VALUES: Know and appeal to a short list of widely shared values, such as honesty, respect, responsibility, fairness, and compassion. In other words, don’t assume too little—or too much— commonality with the viewpoints of others.
Before we go further it is important to explain what we mean here by the term “values,” since this is obviously an overdetermined word. For example, how is our use of “values” the same as or different from “ethics” or “morals”? And further, when asked to name their values, many people, especially businesspeople, may include qualities like “innovation” or “creativity” or any number of other useful and important characteristics that do not even have an obvious moral dimension to them. So how do those values connect with our focus here, if they do? Although these different terms and even the multiple uses of the word “values” are often overlapping and used interchangeably, it is important to clarify our intent and usage in this book.
First of all, the focus here is on “values” rather than “ethics,” because in general usage, ethics suggests a system of rules or standards with which one is expected to comply. That is, we may talk about business ethics, medical ethics, legal ethics, or more generally, professional ethics. Individual businesses often have their own formal codes of ethics (a set of written standards and guidelines); they distribute these widely and sometimes even conduct training sessions to make sure employees are aware of them. Thus, ethics is often seen as rule-based and externally imposed, something that exists outside the individual.
Furthermore, in the study of ethics, the emphasis is typically on models of ethical reasoning, such as deontology or duty-based ethics, utilitarian or consequentialist ethics, virtue ethics, and so on. The emphasis is therefore again on various external frameworks that can help us to discipline our thinking about various ethical choices and dilemmas. In particular, discussions of the application of ethical reasoning often focus on scenarios where the various models will lead us to different, conflicting decisions about what is “right,” with a discussion of how we might try to resolve those tensions. For example, there are the classic hypothetical cases where we must choose between respecting the individual (duty-based ethics) and maximizing the good for the many (consequentialist ethics): Would we pull the railroad track switching lever if it would save the lives of many people in a train’s path, but sacrifice the life of one individual on the alternative track?
This kind of analysis can be valuable in helping us consider the complexities of ethical dilemmas and teaching us to be rigorous and to recognize and question our own biases. However, it does not teach us how to enact those choices once made—which is the focus in this book. Ironically, this kind of analytic focus can actually have a dangerous unintended consequence, as was captured in the interview with a CEO that was mentioned in the Preface to this book.
As you will recall, this CEO described a freshly minted MBA’s answer to his question about what he had learned in his business ethics course: “Well, first we learned about all the models of ethical reasoning—you know, utilitarianism, deontology, and so on—and then we learned that whenever you confront an ethical dilemma, you first decide what you want to do and then you select the model of ethical reasoning that will best support your choice.”
Of course, this anecdote does not negate the importance of thinking rigorously about ethical challenges. But as the CEO had wanted to show me, the story does reveal an unanswered challenge in most efforts to talk about business ethics. Even in corporate settings where there is less emphasis on teaching models of ethical reasoning, the discussions will typically still revolve around considerations of what the “right thing” to do might be in a particular situation, rather than what to say and how to do it once you have decided the right course of action. People tend to walk away with a sense of confusion, at best, and a schooling in rationalizations (as was the case for that MBA student that our CEO interviewed), at worst.
So for all these reasons, we chose not to call our focus in these pages “Giving Voice to Ethics.” Rather than the emphasis on externally imposed rules and sometimes seemingly sophistic reasoning exercises that are unfortunately associated with “ethics” education and training, we chose the word “values” because it suggests something that we own ourselves and hold dear—“my values”—and something that we experience deeply and internally, which, although it possesses a cognitive aspect, is not exclusively about analysis.
But what about the term “morals”? While morals and morality refer to standards of right and wrong conduct and this is certainly relevant to what we are talking about, again the word “morals” emphasizes the “rightness” or “wrongness” of a particular behavior more than how we feel about that behavior. That is, the emphasis is on judgment and discipline more than an affirmative pursuit of desired goals and objects. Admittedly, all of these terms overlap and the distinctions drawn here have as much to do with tone as substance, but that tone is important.
It is important because the fundamental stance we are taking in the Giving Voice to Values approach to values-driven action is one of alignment, of moving with our highest aspirations and our deepest sense of who we wish to be, rather than a stance of coercion and stern judgment, or of moving against our inclinations. Although self-discipline is certainly required to voice and act on our values, the emphasis here is on finding the part of ourselves that already wants to do this, and then empowering, enabling, training, and strengthening that self.
Finally, the word “value” refers to the inherent worth and quality of a thing or an idea, and we often talk about valuing a challenging job, a comfortable lifestyle, or even a well-made piece of clothing. However, the “values” we are discussing here are, in fact, values that most people would agree have a moral or ethical aspect to them. In this sense, these values are actually much the same as what we mean by “virtues.” It’s just that we are approaching them from a self-motivated aspirational stance, rather than a judgmental or self-disciplinary position. The word “value” is both a noun and a verb; it has inherent in it not only the concept of goodness—like “virtue”—but also the act of wanting, desiring, or personally “valuing” something. So the choice of the term “values” is about tone and positioning, as well as literal definition.
Now that we have settled on the term “values,” the question becomes what values? And whose values? When asked to list our “core” values, we will certainly encounter disagreements about the items on the list and their relative priorities. However, I always find it instructive when groups are invited to participate in values clarifications exercises. If the values people are invited to choose among include many items that do not carry an inherently moral aspect—like a comfortable lifestyle (for example, the well-made clothes mentioned above) or even more profound concepts such as access to the natural world, creativity or dependability, independence or community—there will be a lot of disparity among the priority lists that individuals generate. On the other hand, if they are invited to identify their core moral or ethical values, the lists often tend to converge.
Much research has been done over time and across cultures, and although differences do surface, what is important to remember here is that there is a great deal of commonality among the lists of moral or ethical values that most individuals identify as central, and that this shared list is rather short. For example, in Moral Courage: Taking Action When Your Values Are Put to the Test, Rushworth Kidder describes the extensive areas of consensus on core values he finds in his own cross-cultural sur-veys, as well as in the research of others.1 The influential psychologist Martin Seligman writes: “There is astonishing convergence across the millennia and across cultures about virtue and strength. … Confucius, Aristotle, Aquinas, the Bushido Samurai Code, the Bhagavad-Gita, and other venerable traditions disagree on the details, but all of these codes include six core virtues.”2 These virtues are wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence.3 Drawing from his own research, Kidder identifies a similar, more simply put, list of five widely shared values: honesty, respect, responsibility, fairness, and compassion.4
Similarly, in the development of their Integrative Social Contracts Theory, Thomas Donaldson and the late Thomas W. Dunfee posit a set of hypernorms that can guide conflict resolution in economic activities when working across diverse groups. They argue that
global macrosocial contractors… would not necessarily deny the existence of a thin universal morality, nor of principles so fundamen-tal that, by definition, they serve to evaluate lower-order norms. Defined in this way and reaching to the root of what is ethical for humanity, precepts we choose to call “Hypernorms” should be discernible in a convergence of religious, political, and philosophical thought, or at least it is a reasonable hope that we should discern such a convergence. The concept of a hypernorm is used to establish the boundaries of moral free space, and individual hypernorms would limit the imposition of ethical obligations within a given microsocial community. We call such principles “hypernorms” because they represent norms by which all others are to be judged.5
Although we may quibble around the edges, knowing that, in general, a certain brief list of values is widely shared gives us both a useful (because of its commonality) and manageable (because of its brevity) foundation that we can appeal to when trying to address values conflicts in the workplace. Recognizing that our differences or disagreements about values, though real, do not preclude the development and pursuit of shared goals is a helpful primary position to adopt when we think about how to voice and act on those values.6
Accepting this premise—that is, the existence of a short list of shared values and, therefore, the possibility of shared goals—enables us both to prioritize our differences and also to frame the most important ones in ways that are more likely to communicate and resonate with different audiences. We will be able to see both others as well as ourselves more clearly, more objectively, because we have made the effort to distinguish between those values that are most universal and those that are more context-specific. This is not to suggest that a context-specific value is not important, but rather that it may be helpful to understand its link to a particular history and situation, and therefore understand its apparent relevance or lack thereof for those embedded in different histories and situations. And when we believe that a value is important enough and needs to be enacted and voiced, we can look for ways to express its link to that short list of values held in common across different contexts.
Perhaps some illustrations would be helpful here. Near the end of a recent lecture and discussion about Giving Voice to Values with a group of graduate business school students and business leaders, one MBA student spoke up. Her comment went something like this: “I am from India and the norms and practices of business there are different. In my work experience, I found that it was often impossible to voice and act on my values because certain less than honest or ethical practices are just accepted.” The woman appeared irritated, even angry. Rather than directly countering her reality, her experience of the futility of voicing values in an Indian business context, I invited her to share more about her own experiences, why she had drawn this conclusion, and how she had dealt with it.
She went on to talk about her discomfort with certain business practices in her previous employment situation, as well as about a time when she herself had purchased a used computer that was guaranteed to be in working order but turned out to be defective. She talked about how offended she was by this violation of business integrity. And she concluded her remarks by saying that, given the futility of trying to enact her values in the workplace in her home country, instead she, in her free time, focused her energy on working with a nonprofit organization that addressed some of the social and economic problems in her community.
The explicit point she was making was that acting on our values is context-specific, particularly across cultures. The implicit point was a sort of justification of her own choice not to try to fight the particular business practices she had faced before coming to business school. There seemed an inherent contradiction here. On one hand, she was saying she had no choice, but on the other, she felt the need to justify the choice she had made.
In trying to respond to the woman’s comments, it seemed important to find a way to recognize and strengthen her view of herself as, in fact, having had—and still having—a choice about how to respond to her context. But this had to be done without locking her into a perception of herself as a fundamentally unethical person precisely because she may not have always done so. Obviously this was tricky. Arguing that she did in fact have choices in her prior business roles might reinforce her self-perception as an unethical person and might therefore lead her to feel disempowered and defeated when confronting future conflicts; on the other hand, simply reassuring her that she really had no choice after all could fuel the kind of self-justifying biases—for example, her generalization that it is impossible to behave ethically in Indian business—that could make it easier to overlook or rationalize future failures to act.
However, the seeds of a response to her argument were embedded in this woman’s own comments. She clearly did, in fact, experience the less than honest business dealings she described as a values conflict. On a professional level, she acknowledged that the behaviors of some businesses at home were less than ethical; on a more personal level, she felt offended and cheated by the computer dealer who sold her a defective machine. So the first response to her comments was simply to reflect back to her that she obviously was a person with active values.
Second, I suggested that the fact that she did experience values conflicts, at a minimum, complicated her assertion that the norms and business context in India were less than ethical. That is, without denying or oversimplifying contextual differences, she herself—an Indian national—had demonstrated that such generalizations are not universal.
Third, once her cultural assumptions had been thus complicated, it was helpful to point out that such contextual pressures to behave unethically are not unique to India. In fact, most folks confronting difficult values conflicts in the workplace are able to point to a story of explicit or implicit organizational or cultural norms that are less than ethical and that make the conflict more difficult. For example, the salesperson who gives inappropriate “gifts” to a customer in order to secure a contract will argue that this is the unstated norm of the industry. The manager who adjusts the quarterly statement to transfer past expenses forward or unreceived revenues backward will explain that this sort of “smoothing” is standard operating procedure and is actually an expected behavior. And organizational behavior research is rife with examples of the implicit and explicit pressures and norms of socialization that lead to unethical behavior.7 I cited these examples not with the intent to negate the power of the pressures this Indian woman experienced, but rather to suggest that they are not unique to one culture, industry, or function, and that, in fact, people sometimes find ways to counter them.
Fourth, her story about her work with a community nonprofit demonstrates that she is the kind of person who can and does act on her values. The trick was to reflect this reality back to her in a way that suggested that she had effectively found ways to counter widespread problems and challenges in one part of her life, thereby raising the possibility of seeing herself as the kind of person who might do so in other areas as well.
If I had directly countered her assertion that it was impossible to act on her values in India, I would have run the risk of pushing this woman into a self-defeating insistence on her own powerlessness and on my lack of understanding of her culture. Instead I asked her to share more of her own story, revealing the complexity of her own feelings and past behaviors. In this way, she felt invited to see herself as a person of values, and specifically an Indian person of values; to reflect on the ways she had acted on her own values in the past; and to recognize that if she feels and acts in these ways, there may be others in her business context at home who may feel and act in these ways as well.
Clearly this discussion did not resolve the question of exactly what she could or would do in the future when she encountered such values conflicts in the workplace, but she left the discussion engaged and positive. Her demeanor had changed and her facial expression cleared and relaxed; she was even smiling. She was one of the first to come up to talk about next steps after the discussion ended and she became engaged in an external (and hopefully also internal) dialogue about her real options.
Her conflicts had become “speakable” in a different way. Before, she had felt torn between anger at the injustice and lack of ethics she observed in her culture and a sense of futility at the idea that this might have something to do with India—or by extension, with herself as an Indian national. After this discussion, no longer was the fact of being Indian, or of working in an Indian business, necessarily a barrier. One of the keys to this reframing of her self-image and her view of her business context was the recognition of some values that she and presumably others in the Indian business context might share. Since this conversation, it has been exciting to see that some of the most enthusiastic business faculty adopters of the Giving Voice to Values approach have been in India. Some of these professors are collecting stories of Indian managers who have in fact found ways to voice and act on their values, despite pressures to the contrary, and they are developing them into case study examples.8
I shared the example above because whenever I talk about Giving Voice to Values, there are two questions that inevitably come up. First of all, someone in the audience will typically remark that this approach must be culturally specific, and that it could not possibly work in all parts of the world. Sometimes that question comes from someone who is actually a citizen of a country where she or he feels such an approach would be challenging. That is the example above. More frequently, however, the comment is raised by someone who is talking about a part of the world that he or she believes would be inhospitable to GVV. Sometimes this person will have lived or conducted research in that part of the world; other times they simply assume that GVV must be culturally specific either because actually speaking up will run counter to the culture in some places or because, despite the research noted above about shared values, they just don’t believe that common ground can be found.
Let’s look at these two issues separately. The concern about whether the act of “speaking up” will be culturally feasible provides a good opportunity to note that the words “giving voice” are intended metaphorically here. That is, although we may sometimes assume that voicing our values means standing up and giving an impassioned little speech against injustice or dishonest practices, in reality the stories encountered and the examples described in this book are much more varied and nuanced than that.
Giving voice may mean simply asking the well-framed and well-timed question that allows people to think in a new way about a situation. Or it may mean working to make sure that certain information is included in a proposal that allows decision makers to see longer-term or wider potential impacts for their choices than originally considered. It may mean speaking quietly, behind the scenes, with someone who is better positioned than we are to raise an issue. Or it may mean simply finding another, ethically acceptable way to accomplish an assigned task. We will see examples of all these approaches in the following pages, but the point here is that “giving voice” can be seen as a metaphor for finding a way to embody and enact our values, but it might not mean actually “speaking up” in the ways we usually conceive of that.
The other concern is that values may differ so much across cultures that common ground will remain elusive, thereby invalidating one of the premises of GVV—that is, that we do have some vital shared values. Notwithstanding research and experience that describe real differences in priorities, preferences, and communication styles across cultures, as well as the research noted previously about the broadly shared but brief list of common values across cultures, let me tell another story that illustrates the approach here. Recently I was invited to share the GVV approach with a university in the United Arab Emirates, the American University of Sharjah. Several members of the business faculty there were quite intrigued and offered to pilot one of the exercises with their students, as the basis for further, customized curriculum development. As part of this effort, they collected stories from students about times when they did and did not voice and act on their values, and I had the opportunity to read these stories before my visit and work with the faculty and students on site.9
Although the student body at this institution is quite diverse, with more than eighty countries represented, over half of the students come from Arab nations. One of the concerns that many of the faculty members—many of whom were expatriates—expressed to me was that often their Arab students did not share the same values as the faculty concerning the inappropriateness of cheating in their academic work (and presumably in their wider lives). These professors wanted to be understanding of cultural norms but also to establish some ground rules for fairness across students in grading. As for myself, this was my first visit to any Arab nation and I was curious to see whether the GVV approach would be useful in this context. I tried to approach the encounter as an experiment, because I was quite aware of my inexperience and wanted to keep an open mind.
As I read the student papers, however, I was struck by the power of the personal revelations and felt a strong connection with the student authors even though many of their experiences were beyond my ken: discrimination against Indian nationals; arranged marriages; religious censorship. And I found a lot of commonality in the actual values discussed, even when the specific contexts differed. With regard to the cheating question, though, I was struck by a student who wrote about being asked by a close friend to provide answers during a final exam. The student said that he did not condone cheating and admitted that his decision to help his friend conflicted with his own personal position on academic honesty. However, he went on to talk about all the kinds of rationalizations that one typically hears, about what was at stake for his friend; about how he might have felt better able to stand up if the friend had not been so close to him; about how he would have preferred to help his friend to study for the test rather than to provide answers during the actual exam; and so on.
What struck me about this story, and many of the others, was that although the student may have ultimately been trying to justify a decision to cheat, the reasons offered were not that cheating was not wrong, but rather that it was in conflict with other values like loyalty or with the realities of peer pressure. In the end, this is no different from the kinds of justifications and explanations that we hear for cheating elsewhere. It seemed useful to point this out, not only to the faculty who had expressed concern that their students viewed cheating as acceptable, but to the students themselves in a public presentation. Just because we may violate a value does not mean that we would not like to uphold it, if we felt we could find a way to do so effectively. And just as realizing that her experiences with less than ethical business behavior did not mean that all Indians were unethical helped to empower the student described earlier, expressing the values conflict around cheating can help reveal to the faculty as well as to the students in Sharjah that there is, in fact, a shared respect for academic integrity that they can work to build upon, in an effort to reduce cheating behaviors.
Providing the opportunity to express one’s values, to identify the arguments that we typically hear—and offer—for our own behaviors when they conflict with these values, and then beginning to brainstorm about how one might reframe the situation is what GVV is all about. The student who described the cheating dilemma was already beginning to understand that in the future, he or she might respond to the request for exam answers by offering instead to help the friend study in advance, for example. The student’s paper also revealed the inherent contradiction between helping a friend because he or she is close, on one hand, and the fact that a close friend would presumably not want to put another in a situation that was so difficult and conflicted.
Again, although these recognitions do not make the decisions easy, they do allow the individual student to begin to see himself or herself as someone who would like to avoid cheating and who is looking for a way to do so, and they allow the faculty to view their students in the same way. This provides a much broader common ground to stand upon than if students viewed themselves as fundamentally unethical because they gave in to their friend and if professors viewed their students as holding fundamentally alien value sets from themselves. Such views discourage the effort to brainstorm solutions and empower actions before it starts. Interestingly, the only professor from an Arab nation I spoke with in Sharjah talked about the importance of discouraging cheating and about how he tried to support his daughter, a college student herself, when she tried to resist pressures from her classmates. Clearly, the concern about integrity was not an exclusively “Western” idea.
When talking across cultures, rather than beginning with a position that we believe to be right and then asking (insisting?) that others agree with it, it is helpful to begin by asking about the other person’s values. In Sharjah, I asked folks to tell us about the times when they felt they were asked or expected to behave in ways that conflicted with their values, and how they handled it. In this way, we begin from a position of expecting and respecting values in the individual with whom we are trying to connect. Right from the start, we found shared values to build upon.
Another cultural comparison can be found in the Aspen Institute Business and Society Program’s MBA student attitude surveys mentioned in the Introduction to this book. Aspen BSP has been conducting these surveys since 2001, and the most recent, from 2008, not only surveyed fifteen business schools in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom but also conducted a comparable survey of fourteen business schools in China.10 Although there were some differences, the major findings from the Western schools and those in China were quite similar in many areas.
Graduate students in both surveys tend to report that, although corporate responsibility to society is important, they see the primary benefit that companies gain from such good citizenship as being reputational, as opposed to direct positive impact on the bottom line. Students in both surveys report that work-life balance and compensation will be among their top three priorities in post-MBA job selection. Western students rated “challenging and diverse job opportunities,” “compensation,” and “work-life balance” as most important, in that order. Chinese students rated “compensation,” “opportunities for training and development,” and “work-life balance” as most important, with “challenging and diverse job opportunities” a close fourth.
When asked what they would do if they found that their values conflicted with those of their companies, the Western and the Chinese respondents differed somewhat in the tactics they selected, but the lowest answer in both groups (less than 10 percent reported “very likely”) was that they would “not mind too much” if they encountered such values conflicts. Although the survey questions were highly general, the findings were encouraging with regard to the ability to find some common foundations for discussions of values-based management. Strategies for addressing values conflicts (speaking up for oneself, trying to get others to join in, and so on) may differ, and more Chinese students reported that they would “quietly handle the stress,” but the issue itself appears to be significant for both groups. And importantly, this supports the primary assumption behind the Giving Voice to Values approach: that is, most of us would like to be able to find ways to voice and act on our values. Finally, and interestingly, women students report a greater concern about the social performance of business than do men among both the Western and the Chinese schools surveyed.
The other big question that people invariably ask on first hearing about Giving Voice to Values goes something like this: “I really like the idea of actually preparing folks—myself and others—to speak about and act on their values, giving them the chance to script and practice their voice. But what if their values are wrong? Aren’t we just empowering folks to be more skillful at arguing for unethical positions?” This is a very important question.
After careful consideration, I have become comfortable with my response, and let me share it with you here. The reality is that we already do spend a great deal of time practicing and pre-scripting the reasons and rationalizations for not acting on what we think is right. Even as children we instinctively defend our misbehavior when we are caught: “Everybody else does it!” or “Jimmy made me do it!” or “I didn’t know!” We become quite adept at explaining away our transgressions when we want to do so.
However, the focus in this book is on the times when we do not want to transgress, when we actually want to find ways to voice and act on our values. Our working hypothesis is that if we are able to adhere to our values in those instances when we are already motivated to do so, the working world will be greatly different. It’s not that all bad actors really want to do good; rather it’s that some of us do, some of the time, and that empowering us in these moments will realign the workplace reality.
So if your concern is that by learning to voice our values, we might be empowering the wrong values, I respond by saying that those “wrong” values are already empowered. The goal here is to raise the volume and increase the sophistication of those arguments that are less often heard, that are less practiced, and that can transform the workplace conversation.
The fact is that the reasons for doing “good” are often based on rules and precepts—those ethical codes we talked about earlier—while the reasons for less than ethical behavior are usually couched in more immediate and concrete arguments: your bonus will be bigger or, perhaps more uncomfortably, if you resist you will ensure that the bonuses of your peers will be smaller! On the contrary, arguments for ethical behavior often rely on an appeal to longer-term costs, less immediate benefits, and more intangible goods.11 For all these reasons, these arguments often come a bit less easily to the tongue and require more forethought and pre-scripting.
But, you may counter, just because our position is based in a belief that we are doing right, that doesn’t ensure that we are doing right. And I respond that if we learn to raise and express these values clearly and confidently, even if our original values-based position were to prove wrong, wouldn’t the discussion itself be a positive thing in your organization? Wouldn’t it be a good thing that you and your peers had to think through the decision at hand? And even if your position is ultimately proven incorrect, wouldn’t it be a good thing that you felt truly heard and had the chance to see the organizational decision as correct, rather than as something you sheepishly complied with, believing all the while that you were doing wrong?
Fundamentally, GVV is about empowering anyone and all of us to voice positions that derive from a sense of doing right, with the assumption that such an impetus is important to express and consider, and that strengthening this impetus in and of itself is worthwhile. In the end, none of us can be certain in all situations what the right thing to do is, but I believe we can agree that it is important to try to find and act on that “right” and that empowering voice will move us forward in that endeavor.