Are You More Ethical Than the Illinois Governor?

Reuters, along with every other high-profile media outlet in the country, reported this week that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich and his chief of staff John Harris were arrested in Chicago on two counts each of federal corruption charges stemming from allegations Blagojevich was trying to sell President-elect Barack Obama's vacated Senate seat to the highest bidder.  The arrest is part of a three-year probe of "pay-to-play politics" in the governor's administration. The criminal complaint by the FBI says each man was arrested on two charges of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and solicitation of bribery. 

It never ceases to amaze me that politicians continue to behave unethically, even when they are almost always caught in the end.  As a regular citizen, you may think you’re immune to such ethical choices as the one faced by my esteemed governor.  But in reality, ethical decisions confront us in the professional world every day, whether it’s deciding to accept an expensive gift from a client or falsifying records in the name of company survival.  Peter Voyt, a longtime friend of mine, provides this quiz to get a sense of how your business ethics measure up. 

If you’re not happy with your results, you might consider checking out this useful primer from the Josephson Institute.  With realistic examples and a step-by-step decision making model, the easy-to-read booklet examines the hows and whys of making choices that withstand ethical scrutiny.  You can also learn to be on the lookout for dangerous rationalizations that cause ethical slip-ups, including “it’s legal,” “it’s okay if I don’t gain personally,” “it doesn’t hurt anyone,” and “everyone’s doing it.”

Comments

[Jason Seiden]

While a fan of ethics, I’m not a fan of ethics trianing. Ethics defies codification. Ethics look black and white only at a distance… up close, it’s nothing but gray.

LYING is pretty easy to spot and should be avoided. ETHICS is often tough to spot because the way we view a situation often depends on how the situation is framed. Literally.

Joshua Greene, a Harvard prof, hooked people up to fMRI machines and asked them ethical questions. Totally different areas of the peoples’ brains lit up depending on how the questions were framed. Think about that: people’s morality changed based on the emotional component of the question.

I took the quiz. I missed one question: apparently I got docked points because I thought engaging people in dialog was a superior option to creating a formal policy.

I get what the quiz is driving at, but frankly, if I ever suggested to a client that the most ethical solution to a problem was to bog their team down in the administrivia of policy creation (with the—cross your fingers—hoped for benefit of heightened awareness)… rather than (1) push back on the leader for what appears to be an ill-conceived, knee-jerk reaction to something and then (2) treat the team like grown ups by talking to them, I’d lose my “seat at the table.” Not for being unethical, mind you, but for being naive, ineffective, and “unleaderly.”

An unquestioned moral code is a luxury not held by leaders in any quarter.

Blago was corrupt. For the rest of us, our tests won’t be so blatant…

[Alexandra Levit]

Thanks for your thoughts, and I agree ethics tends to be more of a gray issue in general. I guess at the end of the day, you just have to adhere to your own sense of right and wrong. After all, unlike Illinois politicians, you probably won't get caught and have only yourself to answer to anyway.