At Cranlana, ethics is a journey, not a book of rules
It’s a challenging era for corporates which has led to a deeper public conversation about how to build an ethical business culture.
Can you teach people to be ethical in their personal and professional lives? Can an ethical boss change the culture of a workplace and embed good behaviour? Certainly consumers are demanding companies step up when it comes to doing the right thing — and they have social media to help them make their point. Employees too want good behaviour from their companies, both inside and outside the workplace. Which means that the pressure on leaders to understand and practise ethical behaviour is increasing. The Cranlana Centre for Ethical Leadership based in Melbourne has been teaching ethics for 25 years and recently announced a partnership with Monash University to increase its impact. Cranlana is supported by the Myer Foundation. It merged with the Vincent Fairfax Ethics in Leadership Foundation in April. Cranlana CEO Vanessa Pigrum speaks to The Deal.
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What is ethical leadership?
Applying ethical leadership is really a process. It’s about strengthening your own understanding of how you approach problems, giving yourself a really strong ethical framework to approach complex problems with and then being able to think through how to approach a problem rather than being given a set of rules. It is an ongoing discipline. It’s not unlike getting fit — you don’t just get fit in six days and then never do it again. There is a very large spectrum of activity that ranges from an ethical code of conduct and a code of behaviour within organisations — the rules of engagement, the don’t-break-the-law end of the spectrum — right up to the very complex and ambiguous problem solving that leaders of all sorts need to exercise every day.
‘It’s about ... giving yourself a really strong ethical framework to approach complex problems’
And when we get to the point where it’s headline news because of royal commissions, we’re really looking at the end of the spectrum that is around law-breaking. So, we’re focusing on preventing that. We’re trying to strengthen leaders across private, public, not-for-profit, start-ups, community leaders to understand not just the ethics of their workplace but the ethics of the work they do. What is the impact of this choice we’re making? What are the consequences beyond your business? What are the long-term effects on community?
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So, ethics applied internally and externally?
Yes, and it depends on your personal leadership style whether you’re more likely to focus on ethics in practice, ethics in the workplace or whether you’re at a time in your career and your life where you’re starting to look around you more broadly and go, well, what is the legacy of the work I have been doing? And how do I want to spend the rest of my professional life?
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Does a younger generation want to do both?
There’s a younger generation who are just coming out of university and entering their professional life for whom it is increasingly important that their personal values and their personal ethics align with the organisation they’re going to choose to work for. And we’re seeing that a lot of the changes that are happening in some big corporations that are coming out with public statements and changing their business model (are) often because of internal advocacy from staff.
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Is this all about developing a code of conduct or is that too narrow?
I don’t think it’s an either/or. I think most organisations would need a very rules-based code of conduct but it’s just one of the tools that you would want to be using. The people who we work with want to exercise their own sort of ethical judgment and want to be more active, to have agency about what matters to them, what they find ethical or unethical. Everyday scenarios can’t be captured in a code of conduct. You can’t possibly capture every possible scenario that you are going to be faced with, and that’s what leadership is about, really — it’s dealing with those complex, ambiguous scenarios where there isn’t a really clear right or wrong. I don’t imagine, for example, that you could put into a rule book which picture to select for a particular story — what message you are communicating by the choice of the picture and headline (and whether that’s ethical). That’s a judgment call. The point is that while rules and codes are a necessary part of creating an ethical workplace, what Cranlana focuses on is how to enhance an individual’s capacity to make wise, courageous decisions. Our focus is on forward-thinking, impactful leadership that will benefit society as a whole.
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If you’re a staffer trying to be an ethical person, is it tough when a manager is basically telling you that there’s no rule book for it?
It’s very comforting to be told exactly what is right and what is wrong but unfortunately that’s just not the reality of how professional life or even personal life works. As a fully fledged adult you need to exercise your own judgment and to be able to navigate your way through the grey areas. What we do is give you some tools to use so that you’re not just relying on your gut instinct. (We give you) some frameworks that you could apply to different situations. Now you may well come back to the same decision but you know then that you’re not just relying on some kind of deep-seated gut instinct.
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Are we more or less ethical than earlier generations?
That’s a really difficult question. I suspect that as individuals we now feel we have more avenues to have a voice, or to express our disappointment or our disapproval. It used to be, if you were upset about the actions of a company, you might write a letter. Who do you send that letter to? It might just go into the void. Now you have the options of very publicly and very easily (making your point) by tagging a supermarket chain, for example, if you don’t like its plastic bag policy. That then creates a groundswell of activity that can create change.
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Companies obviously feel that social media campaigns can be very unfair. Do you see a lot of that?
Business decisions are always very complex and we never know the full story about why particular decisions are made. What I hear quite often is that, particularly younger, employees are wanting a work environment where they feel safe to speak up so that it doesn’t reach crisis point. Most of us want to work for a company or an organisation that we feel proud of, to feel that our work has some purpose in the world and that decisions are being made that we can live with. So in some ways ethical leadership is about creating an environment where questions can be asked safely without negative repercussions, where diverse thinking can happen, where constructive disagreement is welcomed. It’s not always about when there’s a crisis and a complaint. It’s how do we use our ethical muscle to create positive workplaces?
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The other issue for corporates is how much they should be involved in public statements. What do you think?
That really is up to them and their board and what’s important to them at that time. But what we do encourage strongly is for leaders to think outside of the walls of the company they work for. It’s not good enough, in a way, to have your head in the sand, to go, we are producing these particular products and we do that well and we don’t hurt anybody, but at the same time we’re not looking down our supply chain at the impact on the environment or whether people in a third-world country are being paid living wages. We encourage the people who come through Cranlana to really look at the much bigger global picture of the impact that their work is having.
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Has there been an increase in demand for your programs?
In the last three years, there has been a 40 per cent increase in the number of public sector leaders coming through and overall a 23 per cent increase in demand for the programs, and what’s really interesting for us is that increasingly we’re being asked to run custom in-house programs for specific teams. There are two flagship programs. One is a six-day executive colloquium using philosophy as the springboard into discussions about ethics. We use fiction and we use references to pop culture. It’s all about this conversation about what matters in the world and what are the systems of thinking that our western world is based on. The other flagship program is a 12-month fellowship based on three residential modules. That’s the Vincent Fairfax Fellowship and the focus is on developing a project that you then embed in your workplace.
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How important is this conversation around ethics?
I think it’s reached some kind of tipping point in terms of being part of the public conversation a lot more. It’s a skill that will be required more and more in senior leaders. It will be expected that you can demonstrate that you’ve been able to navigate your way through tricky ethical challenges, in the same way that over the last decade or so we’ve expected our senior leaders to have strong levels of EQ. It’s moving from just technical skills to having emotional intelligence, to a strong grasp of ethics and how it applies. It doesn’t all sit in the one leader. It’s got to be about a work environment where everyone can practise their ethics or can feel psychologically safe so they can raise questions and challenge (others). You can raise awareness fairly quickly I think, but the embedding of it is the issue and I think that’s the challenge with very large organisations which are in the spotlight, which want a quick fix. It’s not a quick fix. You do need to invest the time. You need to change the culture so ethical conversations can happen without it being seen as a big challenge to authority. These are transformational changes that need to happen. And it is contextual, it’s not one size fits all. When people hear the word ethics, they think it’s very dry, abstract learning when really every day, every single one of us is making ethical decisions every moment.
Read more in The Deal, out in the paper and online on Friday.