The Corporate Philosopher, Roger Steare, explains why our beliefs inevitably clash with ‘the system’
If you were one of the 530 people who took the MoralDNA™ profile as part of People Management’s feature ‘Don’t be evil’ then you would’ve found yourself classified as anything from an ‘Angel’ to an ‘Enforcer’.
An ‘Angel’ is someone who cares and is willing and able to break rules if they believe a higher principle is at stake, while ‘Enforcer’ helpfully reminds everyone to do their duty, but may sometimes forget that it’s the principle that counts, not the letter of the law.
But these titles alone offer limited information about how we are driven by our personal ethics in our professional lives or what to do when they inevitably clash.
Giving an example of poor workplace ethics in action, corporate philosopher Roger Steare, says: “The two moral values in deficit with board members and senior leaders are humility and humanity. And the vices that go with that are narcissism and sociopathy.”
“Sadly the corporate system, tends to push those types of people into positions of power and that is because most organisations have a single overriding rule that everybody must comply with: ‘You must make the numbers or else.’”
According to Steare, this hard-and-fast rule is true of the public sector as well as the private, whether it is sales revenues and profits, or delivering public services within a finite and diminishing budget. Scandals such as serious failings in patient care at Mid Staffordshire and the widespread miss-selling of personal protection insurance (PPI) have highlighted instances when, otherwise caring, people have been driven by economic value, rather than customers, patients or citizens, he says.
“The purpose of any business is not to make money, unless you are De La Rue and you print bank notes. The purpose of business, or enterprise, is to provide people with the goods and services they need, at a good quality and at a fair value. Making money is an outcome of doing it well, it is not the purpose,” he adds.
HR professionals racked up good scores through the test, in that they conform, but they do not blindly obey the rules, Steare says, which is a characteristic more likely to crop up in the legal and accountancy professions, according to the results.
“People going into HR are not people haters; they are people who have a conscience, and care about others, so they will be starting in a stronger place from an ethical perspective,” he says.
Perhaps there has always been a higher calling for all of you who believe you just ‘fell’ into HR, or perhaps this is the evidence to suggest that HR professionals make ideal leaders.
“You can’t be good at understanding people issues if you are narcissistic and sociopathic,” he says.
But with so many supposedly deep-thinking, caring HR professionals embedded in our organisations, why, in Steare’s opinion, do businesses ‘go bad’?
“HR professionals regularly tell me how compromised they feel in fulfilling their professional duty,” he says. “There is clearly a tension between their personal values and the rules they are asked to comply with within the workplace.
“The purpose of life at home is family; to have friends and be part of a community. This is what defines our survival and prosperity as a species; our willingness and ability to care for each other,” he explains.
But too often this is the complete opposite of the corporate world. “The corporate system is based on short-term, profit-driven purposes,” he says.
“The principle driver we see in organisations, which MoralDNA™ identifies, is the ethic of obedience, in other words compliance. It tells us how much fear and anxiety there is in an organisation.
“Unfortunately most organisations have a fear-driven culture, where people are frightened to challenge power and afraid of not ‘making the numbers’,” he says.
For those employees who find their personal ethics conflicting with corporate ‘values’, Steare says: “If you’re unsure about the morality of something you’ve been asked to do, don’t be afraid to question how this is consistent with the advertised values and purposes of the organisation.”
Discover your MoralDNA™ and take Roger Steare’s profile quiz here: http://moraldna.org/