How To Do The Right Thing

From Mary Gentile: Knowing your values is one thing; it’s acting on them that’s the real challenge.

Mary C. Gentile is the creator and director of Giving Voice To Values, and author of Giving Voice To Values: How To Speak Your Mind When You Know What’s Right (Yale University Press). Giving Voice to Values (GVV) is based at University of Virginia-Darden School of Business. It was first launched by Aspen Institute as Incubator & Founding Partner with Yale School of Management, then supported at Babson College 2009-16.

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I can’t remember a time when people didn’t bemoan a sense that life was more complicated and, in particular, more ethically challenging than it “used to be.” But I must say that our current challenges loom especially large for a number of reasons: The world is more interconnected than ever before; news and ideas travel faster and farther than ever before (often news of scandals and corruption in politics and business); some challenges, such as climate change, have ticking clocks attached to them; truth and facts are more elusive as our ability to manipulate text and images increases by the day; and so on. All of these realities make the pursuit of an ethical life feel more difficult.

Photo by Henry Schneider on Unsplash

I have spent most of my professional life working in business education, developing curriculum and teaching about values-driven leadership, ethics and inclusivity at Harvard Business School, Babson College and the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. But a number of years ago, I experienced what I call a “crisis of faith.” I began to wonder if teaching about ethics and values in business schools and in corporate training was, actually, unethical -- or at least futile and possibly hypocritical. As an earnest kind of person, this was a difficult proposition to entertain.

There were several reasons for this “crisis.” First of all, I had been working on these issues for years, but nevertheless every few years some major business scandal would erupt, and the institutions where I worked would scramble to address the outcry. After all, it was often graduates of the leading business schools who were seen as the architects of the scandals. But despite the hiring of new business ethicists, the development of new curriculum and new research efforts, the scandals continued.

Another reason for my “crisis” was more personal. I was invited to be part of a debate at the Markula Center for Professional Ethics at Santa Clara University on whether, after a quarter of a century of efforts to teach ethics in business schools, we had made any progress. I was asked to speak in the affirmative, and when I sat down to write my remarks I faced a sobering question: Could I lie on an ethics panel? Joking aside, in the end I wrote something rather nuanced about the idea that any of us who teach – or who manage people in organizations – know that there are individuals upon whom we have had a positive impact. But I couldn’t actually say we had made a lot of progress on a wider scale. This was sobering.

But the biggest reason for my “crisis” had to do with what I experienced when I taught a class on business ethics or led a discussion in a company on the subject. Typically, we would share a case study – an example of a values-conflict – with students or employees. Then, two things tended to happen. First, participants would realize that the unethical behaviors under consideration might actually be very common, even assumed to be “standard operating procedure,” and that efforts to act ethically might not succeed and might even make things worse, at least for themselves. This seems an important outcome of such discussions, as I don’t want students or employees to enter into these situations naively. It’s important for them to consider as much information as they can.

More troubling to me was a second reaction, often from the most experienced and respected people in the room, who expressed the most skeptical or even cynical position. They were the ones who would say: “I know what you want me to say, Mary, but in the real world, it’s just not possible to act ethically in such a situation.”

The people who had the most influence were the ones who were saying this is not possible, in other words. And so participants would walk away from these conversations both more confused and less empowered. This was the biggest reason for my crisis of faith. At best, it appeared that the way we approached business ethics and values-driven leadership was not as effective as we hoped. At worst, it could sometimes devolve into a sort of “schooling for sophistry,” as participants would hear seemingly convincing arguments and rationalizations for succumbing to pressure to act unethically.

For all these reasons, I decided to take a step back from teaching about organizational ethics. Life is short; I wanted to do something that mattered.

“Moral Muscle Memory”

Around that time, I had a number of experiences and began to see new research that suggested an entirely different way of teaching about – and even personally acting upon – ethical conflicts. This was the beginning of “Giving Voice To Values,” or GVV. Drawing on actual experience and scholarship, GVV fills a long-standing critical gap in the development of values-centered leaders.

GVV is not about persuading people to be more ethical. Rather, it starts from the premise that most of us want to act on our values, but also want to feel that we have a reasonable chance of doing so effectively and successfully. This pedagogy and curriculum are about raising those odds. Rather than a focus on ethical analysis, the Giving Voice To Values curriculum focuses on ethical implementation. It asks the question: “What if I were going to act on my values? What would I say and do? How could I be most effective?”

Typically, business ethics education – and ethics education more generally – focuses on awareness and analysis. That is, we expose learners to a variety of circumstances that might trigger ethical concerns so that they can learn to recognize them when they encounter them. This is important, as we live in an increasingly complex world where the development of new technological capabilities and the exposure to different cultures mean we may not always be prepared to see and understand the ethical implications of our choices.

But necessary as this focus on awareness is, it is not sufficient. We all know that many of the ethical scandals that organizations experience – and the ethical choices that we face as individuals – are not cases where we didn’t see the problem. They are more often situations where we succumbed to pressures or perhaps didn’t feel we had a choice.

The second focus – analysis – is also necessary but not sufficient. In an academic context, this typically involves sharing a case example of an ethical challenge and then applying the ethical lenses from philosophy – utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics – to the situation in order to think rigorously and consistently about what the “right thing” to do might be. These models, by design, conflict. They are valuable in the way they help us see things from different angles – but they will not tell us what the right thing to do may be.

So I decided we needed to add a third “A.” In addition to building awareness and pursuing analysis, we needed to practice action.

Increasingly, behavioral ethicists and social psychologists suggest that rehearsal, pre-scripting and peer coaching can be effective ways to affect behavior. Research suggests that when we encounter values conflicts, we don’t typically sit down to do a pro/con list or to ask what would Confucius – or John Rawls – or Aristotle – or Kant say? Instead, we act – automatically, emotionally – and we tend to rationalize post-hoc why our choice was the right thing to do, or perhaps the only thing we could do. This is not because we intend to do wrong; it’s an automatic response so we can avoid the cognitive dissonance of knowing something is wrong and doing it anyway.

If our teaching and personal efforts involve presenting ethical scenarios and asking “what would you do?,” we are actually inviting folks to simply repeat and rehearse this same self-protective response. I wanted to try to “re-wire” this automatic response instead. So in developing the “Giving Voice To Values” pedagogical approach, we created the “GVV Thought Experiment.” We present a scenario that concludes with a protagonist who knows what she or he believes is right. Then, the questions for discussion are ones like: “How can they get it done, effectively? What will they say and do? What data do they need? Do they need to re-frame the situation? Will they act alone or do they need to build a set of allies – a coalition? Who will they approach? In what sequence and in what context? And is this a one-off challenge or is it a systemic challenge? If the latter, they will need to approach it systemically – more incrementally, over a longer time period.” We have generated a protocol of discussion questions; various self-reflection tools; lists of “levers” or tactics; many case examples; and so on.

The intention is for GVV participants to develop a sort of “Moral Muscle Memory.” I actually developed this idea while taking a self-defense class. The class, called “Model Mugging,” took a developmental approach. We learned and practiced various defensive moves and, to practice, a gentleman in a padded suit would approach us as if to attack. and we could practice the moves on him as he was protected. The instructors explained to us that this approach was based on the concept of Specific State Muscle Memory: the idea that you practice something in the same cognitive, physical and emotional state that you will be in when you need to use it. One day in this class, as I lay on the floor after a failed attempt to ward off one of these practice attacks, I began to wonder if we could develop a sort of “Moral Muscle Memory” through rehearsal, pre-scripting and peer coaching. And that was the beginning of GVV.

More choices than we think

One of the first steps was not only to develop a teaching methodology but also to collect stories of times when individuals faced values conflicts – and especially when they found successful ways to address them. One of the first such GVV cases, “The Client Who Fell Through The Cracks,” recounts what a young financial analyst did when she was directed by her supervisor to tamper with benchmarks to make it appear that a client’s portfolio had performed better than it had. The analyst didn’t want to deceive this investor but was concerned that refusing would not only damage her relationship with her boss and her own career trajectory but also merely prompt her boss to ask another analyst to make the changes.

Rather than asking “what should she do?,” the GVV case begins with the analyst’s decision to do the right thing: not to deceive the client. That choice opened up a range of more possible choices that she might never have realized she had, of what she could say and do to address the situation effectively. Ultimately, she proceeded as if her boss was not “invested” in being unethical, but rather as if he was invested in finding a way through a difficult conversation with his client. And she prepared a deck of slides and detailed talking points, explaining precisely where and why they went off track each time they did and what they were planning to do, going forward, to address the challenges. As part of the presentation, she anticipated what the client might say and what her boss could say in response, which helped to put him at ease. Even better, she provided a detailed map for the meeting. In the end, the solution worked out for her, for her boss and for the client.

Some will argue that the analyst didn’t stick to her values because she didn’t name the ethical problem to her boss. However, I would suggest that he most likely knew why she didn’t do as he had originally asked; that he recognized that she had given him an alternative and better option; and that he was able to “save face.” Obviously, not every situation has an elegant solution, but more of them probably do than we think. GVV provides the opportunity, the tools and the time to develop the arguments and skills needed to find more ethical solutions.

Although the GVV curriculum was originally developed for use in business schools, it has expanded widely. It has been shared on all seven continents, in education across professions, in companies large and small, in NGOs, in the military and government. There are videos, a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), interactive online modules, a book series and an entire set of curricular materials – cases, readings, exercises, etc.

When asked what is the one thing I would hope that individuals remember about GVV, I answer this way: When you confront values conflicts, you may have more choices than you think.

We tend to think of negative consequences as the norm and positive ones as the exception. But that doesn’t mean that they have to be. Through pre-scripting, rehearsal, and peer coaching, we can transform our automatic responses to such challenges to see that we have more “arrows in our quivers.” We can play to our strengths because we have anticipated and practiced -- so the question we ask ourselves is not whether we can act on our values but rather how we can do so effectively.

So the next time you read about a business scandal, start building that moral muscle and ask yourself: how could that person have proceeded in doing the right thing instead?