Excellent leadership demands ethical conduct. As a leader, being ethical is so much more than just a skill. It is the capacity of your own will to strive to be a better person in the things you do and the choices you make.
In our increasingly globalized business world, prioritizing ethical behavior is essential to doing good business, not only for yourself, but for others. The impact of prioritizing ethics is impactful when it starts at the top of business: the leaders.
What can leaders do to be more ethical? For a start, adopting the Globally Conscious Leader® Program. But, what else?
Ethics does not give you a concrete answer to every problem that arises. Ethics is a journey, a practice, and a deliberation of the highest value. Ethics relates to your moral compass, and what you think the moral thing to do is. The moral thing to do is usually the choice that advances the greater good of humanity the most.
Immanuel Kant has proclaimed that in situations where you are unsure of what is ethical and what is not, think about what you are doing, and think about if everyone in the entire world did the thing that you are doing, would it be okay? How would it impact the world? It is a deliberation between what you are doing versus what you ought to do. To illustrate this, if everyone did not help their friends in need or be there for them, then no one would confide in each other anymore and a lot of problems would be unsolved. You might ask, why is it wrong to not help my friend when they are in need? “I would have done it but I was busy.” “Last time I confided in my friend they didn’t help me so this is fair.” This is where the ‘ought’ comes into play.
Regardless of extraneous circumstances, you have an obligatory role as a human being to do the ethical thing. Some basic things like “You should not kill”, “you should not steal” illustrates this idea even better, as most people don’t even think about doing them. But ethics, and life itself, isn’t so easy. Life is complicated, and so is business, and when there are many extraneous circumstances that can overwhelm a person or a business, it is easy to not prioritize ethical behavior. An easy fix for this is asking yourself, what would the world look like if everyone did what I am about to do?
