Leadership as ethics

In our Centre for Voluntary Sector Leadership courses, we define leadership as “a collaborative, political and participative practice that provides direction, energy and critical engagement on issues that are made to matter”. The key aspects to this definition are that leadership is a practice – it’s something we ‘do’ – and that the issues that we address are ‘made to matter’ through that practice, i.e. leadership makes issues matter by focussing on certain things above others. These choices are one area where ethics can play a large role in leadership.

In the video clip below Nik discusses an approach to leadership and ethics and how the ethics of an organisation can do real leadership work – that ethics can guide people’s behaviour and decisions. He also emphasises how applying ethics to the workplace is not about coming up with a single correct answer – instead, it is a way of feeling a way through the opportunities and pitfalls of organisational life.

Saying there's such a thing as leadership ethics, an ethics appropriate for leadership, doesn't really help us understand. What we need to understand is the relationship between ethics and leadership. As people, we're ethical beings. So as leaders, we bring in those ethical understandings as we practise leadership.

Dr Nik Winchester

Emotions are highly important in both of these areas and in relation to ethics – and leadership – more widely. We experience emotions as we practise leadership and engage with others and these can be both positive and negative.

Nik talks about ethics theory being useful as ‘lenses of understanding’ for the problems that we face. Rather than providing us with direct answers to these problems it allows us to consider them in different ways that will hopefully lead to better decision making.

In the voluntary sector, this can help to uncouple leadership decisions from being driven solely by certain factors. For example, being a ‘mission-based’ or ‘values-based’ organisation implies there is a ‘right’ way to do things based on that mission. However, even with the existence of specific guiding values, it is how we practise those values and apply them through consideration and debate that emphasises the ethics involved.

Organisational Purpose

Here’s an example from the course that considers the charity Crisis. For Crisis, eradicating homelessness is a clear purpose underlying all of its work:

Homelessness is devastating, leaving people vulnerable and isolated. We believe everyone deserves a place to call home and the chance to live a fulfilled and active life. (Crisis, 2015)

Taken from: ‘Developing leadership practice in voluntary organisations’, Week 4, Section 2.

Note the strength of the language used here by Crisis: ‘devastation’; ‘vulnerability’; ‘isolation’. Through these words, a picture emerges of shattered lives. Furthermore, Crisis believes that ‘everyone deserves’ a home. ‘Deserves’ signals the sense of a home as a fundamental right. There is a strong sense of ethics at play here. Having a home is a fundamental right and not to have one is wrong – this is about ethics. Furthermore, this is about a sense of ethics leading the organisation.

In a leadership sense, an organisation’s purpose sits somewhere between its morality and its ethics, in other words, between the underlying system of values of an organisation and its judgments about right and wrong. That is what makes thinking about purpose so intriguing.

But a purpose does not result in an automatic set of ethical prescriptions: X is right, Y is wrong. There is significant room for interpretation of a purpose and what it means in practice. Moreover, a purpose may not always be fit for purpose. Sometimes a purpose may lead an organisation in a direction that is consistent but still wrong.

Purposes can also lead people to pursue certain activities over others. Yet purposes are also contested (debated, argued over), which is what makes them such a lively and interesting point of focus for practice and research. Having a strong purpose does not mean that organisations are able to avoid tough ethical dilemmas.

Ethical Dilemmas

In Nik’s video, he suggests we can define ethics as concerning judgements about right and wrong and the good and the bad. The simplicity of this definition conceals a range of more complicated issues.

In reality, ethics is mostly not about right and wrong but about ‘wrong and more wrong’ or ‘almost-right and a-bit-wrong’.

In other words, organisational ethics is often about dilemmas that:

• have to take into account complex contexts
• acknowledge that people very often operate from a basis of incomplete information
• acknowledge managers often operate from a basis of insufficient time
• look very different depending on the position from which they are viewed.

Taken from: ‘Developing leadership practice in voluntary organisations’, Week 4, Section 3

Ethical dilemmas are those problems for which there is no straightforward answer: the problem cannot be solved as such, merely acted upon in one way or another. Truly ethical problems do not disappear once a decision is made.

If we think about the current Covid-19 context we can see a variety of issues that have been raised that did not disappear just because a decision was made. Take staffing, for example, organisations had to decide which staff to continue to keep in their posts in order to deliver services and keep the organisation moving whilst also thinking about who might have to be furloughed in light of additional pressures and funding cuts. That decision had to be revisited many times.

Leadership is important within these ethical dilemmas and how you engage with other people within the process of interaction is a key part of this as much as the final decision that is made.

In the final aspect of ethics and leadership, we’ll consider the importance of staying to see the results of the decisions that have been made.

Sticking Around

It is our belief that in leadership you cannot escape ethical dilemmas as such. Leadership is therefore as much to do with the quality of how you engage one another within the dilemmas (the processes of interaction) as it is about the final decision made. To flee in the face of a difficult choice and its aftermath does not count as leadership, as you would not really be leading anyone – other than yourself, in the opposite direction of the tough choices.

Taken from: ‘Developing leadership practice in voluntary organisations’, Week 4, Section 5

Often ethical situations are what Williams (1973; 2008) describes as ‘tragic’ because there is no single, correct answer. As a result, you emotionally feel the discomfort, distress and remorse associated with the decisions you have made. These feelings and emotions are good however as they show you are able to act ethically. If you did not feel anything that would be worrying!

Adopting this perspective tells us that we need to stick around to participate in the leadership that follows any difficult decision. This involves thinking about how you can contribute to rebuilding and re-energising the organisation in the face of a very difficult decision. Thinking of the tragic suggests an element of sacrifice on the part of those who would act as organisational leaders. You have to absorb some of the pain and act as a kind of lightning rod for the emotions of those who work in the organisation if that is what the organisation needs.

Sticking with a tragedy can, of course, become self-indulgent. However, there is no formula that tells you when it is time to start moving on and putting a decision to one side: it is a matter of feeling your way through. You will know better than most what your organisation can tolerate and when.

Ethical Reflection as a Key Practice

Ethical reflection is a key practice in relation to leadership. The two activities above have involved reflecting on the values of the organisation(s) you’re involved with or know about and reflecting on what you would do in a situation that highlights ethical dilemmas. Our courses have more activities in them to help you develop this aspect of leadership.

Ethical reflection is important because it deals with dilemmas and problems for which there is no straightforward or satisfactory answer. It allows you to approach a problem from different perspectives and from the points of view of different people – it’s important to remember that reflection is not just a solitary task.

The idea of ethical reflection is to make a problem more complex and difficult, to see more sides of the puzzle, rather than solving the puzzle itself. Ethical reflection is also very much an emotional and embodied task. It asks you to pay attention to how certain options, issues and people make you feel.

Taken from: ‘Developing leadership practice in voluntary organisations’, Week 4, Section 7

Our webinar with Dr Nik Winchester on 11 December 2020 allowed guests to explore issues of ethics and leadership in more detail and to reflect on the ethical dilemmas that you encounter in your day-to-day practice. You can watch the video again here.

The above information has been extracted from one of our free open access courses.