Finding the Glass Half Full: Reframing Ethics in Associations

What is stimulating new ethical awareness in our associations? Issues of ethics, accountability and governance are both front-page news and front-and-centre for corporations. Enraging for shareholders, frightening for CEO's, scandals are driving the building of new ethical parameters. If associations aren't putting out fires under the blazing scrutiny of the legal, financial and public watch, reactivity isn't fuelling change. Where, then, is the impetus for ethical growth?

Precisely because associations are not having to deal with public airings of their misdeeds, their energy and vision can be focused on building high functioning organizations. The difference is rather like tending to the sails in calm weather instead of once the storm is in full force. The job may - may - get done either way, but in relatively calm waters it is done without trauma and no one is lost overboard. In less chaos, the team can work more collaboratively and the task is energizing, not depleting.

Most, if not all, associations have codes of ethics in place and in the absence of particular drama may wonder "if it ain't broke, why fix it?" However the reason to continue building on these foundations lies in tremendous realizable value beyond the intent to forestall harm. The "glass half full" refers to these benefits:

• greater clarity and vision in delivery of service;
• enhanced relationships with all partners;
• increased reputation and clout in one's industry or field;
• accelerated individual motivation and team productivity;
• a self-propelling energy that makes people want to be part of and respond to what they see.

On the continuum, we move from a place of clearly unethical behaviour at one end, to the neutrality of "no harm" in the centre. "The Rules" are drawn up and then forgotten until someone is "caught" doing something wrong. While they do have an important function, rules can sometimes relieve the individual of responsibility for their own consciousness and ownership about what constitutes good and appropriate relational interaction.

Since reluctance to own the impact of our behaviour is fortified by shame and defence, our ethical growth will be assisted by systems that don't unduly induce these natural human states. We reap the greater reward at the end of the continuum that seeks to intentionally build right relationship.

Ken Blanchard taught us an apparently simple lesson a couple of decades ago with The One Minute Manager: catch people doing something right. While he was talking about management style and leadership, his is a helpful concept to apply here. Deliberately and voluntarily turning attention to what is right about how we go about our business from a relational perspective, points the way to an expansive ethical stance. This intentionality informs the development of methodologies (codes, best practices) for the on going heightening of awareness. Hence a generative loop is complete: behaviour informs the articulated stance informs the behaviour - all fuelled by organizational commitment.

Learning from the Corporations

For corporations, success is measured economically. Because of their legal responsibility to shareholders to be profitable, they have less room to consider any impact that isn't measured in dollars. Therefore, their route to ethical corporate behaviour will be a necessarily longer one, involving many shifts in legal, financial, production, marketing, environmental and human resources realms.

Joel Bakan's The Corporation - both the book and movie - explains the corporation's legal standing as a "person" and then poses the question: what kind of person is it? Using psychiatric criteria, the answer comes in the diagnosis of "psychopath". The corporation is found to be incapable of relationship. Symptoms include lack of empathy, superficial relating to others, inability to accept responsibility for actions, and lack of remorse, among others. Entangled in their legitimate need to be profitable, relationship is left unattended except as it serves the need for profitability. That's relationship to human as well as environmental resources.

There are exceptions in the corporate world, of course, and an heroic one comes in the person of Ray Anderson, Chair of Interface, Inc. the world's largest commercial carpet manufacturer. This is a manufacturing sector that has a huge and adverse impact on the environment. After 20 plus years of business success, Ray Anderson realized, in his words, that he is a "plunderer" - that the earth and its resources cannot sustain the damage being done to it. "Someday people like me will end up in jail." He came late to this awareness and not because he was "caught out". But once he came to it, he succumbed to neither defence nor shame, but to action. He set about making substantial changes, growing his company toward environmental sustainability and leading the way for others.

While economic considerations are important to associations as well, they are not bound to them in the same way. A key function of the association's job is that of bridge builder. They are service oriented, promoting excellence and an image to match. In part they do this by taking a larger view and offering a common well from which can be pumped up a resource for many. They are, therefore, positioned to lead in the modelling of what is acceptable, even preferable, in how we go about achieving our collective goals.

If the association were viewed as a person, what kind of person would they be?

The Ethics of Relationship

Ray Anderson was willing to stand in relationship to the environment he was plundering, in relationship to the clients who were asking about Interface's environment vision, and in relationship to his own team who were asking for leadership.

While there are some great complexities in the realm of ethics, we can actually talk about the ethics of relationship in a very accessible way. Rather than starting with a code of conduct or a theory, the entry here is the relationship. Whatever that relationship is, be it manager and direct reports, executive director and board, co-ordinator and volunteers, the same principle applies: allow those relationships and one's own subjective experience to inform how to proceed. The ethics of relationship is about operating from within the relationship, with all its chaos and conflicts of interest and communication problems and yet being willing to ask "what is right, under these circumstances, in this relationship?" We are informed by questions such as:

• How will this (project, plan) impact our relationships with staff? With volunteers? With stakeholders?
• Are there any conflicts between what we're proposing and our values as articulated in a code of ethics or mission statement?
• Can I personally stand behind this action, honestly and without justification or defence?

This approach requires authenticity. It cannot be done for show or appearance. Authenticity requires congruence between what is being espoused and what is being enacted. It requires accessibility and a degree of transparency. Allowing for real personal interplay is what gives any ethical guide a living, actuated potency.

The ethics of relationship isn't punitive and policing, siphoning off energy to mend, amend or defend. It is an enhancing, even enticing aspect of engagement. It puts the generative juice into our teams.

The Corporation itself provides us with another piece of useful learning. It tells a critically important story in a way that has riveted the public's attention. It depicts examples of relationship along a continuum of (mostly) unethical to sound and respectful. It has educated and informed and provided a rallying point for change. In this it is a good book and movie. But if we turn from how The Corporation is about relationship to how it is in relationship, what can we assess? If you call someone a psychopath, how likely are they to engage with you? I asked earlier what kind of person the association might be if measured by standards of mental health. Readers of this article would likely have dropped off dramatically by this point if I had suggested a pejorative answer.

Associations: A Chance to Lead?

Some corporations have unwittingly taken on an important task for the rest of us: teaching us, by virtue of modelling, what not to do. The magnitude of some of the ethical breaches makes clear the issues, and demands that we face them. Without that magnitude, there would not have been the broad public awareness, and the opportunity for change and for understanding would have slipped by once again.

Now, this is a hard way to effect change; need it be the only way? Can associations contribute to the collective consciousness - and do they want to? Is there a return on this investment?

I pose the questions and hope I have also posited some answers. At the end of the day, no matter what else has gone wrong, advancing ethical behaviour by living it, and putting energy into true relationship building would seem to be "value added" in the highest sense of its meaning.

[As published by the Canadian Society of Association Executives (CSAE) in Association -October/November 2004]