‘Leaning into’ uncertainty to develop an ethical workplace

Open dialogue and an acceptance that there may not be a “right” or “wrong” answer are some ways to create an ethical workplace environment, one ethics expert has said.

Making a space for ethics

An ethicist and program director of the Vincent Fairfax Fellowship, Dr Matt Beard, said leaders must open a space to have conversations about ethics.

Beard stressed the importance of organisations to collaborate with their employees by encouraging and facilitating conversations about ethics.

An ethical workplace environment is agile enough to deal with an “ethical controversy” or “ethical challenge”, as they would have been discussed or identified in advance, Beard said.

The ideal candidate

He stressed the importance of building a diverse team that has different kinds of ethical reasoning styles but thinks about ethics in the same way – a team that is “open to hearing these kinds of different perspectives around ethics”.

Beard warned that companies should not recruit for “values alignment” as it is a strategy “riddled with bias”.

“It’s often people who don’t share the values of an organisation that don’t think in the same way who are going to be able to provide that sort of outsider’s perspective to kind of challenge the way that things have always been done,” he said.

Forgetting about ‘bulletproof arguments’

“People are more concerned with not doing the wrong thing than they are with doing the right thing because we’ve built such strong accountability measures, and that’s leading to a kind of race to the bottom,” Beard said.

Creating a workplace environment that allows a “process of reflection and thought to discuss difficult ideas” is crucial for ethical development. These types of environments align incentives with ethics, he explained.

“It is never the wrong time to ask the right question,” he said. Organisations need to let go of the idea that ethics is about having the right answer, Beard advised; instead, it is about having open “those conversations” where staff are allowed to share their thoughts.

From this, they will feel supported, which makes it easier for people to raise things and not feel the need to have an “absolute bulletproof argument”, Beard said.

No one magic potion: levers of an organisation

“If you look at any one thing as the magic cure-all potion for your ethical challenges, you are going to fail,” Beard said.

“There are going to need to be different approaches that you adopt because there is a shadow side to every different way that you might try to lead an organisation to drive ethical change within an organisation to respond to ethical challenges.”

Among others, culture and policy are examples of levers needed to create an ethical workplace environment; it is not enough to just depend on one of them, Beard warned.

“When there’s a choice between an easy wrong and a hard right, we’re more likely to choose the hard right,” Beard said.

Moral courage is the ability to “resist the kind of temptation to be reductivist about ethics and say everything is black and white”, and instead “lean into” the realities of uncertainty and ambiguity in decision making, he concluded.