Authentic Leadership and Communication Lines

Reflection on a Personal Ethical Dilemma

Overview

The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical personal reflection of an ethical dilemma that I faced in my business. The goal of the paper is to conclude with actionable strategies for improvement, based upon Gentile’s (2012) approach to managing ethical situations successfully. Using Giving Voice to Values (GVV) and guided by Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle, this paper draws upon the pillars of GVV to illustrate the thought processes I went through when navigating my own ethical situation in leadership. The following provides my value conflict scenario, a reflection, with personal and contextual analysis, and reasons and rationalization. Peer feedback is also incorporated as well prior to the conclusion.

Value Conflict Scenario

Analysis is used in business ethics when one applies the rules, laws, and policies of an organization to an ethical situation to determine if it is “over the line or not,” in the words of Gentile (Harvard University, 2013). As Gentile notes in describing her GVV program, awareness is essential in this process of analysis, but one also has to be able to assess whether the behavior in question is “trustworthy behavior”—and that requires reflection and cognition (Harvard University, 2013). It also requires understanding how one’s own presumptions and biases can play a part in shaping our perception—or as Gentile puts it, “just because I think it’s right you’re gonna think it’s right” is not a good parameter for analysis (Harvard University, 2013).

Personal and Professional Context

It is difficult for me to divide personal and professional context, because my personal life is so wrapped up in my professional life. I am a business owner, and as such I really have very little personal life outside of my business. Any business owner can appreciate this circumstance, as I believe it is common. Therefore, when I provide personal and professional context, I am really simply framing the scenario from my point of view as a human being and as a leader in my organization.

Framing the scenario, however, is important, and I must point out that Gentile’s remarks are relevant to my value conflict scenario because I held the assumption that if “I think it’s right others will too.” The situation was this: I am President and CEO of “The Creative Approach, Inc.” With COVID taking down the business to levels we have never seen and where we were barely able to survive, the company was looking at dropping its policy of covering 100% of team members’ health insurance. For me, the idea of dropping health coverage for employees was an incredible conflict: I had had cancer and knew how hard it would have been to cope with bills without insurance. I did not want anyone to be in a situation where they had to worry about whether or not they would be able to pay for medical care. I assumed everyone would feel the same way. I voiced my concerns with my business partners and they appreciated what I had to say, but in the end they insisted that good governance had to win out or the company could sink into bankruptcy—and that would mean reducing benefits for employees. My partners reasoned thus: better to be employed with no health benefits than to not be employed at all. I, however, maintained that as a leader of the company I had a responsibility to look out for my workers’ best interests and I could not in good conscience accept this decision. I did not know what to do. On the one hand, I could appreciate my partners’ assessment of things—it made sense financially. On the other hand, I felt my partners were dehumanizing the situation. I wondered whether I myself had a conflict of interest in this situation, since as President I would benefit by denying my employees their benefits. It was a very confusing situation for me to be in, and I wasn’t sure if my employees would turn against me if I gave into my partners and reduced benefits for all. At the same time, I wondered if I was more concerned about my own image than I was about the health of the company during this pandemic crisis. What needed to come first?—my own desires, the company’s finances, or employees’ well-being? How could I even determine what was best for employees? Maybe my partners were right about it being better to have a job without health coverage than no job at all—which is surely what would be the case if the company did not cut costs immediately.

Reflective Observation

Gentile (2010) states that the “everyone else was doing it” mentality is one that should be avoided when it comes to workplace ethics because it is an attempt to excuse unethical behavior (p. iv). Reflecting on my experience, I can see that I was torn between a kind of conformity bias (conforming to my partners’ way of behavior) without thinking about (because thinking about it made me disconcerted) and holding out to see if we could find a better way. Gentile (2010) also has a section on cognitive dissonance in her book, and in that section she cautions against ruling out information that makes us uncomfortable—but at the same time states that these occasions of cognitive dissonance can be helpful because they help us “more effectively voice our values” (p. 200). Gentile (2010) states that in these cases when we voice our values it may trigger cognitive dissonance in others, and one way to help others is to affirm their position and viewpoints even as we challenge them. Looking back, I can see that my mistake was that I did not affirm the viewpoint of my partners as much as I should have. Instead, I became frustrated and uncertain about how to act toward my partners and toward my workers.

What I could have done differently is this: I could have said to my partners that I appreciate that they are looking after the company’s financials—that is good governance. I could have then suggested an alternate solution to cutting benefits—such as applying for the Payroll Protection Program (PPP) that the federal government was making available to small businesses. I might have demonstrated that a PPP loan could support the company’s payroll while we wait to see if business picked back up. The important thing about this approach is that I would have been affirming the Board’s values while voicing my own. It would have helped us engage in a continuing dialogue to discover the best solution.

I also think I might have broached the matter with employees more substantially and asked for their feedback. After all, this would be a matter that affected them personally. I could have mentioned to my partners that we might survey employees to see if they would accept a reduction in their health benefits. However, I did not do this because I presumed my partners might panic and think such an approach might lead to employees abandoning the company altogether, which is not what anyone wanted. No one wanted chaos to break out in the ranks of workers. Yet, here I can see that perhaps I was experiencing “ethical fading,” that phenomenon when the ethics of a situation disappear from view because some other detail or concern is pushing them out, as Tenbrunsel and Messick (2004) describe it (p. 223). Were we more concerned about maintaining order, even if it meant keeping workers in the dark about their own health care coverage?

In the end, I talked the matter over with my partners, and we agreed to apply for PPP aid, but we also knew that this might not be enough. I asked my partners if it would be all right if we take the matter directly to our employees to see if they might have any feedback for us. They were reluctant but they saw that I really needed to know what our workers would think. They understood that for me personally, having been a cancer patient, I knew how essential health coverage is. They accepted my request to take this matter to our workers. And our workers, it turned out, were understanding: they were grateful to still have work—and they hoped that when business picked back up their benefits would return as well. My partners and I promised that if business returned to pre-Covid levels the first thing we would do is restore all health benefits to 100% coverage. This outcome satisfied everyone and I felt that finally we had done the right thing ethically.

Abstract Conceptualization

I felt that we had done the right thing ethically, I believe, because in the end we were authentic about it: we did not try to hide what was going on with the company financially, and we did not keep workers out of the loop. We were open and honest about the situation, and we were true to our core values, which is care for our workers. Honesty, care, and integrity are the essence of authentic leadership, and I felt certain we had demonstrated this type of leadership (Wong & Cummings, 2006, p. 6). The scholarly literature supports my belief, for as Wong and Cummings (2006) explain, authentic leaders focus on building trust (p. 6). Authentic leaders build trust by communicating issues directly with workers and showing that they are committed to core values. Gentile (2010) says as much about trust and values, because in voicing our values we establish an open line of communication that helps build trust among people (p. 102). Goffee and Jones (2005) support the view of Wong and Cummings (2006) regarding authentic leaders: authentic leaders display “the real thing,” which to workers means “sincerity, honesty, and integrity” (p. 86). What does it mean to be sincere, honest, and to have integrity? It means to match words with deeds (Goffee & Jones, 2005, p. 86). It means to practice what one preaches. For me at my company, I was concerned that we were not going to be practicing what we preached as a core value, which was care. Yet the pandemic had us in such a situation where we simply could not continue to offer benefits like we had in the past: I had to admit that as much as it pained me. My concern or worry was that my partners and I weren’t doing enough to show our care for our workers. But by going to them directly, we demonstrated integrity—we showed them we cared even though the pandemic had taken so much of our business away that we could not afford to continue to pay for 100% of our workers’ health care coverage.

Peer Feedback

Following my own reflection on this matter, I shared my story with one of my peers; my peer agreed with the final decision that my partners and I made with respect to laying our troubles out before our workers and inviting their feedback. My peer told me that if she had been an employee at our business she would have wanted nothing more than for the owners to be as open and honest about the situation as we were. She said that people in general are “pretty understanding” and can see that the pandemic and the lockdowns have hurt small businesses badly. They are just happy to still be working at this point, and the hope is that things will get back to normal at some point down the road. I really appreciated this feedback from my peer and it helped me to feel that we did make the right decision in the end.

Reasons and Rationalization

I was concerned that the period of lockdowns and pandemic panic might have given everyone, including me, a case of moral myopia or moral blindness—wherein we no longer see the moral implications of our actions and simply act out of a survival instinct or from a position of a self-serving bias (Drumwright & Murphy, 2004, p. 8). I feared this might be the case especially because as a leader and part-owner of my own business I felt that my partners and I had something of a conflict of interest in the decision-making process. We needed to save the company from financial ruin and from this standpoint of good governance it made sense to cut employee benefits—but at the same time did we not also owe some care to our employees who committed themselves to us? I still struggled with this question, and even though we received positive and supportive feedback from our workers, I felt that I needed to do more on my part to ensure that our company was realizing its values. I had to do more to believe that I was as authentic a leader as I wanted to be.