Understanding Ethical Leadership Failures (part 2)

Following yesterday's blog, and taken from the same source, the potential organisational ethical failures are:

• Lack of clarity ("what does ethical mean around here?")
• No ethical leadership and behaviour standards ("there are no rules about this")
• Oversimplified rules ("just do the right thing")
• Lack of positive role models ("who is doing it the right way")
• No training or coaching (" how will I learn it")
• No accountability, no enforcement ("nothing bad happens if I do it, even though it's not allowed")
• No performance integration "we say we want ethics but we reward and promote based on sales and output")
• When problems happen, scapegoats are quickly fired (instead of learning from mistakes and fixing culture").

So, it is likely that ethical failures are due to more than one of these factors and a combination of individual failures (see yesterday's blog) and organisational failures.

This just reinforces the point that strong ethical leaders and role models are essential in engendering ethical conduct so that there are visible and active examples of how to behave everyday and what "doing the right thing" means.