As a business owner and leader, you’re going to have to make a lot of important decisions for your company. On everything from marketing to sales, operations to human resources, your team will look to you for guidance and ask which direction they should go in. In addition to keeping profitability in mind, you also have look at decisions from an ethical standpoint. The role of ethics in decision making affects how you approach decisions, how you decide which action to take and whether or not you need to consult someone else for their viewpoint.
According to the Business Ethics Resource Center, it’s vital to include a decision making framework when you’re dealing with ethical questions in your business. This is a process or set of rules that helps you determine how to make the best decision. The first step of the ethical decision making process is to understand what problem or dilemma you’re up against. Keep in mind that this may not be the same as the question asked of you to make a decision.
Status suggests that this step is really about helping leaders to understand where they need to apply ethical principals. Not all important decisions will have ethical considerations, but leaders need to know which ones do. They may not always stand out and be obvious. For example, when deciding which new product lines to sell in your store, one of the options may include liquor and cigarettes. While they are profitable choices for many retailers, it might not fit in with your company’s ethical values.
After identifying what the ethical problem is, you need to conduct research into the issue. This is where it’s important to look for resources within and outside your company that can provide specific expertise related to the decision you need to make. It may include consulting with other business executives at your company, talking to Human Resources professionals or even reviewing your company policy handbooks, according to Status.
Ethical decision making in organizations isn’t always easy, as the right answer may not be clear. However, seeking viewpoints that are different from your own can provide you with a wider perspective and bring up elements you had not previously considered. This step is about gaining clarity and understanding more about the ethical dilemma.
Now it’s time to brainstorm solutions for your problem, according to HubSpot. In this step, it’s vital to look at what has previously been done at your company in addition to out-of-the-box solutions. Consider similar previous scenarios and how they have been handled, so you can get an idea of the outcome. However, you also have to look outside your business to the larger industry and see what others are doing in these kinds of situations.
HubSpot suggests narrowing down three to five possible solutions. Getting down to just two options often makes it more difficult to come to a decision. Having a couple of options provides you with more variety of solutions. For example, if the problem you’re facing is having to layoff employees due to low profitability, solutions may include taking a personal pay cut, asking all employees to take a pay cut in order to avoid layoffs and turning to other types of payment like stock options.
Once you have selected a few possible answers to your ethical question, it’s time to evaluate each solution. HubSpot suggests understanding the positive and negative aspects of each. Focus on the outcome of each decision and how it will affect your business in the short and long term. Not only that, but how will each decision affect people within your company, your customers and your partners?
You’ll also need to consider the likelihood of each negative consequence. For example, if two solutions have several negative consequences, and one solution only has one negative consequence, you may lean toward that one. However, if that negative consequence is more likely to happen than the others, then this may not be a good choice.
Now that you’ve done the research, brainstormed solutions and evaluated the many options, it’s time to come to a decision. This is the hardest step in the ethical decision making framework because it has lasting effects for your company. It’s important to feel confident in your choice because you have weighed all your options carefully.
It’s also important to share your decision, and the reasoning behind it, with the right stakeholders in your business. Some ethical decisions can be shared publicly with the whole team while others may require some discretion and privacy. Decide who needs to know the details and be as transparent as possible.
Once you’re confident in your choice, work with your team to bring your decision to reality. This may include developing a business strategy, creating an action plan, devising a new company policy or holding a meeting about the new changes. Put your ethical choice into practice and then review the effects it has on your business.
Even if you have spent a lot of time researching the possible ramifications and know how everything will pan out, it’s best to review your decision once it has been implemented. Were there any curveballs you didn’t foresee, or did the outcome differ from your expectations? Did your business improve as a result of the decision, or did it suffer? Analyze your choice so that you can use this information to make your next ethical decision.
Having a step-by-step system for making ethical decisions is key to making sure you consider all of your options. In addition to that, be sure to use the PLUS model for evaluating your ethical dilemmas, according to Status. This is helpful when you’re not quite sure whether a decision has unethical ramifications. You can use this outside of the ethical decision making process to just get a deeper understanding of the choice you face.
PLUS is an acronym that stands for:
The PLUS model can help you understand whether the decision you’re about to make is ethical or unethical, and it can also help you understand why. This way, if you need to shift any elements to make the decision a better choice, you know where to start. For example, if something about the decision goes against the core values of the company, you can see if that aspect can be changed or shifted so that it does work with what your business stands for. Manuel Velasquez, Claire Andre, Thomas Shanks, S.J., and Michael J. Meyer
Some years ago, sociologist Raymond Baumhart asked business people, "What does ethics mean to you?" Among their replies were the following: "Ethics has to do with what my feelings tell me is right or wrong.""Ethics has to do with my religious beliefs.""Being ethical is doing what the law requires.""Ethics consists of the standards of behavior our society accepts." "I don't know what the word means." These replies might be typical of our own. The meaning of "ethics" is hard to pin down, and the views many people have about ethics are shaky. Like Baumhart's first respondent, many people tend to equate ethics with their feelings. But being ethical is clearly not a matter of following one's feelings. A person following his or her feelings may recoil from doing what is right. In fact, feelings frequently deviate from what is ethical. Nor should one identify ethics with religion. Most religions, of course, advocate high ethical standards. Yet if ethics were confined to religion, then ethics would apply only to religious people. But ethics applies as much to the behavior of the atheist as to that of the devout religious person. Religion can set high ethical standards and can provide intense motivations for ethical behavior. Ethics, however, cannot be confined to religion nor is it the same as religion. Being ethical is also not the same as following the law. The law often incorporates ethical standards to which most citizens subscribe. But laws, like feelings, can deviate from what is ethical. Our own pre-Civil War slavery laws and the old apartheid laws of present-day South Africa are grotesquely obvious examples of laws that deviate from what is ethical. Finally, being ethical is not the same as doing "whatever society accepts." In any society, most people accept standards that are, in fact, ethical. But standards of behavior in society can deviate from what is ethical. An entire society can become ethically corrupt. Nazi Germany is a good example of a morally corrupt society. Moreover, if being ethical were doing "whatever society accepts," then to find out what is ethical, one would have to find out what society accepts. To decide what I should think about abortion, for example, I would have to take a survey of American society and then conform my beliefs to whatever society accepts. But no one ever tries to decide an ethical issue by doing a survey. Further, the lack of social consensus on many issues makes it impossible to equate ethics with whatever society accepts. Some people accept abortion but many others do not. If being ethical were doing whatever society accepts, one would have to find an agreement on issues which does not, in fact, exist. What, then, is ethics? Ethics is two things. First, ethics refers to well-founded standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues. Ethics, for example, refers to those standards that impose the reasonable obligations to refrain from rape, stealing, murder, assault, slander, and fraud. Ethical standards also include those that enjoin virtues of honesty, compassion, and loyalty. And, ethical standards include standards relating to rights, such as the right to life, the right to freedom from injury, and the right to privacy. Such standards are adequate standards of ethics because they are supported by consistent and well-founded reasons. Secondly, ethics refers to the study and development of one's ethical standards. As mentioned above, feelings, laws, and social norms can deviate from what is ethical. So it is necessary to constantly examine one's standards to ensure that they are reasonable and well-founded. Ethics also means, then, the continuous effort of studying our own moral beliefs and our moral conduct, and striving to ensure that we, and the institutions we help to shape, live up to standards that are reasonable and solidly-based. This article appeared originally in Issues in Ethics IIE V1 N1 (Fall 1987). Revised in 2010. |
Which of the following considerations is not included in the WH Framework for business ethics
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