twentieth century. In 1910, Bean talks of:

That general determination - to stand by one's mate, and to see that he gets a fair deal whatever the cost to oneself - means more to Australia than can yet be reckoned ... Whatever the results (and they are sometimes uncomfortable) may it long be the country's code.

The thing to notice about Bean's comments, in particular, is that he is not writing of the values of one or two selected individuals. He writes with confidence about how a nation, how Australia, expresses itself when answering the question, “What ought one to do?”.

There are a number of features that characterise the early period in Australia's development. Some of these features remain but their effects have been neutralised. For a start, many people found themselves in what they considered to be an unfamiliar, inhospitable and even hostile environment. As such they were drawn close to one another.

Then there were the problems of difficult terrain, long distances and poor communication. People needed to be able to trust one another and to rely on the word of honour. Then there was the pace of life itself. Things move more slowly and there was time to get to know the other person, to see them under strain, to test their mettle. Friendships thus became enduring relationships.

Another feature was the silence of the land. Anyone who has read Les Murray's poem The Noonday Axeman will remember his evocative description of the abiding (and sometimes disquieting) silence of the frontier bushland. When silence is broken by human speech the words uttered may be attended to in a way not usual when words are embedded in a wall of sound.

It is, perhaps, another paradox that almost instant access to each other has been accompanied by an apparent consolidation of individual identity at the expense of a sense of community. It is as if we engage with interactive video images in a world of virtual reality. If we prick our neighbour will he bleed? Or will his skin peel back to reveal nothing - not even a ghost in the machine?

Perhaps these comments are too extreme. However, I am concerned about a society that feels comfortable about terms such as ‘human resources’. As Dame Leonie Kramer recently declared, "I am a person, not an object!". The way we use words matters, for they reveal our underlying conception of the world.

Of course the picture is far more complex than that which I have outlined. My comments and concerns need to be balanced by a recognition of the fact that there is a new awareness of issues like our impact on the environment. I am not trying to depict a society in which people have performed a wholesale trade of benevolence in favour of selfishness. At heart I am an optimist about human nature. And I am not wanting to decry the importance of the individual in favour of some naive view which presupposes the superiority of society.

Instead, I am trying to suggest that whilst society may not be superior to the individual, it is none-the-less the necessary context for the full development of our human being, of our personhood if you like. Indeed, the idea of society and the idea of the individual are mutually dependent on each other for their fullest expression.

Without an appreciation of the fact that we are all related as members of society it becomes difficult to see why the welfare of others should be taken into account when trying to decide how to act. And it has been my contention that we are currently experiencing a time in which it has become increasingly difficult to appreciate these relationships, except amongst immediate family. If we care to look for the seeds of the unfortunate activities of the 1980s it may lie in the fact that we no longer recognise our neighbour.

Conclusion

So, what is to be done? What ought one to do? Whichever way you look at the issue, an effective response is going to involve the exercise of responsible leadership.

The burden of choice is not lifted by effort alone. As a precondition for success there must be an exercise of the will. People need to be inspired, to see that it is possible to choose and to choose well. This means that we need people in every sector of society who are prepared not only to be ethical in their own conduct but who seek to stimulate discussion of these important issues. This will require moral courage, something that we hear very little of these days.

At the same time, I want to be absolutely clear that I am not suggesting that those who would lead should set themselves up as the arbiters of good conscience; with the power to enforce their standards. To do so would merely be to remove any chance of our society testing its resolve in the face of choice.

This does not commit our leaders to a life of silent example. On the contrary, those who would lead should also be permitted to exhort and persuade. They are entitled to explain the basis for the values which they hold and to encourage their exploration by others.

Yet there is another powerful tool which can be deployed. This is to raise questions about customs and practices that everyone may take for granted. This is not inimical of tradition. Just as sound plants thrive in the light of day, so sound traditions should thrive in the face of constructive questioning. Convention can be a straight jacket, custom can be performed without any sense of the rhyme or the reason which gives it life. All of these things can be like the letter of the law; dead without the spirit.

If this seems easy for me to say, then I would be the first to recognise the difficulty of applying it in practice. Not least of the difficulties may be the fact that we live in a society of many cultures and in which there can be no guarantee that values are shared across the community. The fact of this raises both challenges and opportunities the full import of which I will return to in a moment. Some of you may be wondering how it is that I expect you to make sense of all this complexity, how to roll back a decade of bad habits.

The challenges before us are amenable to solution. However, they demand that those who are prepared to face the issues do so with humility, wisdom and fortitude. As was noted earlier, ethics is an immensely practical matter which, at its heart, deals with questions affecting the actions of real people. As such the subject is bound to be a morass of complexity which defies explanations based on a crude understanding of human nature and the place of man in society. As Robert Hughes has observed in connection with the writing of history:

The need for absolute goodies and absolute baddies runs deep in us, but it drags history into propaganda and denies the humanity of the dead: their sins, their virtues, their failures. To preserve complexity, and not flatten it under the weight of anachronistic moralising, is part of the historian's task.

The 'flat man' of history is quite unreal. The problem is that too many of us behave as if we are surrounded by such creatures. They are the commodities of modern society, the stock-pile to be allocated in the most efficient and economical manner. Each of them has a price because none of them are thought to be of any intrinsic value.

I have spoken of the burden of choice for all of us. As a yoke, it can sit with extra weight on the shoulders of those who must take the initiative and lead with good example. So how will you choose? Will you remember that you lead real people and not mere ciphers to be deployed for the company's purposes? Will you remember that if you prick them, they will bleed? Will you recognise each of them as your neighbour?

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