Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Follow Greg on LinkedIn for his expert perspective on a variety of leadership topics. He’s at https://www.linkedin.com/in/gsmoran.

Our host Maureen Metcalf posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI. Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

• Everyday Ubuntu: Living Better Together, the African Way by Mungi Ngomane. Hardback (https://amzn.to/48Doh6j) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/48YCRF4)
• Nerve: Lessons on Leadership from Two Women Who Went First by Martha Piper & Indira Samarasekera. Paperback (https://amzn.to/3tOtzg4) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/41OYdT5)
• Jilly Truit murder mysteries by Beverley McLachlin:
  • Full Disclosure – https://amzn.to/46TxW6Q (paperback) https://amzn.to/46VDL3Q (audiobook)
  • Denial – https://amzn.to/46YCbhs (paperback) https://amzn.to/3GJc0AA (audiobook)
• Women and Leadership: Journey Toward Equity by Sherylle J. Tan & Lisa DeFrank-Cole

NOTE: As an Amazon partner, we may make a small commission from books you buy through these links.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Greg Moran is a C-level digital, strategy and change leadership executive with extensive global operations experience. He led corporate strategy for Ford and designed the plan that Alan Mullaly used to turn around the company. Greg held C-level IT positions in app dev, infrastructure, and core banking applications at Ford, Nationwide Insurance, and Bank One/JPMC, respectively. He began his career in consulting with Arthur Andersen Accenture, working across industries with 100 companies over the course of a decade. He is passionate about leadership and culture, and teaches part time on the topic at Ohio University.

Transcript
(auto-generated)

Maureen: [00:00:00] This is Innovating Leadership Co-Creating our Future. I’m your host, Maureen Metcalf, founder and CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute. Where we help leaders be future ready? Helping us in this mission today is Greg Moran C-level digital Strategy and Change Leadership executive with extensive global operations experience.

We’ll be talking about ethics from the corporate side. Greg, I’m delighted that you’re with us.

Greg: Glad to be here again. Maureen,

Maureen: what’s the distinction between morality slash values and ethics slash action

Greg: for purposes of this conversation, and I say that [00:01:00] specifically because you know, I’m sure a philosophy professor could pick me apart on this, but just for simplicity’s.

I view morality slash values as really a framework that you say that you espouse, and it could have come from anywhere. It could come from your religion and faith. It could come from the culture in which you have grown up. It could come from the company that you work for, to some degree, sometimes determines frameworks.

It could come from just something that you’ve learned and decided works for you. But that is essentially the framework or the rules that you say you wanna live by and, and define what you view as right and wrong. Ethics is really where that gets put into action. You’re not ethical. If you have a framework, you’re ethical.

If you demonstrate. Adhering to that framework consistently over time with your actions. So to me, ethics really gets defined by what you do and whether or not people can look at your actions and say, yes, that [00:02:00] person says they believe this, and I see them act consistently with that all the time. Does that make sense?

Maureen: It does, and it’s interesting to draw from that. Our leadership workshops, one of the first exercises people do is look at their own personal values, define them, and write a story about them. So not only do I say health matters, but what does health mean to me? It’s not an abstract word off a list. It’s interesting how often people cite a list of values like health or family, and yet as they go through the exercises, realize that they are in fact not living those values that they espouse to be crucial to who they are.

Greg: Yeah, absolutely. I teach at the undergraduate level at Ohio University, and I focus a lot on this question of values and ethics with particularly the seniors as they’re starting to launch their career. And I can tell you it is deeply concerning to me. The degree to which seniors in college that already have jobs typically lined up, [00:03:00] often have never had this conversation, often have never been forced to think about this question of what really are my values when it comes down to what I view as right and wrong, not just what I think is important.

But what I think is right and wrong. And so I’m urgently working with them to get them to develop and define a framework for themselves and then talk to them about the importance of adherence. Like be transparent about it. ’cause it’ll create some accountability for you. And then adhere, right? Act accordingly so that when you are faced with a moral dilemma of sorts, and there’s so many good examples of that that we can cite from business history, even recent history.

Then you know how to make the decision and you make it without having to contemplate it. Any other approach really leaves you facing moral hazards in real time when perhaps your context makes it really hard for you to make the right call.

Maureen: One of our past podcasts and someone we have worked with is Mary [00:04:00] Crowson who has a framework on character.

What does virtuous leadership look like? One of the things she talks about is we need to practice this. It’s not something that necessarily comes naturally. When I’m in a difficult spot and I haven’t built the muscle to make those difficult decisions, and the center of her framework is judgment, if I haven’t honed my judgment to balance between very complex issues,

Greg: frameworks don’t have a set of values that all have the exact same weight and importance There is.

An importance framework that is implied in a framework, right, in the sense that the highest order thing might be student safety, and I’m not suggesting that would be the right one. I’m just using it to illustrate the point. You might say, above all else, we keep our students safe and any other value that we have is subordinate to that in a moment where [00:05:00] student lives are at risk.

Or where student perceived safety is at risk. ’cause it might not just be actual risk. It might be perceived risk. Then you might say free speech or an open forum is another value that we espouse. But we don’t put free speech above safety. So when we have a decision to make that balances, those two safety wins.

And to your point, if you’re not talking about that all the time, if you’re not modeling that all the time and you find yourself in one of these complex situations where you’re having to balance two values against each other, you’re now in a very difficult situation and nobody knows what to expect of you.

And so you’re now in a much, much tougher spot than you otherwise would have been. That doesn’t just apply to university presidents, that applies to US presidents or presidents of any country, and quite frankly, leaders of organizations. I remember being at Ford Motor Company during 9-11, and we had to think about what’s the right course of [00:06:00] action.

With respect to balancing the various interests of our employees at that point. You know, initially the first few days we didn’t know if this was a global thing or if this was just a US thing and you’re just sorting through, you know, do you have people come to work when we don’t even know if there’s more attacks?

So it was really important to have that absolute clarity, not only of what’s important. But the order, how you’re gonna prioritize.

Maureen: I’m working with a client right now who’s creating their vision playbook, and the values are central to that.

Greg: Absolutely. I don’t think you can define an organization without defining its values.

Yeah. Not everybody would agree with me on that, but that is. Both observational and belief driven, in my case, that it’s inconceivable to me that you could describe to somebody who might wanna work in your organization, what it’s going to be like to be a member of that team. If you haven’t been [00:07:00] explicit about what values you have as an organization.

That just doesn’t make any sense to me. You haven’t defined the shape of your organization if you haven’t expressed its values in some meaningful way that somebody can not only understand. But then make a choice about you want people opting in or opting out. If somebody says, those values don’t match mine.

I would immediately be like, let me help you be successful somewhere else. I’m not telling you I’m right. I’m just telling you those are our values, and if they’re not yours, you should not come here ’cause it’s not gonna go well.

Maureen: Here’s a concrete example of that from a conversation yesterday where this person was saying, we live in a dynamic world and everyone is expected to change and can change on a consistent basis.

And we know that change is difficult. This is not an easy place to work ’cause you don’t get to build the muscle and settle in and just do the routine. We expect you to change consistently. We have your back, we will support you, but if [00:08:00] you want traditional stability, you should not work here. The passion and clarity with which he was able to express that is foundational for their hiring.

Greg: I completely agree. I think if I were in that situation, I would then follow it up with, and here’s how we’re gonna help you grapple with change. First of all, here’s some things that are never gonna change, just so you know, because everybody has to know how to anchor. If what you’re saying is our definition of right and wrong is gonna change and you’ve gotta change with it.

That’s a big problem. So if I were interviewing, I would have some follow up questions on that. And I agree. It’s a super important point to get across that, look, we’re not gonna have static job descriptions. We’re gonna expect you to grow and learn. We’re gonna expect you to put on different hats. All those things make sense to me, but then I would.

If I was the leader of that organization say, let me tell you some things that are bedrock that are never gonna change, that you can anchor to. We’re always gonna back it up with investment. Like, we’re not gonna expect you to change and not help you. And we’re always [00:09:00] gonna have a moral code that is sacrosanct.

It’s never gonna change.

Maureen: And in this case, quality, trust, and service are the bedrocks. Very clear. We will always do the right thing with our customers. We will always deliver good quality and make right on it. Things will go wrong. We will come back and fix it until you are satisfied that it is what you believe you purchased, even if we’re delivering well beyond what the contractual requirements are.

Greg: Right? So that’s absolutely great. And then you say the ethics side of that, the actual point of action is, do you consistently do that? So if a frontline employee makes a decision on behalf of the customer that kills the margin on that deal, does the frontline employee get celebrated or do they get punished?

Maureen: I have not been with them long enough to know for sure. They consistently actually will take a loss. To deliver that value. You don’t stay in business if you do that with every client, certainly.

Greg: Well, you just have to build processes that will deliver quality [00:10:00] without you losing your margin, which I think is great.

That’s partly what change can do for you. You know, you look at great companies, even at huge scale like a Toyota Motor Company or a Honda that deliver high quality products consistently. They don’t do that by standing still don’t. Define high efficiency, high quality, high value processes is a static thing.

In fact, almost definitionally the Honda way. The Toyota way involves constant questioning of is there a better way, and that allows them to then consistently get more efficient without sacrificing quality and. So again, and I don’t wanna sound like I’m questioning the exact company that you’re talking about, it’s really just using that as a springboard to this dialogue about how to think about it more richly as a leader.

You can’t just stop with the values. You’ve really gotta talk about then, okay, how do we back that up? How do we define that in action? How do we model that? To the point that you made earlier about, nobody believes that if you’re not doing it consistently, and you’ve gotta [00:11:00] build the muscle around making those trade-offs,

Maureen: which is culture process, it’s built into your performance management, it’s built into the way they lead.

All of that has to be in place before. People can consistently deliver and be expected to consistently deliver.

Greg: And then when those examples come up as a leader in the organization, talk about it with the team. So everybody’s connecting the dots. One of the things that frustrated me about where corporate HR has sort of landed these days is somebody will violate the company’s values in some meaningful way and they’ll get terminated for it.

But the conversation about it is Greg has decided to pursue other interests, and then there’s never a discussion that says, you know what? Greg broke our rules and he used his corporate credit card consistently over time for personal purchases. We realized it was a pattern and that he was doing this intentionally, and that’s a violation of our ethical code.

It’s a violation of our [00:12:00] employee code of conduct, so we fired him like people should know that. We don’t say that out of a i, I expect fairly misguided fear around that employee that’s been terminated, having some cause of action against the company for besmirching their character. But to me there’s a way to do it that in no way besmirches their character, but just talks about the choices you’ve made and the consequences of those choices that should be talked about.

To your point, it reinforces everybody knows, oh, they’re really serious about that one. Yeah. Okay, that makes sense.

Maureen: I have another client who, on the positive side, they would let people go for things that were perceived as unethical treatment of colleagues. After a number of firings, it was very clear that that behavior was not tolerated.

If you wanna work in that organization, there’s a way you treat your colleagues.

Greg: Absolutely. And in my last company, we were incredibly explicit about the culture and about the values in the meeting where we [00:13:00] talked everybody through it when they joined the company, I said explicitly, we hire for culture, we fire.

So we’re gonna get really clear in this meeting about what our culture is, what our values are, what behaviors we expect, because if you start to color outside the lines, we’ll coach you. But if you ultimately can’t adhere, we’ll move you outta the organization and we’ll do that for your sake and ours, because our culture is a contract with everybody else that works here and you know they’ve signed up for this experience.

And if you’re breaking that experience consistently and can’t be coached. Into alignment with the values, we’re gonna help you be successful somewhere else.

Maureen: The idea that it starts the first day or before onboarding is crucial. It is about equity to the entire organization. Acting outside of that code of conduct should be for leaders.

I feel bad for firing somebody, and yet if I’m being true to everyone who works here. Of course [00:14:00] I have to make that decision.

Greg: I completely agree how important your quote unquote social contract is with everybody that’s already in the organization, and it’s a great example of something that should have been talked about on day one with some of these student protests going on on campus.

If the protest violates your contract with every other student. Right. You should shut that down and get back inside the box. The box being defined as what is appropriate behavior for a protest on campus, and how do we do that in a way that it keeps every other student feeling safe, being safe, and having full access to the facilities that they paid for when they signed up to go to that university.

So it’s a great point. You’re making a, it should be known from day one or before day one when you sign up. And then B, they’ve gotta see it get. Practiced right? They’ve gotta see it happen in action or it’s not worth the paper it’s written on. And again, if you decide that you’re going to change [00:15:00] the priority of those values, back to that idea of, you know, some things are subordinate to others, and you’re gonna do that in real time, it completely undermines the trust you have with the people in the organization.

And once you’ve lost trust, once they don’t believe it. Your ability to preserve it over time is highly compromised.

Maureen: We build the prioritization given what we think is most probable When something happens, like the student protest now on university where they’re taking over buildings that may not have been anticipated when the values were defined.

We may go back and say, this is outside of what we anticipated, and consequently we’re changing how we’re treating this situation with transparency. People know why our decision is evolving and what our criteria is.

Greg: That’s a tough one for me because we’ll use Columbia as an example. That’s the easy one.

If you didn’t anticipate that potential [00:16:00] eventuality in your value framework at Columbia, you are absolutely not paying attention. Not only is that a reasonable outcome to happen at Columbia, it’s happened at Columbia. At that building specifically in the last 40 years.

Maureen: Yep.

Greg: You know, to me, if the president came out and said, my excuse is I didn’t anticipate students taking over a building, I think the world would be right to look at you sconce and be like, yeah, but it’s already happened on your campus in that building.

In the lifetime of people that are on your board of trustees. Come on. It’s not credible. Now that being said, I think the point that you’re raising that you can encounter moral hazards that have not been anticipated, I think that is for sure the case and that does happen. AI is a great example over the last year where we’ve begun to encounter some new moral hazards.

That didn’t exist in the world before. As [00:17:00] we’ve talked about on this program before, you have to be experimenting with those technologies in order to find where those new moral hazards are. And then you’ve gotta be super transparent about how you’re gonna incorporate that into your framework. We’re seeing that happen right now.

Uh, news story this morning, you’ve got a bunch of news organizations that are trying to build. Contracts with OpenAI and you’ve got a bunch of other news organizations that are suing it. Because they have different points of view around the role that large language models are playing in the delivery of news.

And you’ve got some organizations that think it’s plagiarism and other organizations that say, no, it’s a huge source of new information and I want a contract to be able to get access to it.

Maureen: And there’s probably truth on both ends.

Greg: Absolutely. So again, I don’t wanna take away from your point around new moral hazards.

They do develop, and I think when they do. You should, as an organization, as a leader, [00:18:00] proactively embrace that you’re in a new situation and say it. So it would’ve worked better for me if the President of Columbia had come out and said, you know, we find ourselves in a situation that we never could have anticipated.

And so we’re gonna take a couple of days with our student senate and the board of trustees. To develop a plan of action. In the meantime, we remain committed to the obvious components of our values. Like every student stays safe, every student feels safe, and every student has access to the facilities that they paid for, but she didn’t do that.

They aren’t safe. They don’t feel safe. They don’t have access. And there was no explicit statement saying, we’ve gotta contemplate how to handle this. And to me, that would’ve been the easiest thing in the world.

Maureen: I think it’s an interesting and important point that it’s appropriate to step back and say, we’re soliciting input from student senate.

Board of trustees, our legal counsel, this decision will take [00:19:00] time.

Greg: You gotta be clear about what values are gonna preside. ’cause this was a very fluid situation and in my view, she should have come out very strongly and said in the meantime, while we sort out what we’re gonna do with this situation, first of all it’s gonna be 48 hours and then we’re gonna make a call.

Maureen: Mm-hmm.

Greg: And then second of all, during that time period, students will be safe. They will feel safe, they’ll have access to facilities. And quite frankly, most of the opposite of that happened. Uh, I, I mean, I’ll just predict the future here. She’s gonna lose her job. There’s just no question in my mind that she’s gonna lose her job and it’s a self-inflicted wound.

She did not need to lose her job because I think we’re seeing different behavior modeled in other campuses across the country. Those leaders that have been proactive about this are gonna keep their jobs and they’re gonna attract more students.

Maureen: I can’t help but think that your crisis communication organization, and I have to imagine that every large university that’s facing these is working with [00:20:00] crisis consultants.

If you follow the direction of your crisis consultants and they’re leading you to a different path, you are also at risk of losing your job.

Greg: Yeah, I think bringing in a crisis firm, and I’ve certainly been involved in those types of situations before, over the course of my career. I remember at Ford, the Firestone debacle and various others that I’ve been a part of.

I think if you are, you know, throwing a lifeline to a crisis consultant to come in and help you deal with a crisis. And it’s one of these that has the potential to really define not only the organization and the safety of the people in it, but your legacy. You are taking a very huge risk. You have no idea what values are driving the decision making of that crisis management firm.

So if you really felt like you were in a job where that was a likely scenario, my advice would be have a contract crisis consultant on retainer. And spend time with them ahead of time so that you’re [00:21:00] aligned on what the values are and what’s most important, and that you have that trusted relationship.

’cause to your point, if you bring in a crisis consultant that’s operating from a completely different values framework, it’s just gonna make your problem worse.

Maureen: Having been in the board chair of an organization that also experienced a crisis, we had a crisis consultant who had a very different point of view than I did.

About our responsibility to, as a nonprofit, our community, are the stakeholders and what we communicate with them. And the question was level of transparency versus if you tell them they’re not going to continue to support you and then you’re out of business. So I get, again, both points of view. But I held heavily the value and still do that transparency with our stakeholders as part of our moral contract.

The point isn’t whether I was right or wrong, the point is to confirm what you’ve just said. That our communication firm had a very different. Ethical view than I did, and their guidance [00:22:00] was 180 degrees different from what I believed was appropriate.

Greg: Did it make your job easier or harder?

Maureen: Oh, it made my job much harder and at the end of the day, I went with what I believed was ethically appropriate.

Greg: Yeah, it’s important to say that if the situation is clearly in violation of the organization’s values. But you waffle your way to the outcome. The outcome rarely changes by much, but the journey looks really different, and the impact of that journey on the various stakeholders is very different. So again, I think Columbia becomes a very illustrative point.

The end of the day, what happened? You know, the NYPD removed the protestors from the building. They arrested them, they’re up on charges, and now there’s calling of a lull in the storm. And my prediction is they will do the work that I was talking about earlier and take 48 hours, 72 hours to be very precise about the definition of what a peaceful protest looks like on the [00:23:00] campus of Columbia.

And then if the protest restarts, which it, you know, would be completely reasonable for it to do so. It will be held tightly within those boundaries. So the outcome didn’t change. The journey was messy as heck, right? And ended up in property damage and fear, reputational loss, huge endowment loss, students transferring.

You’ve got, you know, now already a bunch of cases of students saying, I’m outta here. I’m moving to another university. The impact is massive. The outcome really didn’t change, but the journey changed all the impact of it, if that makes sense.

Maureen: It does. And I would transfer that to some of the basic things that almost all business owners face.

How do we deal with things like. The COVID crisis and how do we treat people with regard to mandating back to the office? Mandating, do I have to relocate now to be in the same city? How are we gonna deal with ai? This question of [00:24:00] ethics will compound over the next decade, not go away at the end of student protests.

Greg: Oh yeah. That’s one of the reasons why I was so anxious for us to talk about this topic. I think anything we can do to help leaders think about how to approach this essential question of organizational identity and organizational effectiveness and organizational. Operations, right? Like just the work of leading on a day-to-day basis gets so much easier when these elements are in place and when that implied contract with the people in your organization is completely understood.

And they see it consistently adhered to. So, you know, I think doing a good job of engaging your organization when these new situations arise and say, here’s how we’re thinking about it. It gives you the opportunity to then evolve that thinking because you say, I don’t, you know, we haven’t [00:25:00] locked and loaded on this and we’re looking for your point of view, but here’s how we’re thinking about it.

So I look at mandating back to work. I don’t think it’s smart to say we’re gonna mandate back to work. I think it’s smart to say we value trust in our organization and it’s fundamental to who we are as an organization. And we believe that it is difficult to build the levels of trust that we think makes an organization efficient and effective without in-person interaction.

So we think that some meaningful, you know, material level of in-person interaction is fundamental to who we are as an organization. And because of that, we’re gonna continue to expect some pattern of behavior. Details to follow around in-person interaction that we think engenders trust and efficiency in the organization that allows us to continue to run, lean, serve our customers well, and trust each other without a lot of inspection.

Maureen: Beautiful. [00:26:00]

Greg: I’m not saying that’s a perfect policy, but I could imagine that being a policy that a, an employee can think through and go, that works for me, or That doesn’t work for me, versus just, I’m gonna mandate back to work and I’m not gonna tell you why in a thoughtful way. I mean, of course you could say, well, you know, we think it’s important, eh, eh, you gotta say more.

People are smart and you gotta say more and you’ve gotta really give it some texture so people can process it and go, okay, that tracks, and I’m willing to make that trade off, or, I respect it. But I’m gonna move on. And you want ’em to move on. If they don’t really believe it and they’re not gonna adhere, you want ’em out of there.

Maureen: Let’s use Columbia as an example. You’re saying we imagine that this university president will be invited to exit new CEO comes in, or new president or whatever the title is. What if their values are different? How do you integrate? Different values. It’s one thing when you’re on the heels of a crisis, but say you get [00:27:00] hired to run an organization of some size, they have a culture and pattern and values, and those aren’t your values, and the board brought you in with an understanding of you having different values.

How does that look?

Greg: Step number one, the chairman of the board needs to be communicating that to the organization. If you think about a longstanding company or a longstanding organization like a university, and you believe that the company’s values are no longer serving it well and serving its customers well then as a board, you interview for somebody who espouses a set of values that you think would serve the organization better.

You gotta tell the organization as a board before you bring that person on board and say specifically, this is one of the reasons we picked this person. Otherwise you’re gonna make that CEO or President’s job way harder. Potentially set them up to fail, right? Is the organization [00:28:00] goes into immune mode.

’cause these people have a social contract with the company. And if you’re saying we’re changing that social contract, you better talk about it. And you better talk about why you don’t think it serves the organization anymore and be explicit about what you interviewed for. Otherwise, you’re just setting up that CEO to impale themselves on the organization because the employees are gonna rebel.

I experienced that in a small way when I went to work at uh, nationwide Insurance. And again, I’m not picking on Nationwide’s culture in any way, but Nationwide has a very distinct culture. They hire outside people often with the premise that, you know, we want you to come in and help change the organization.

And what you find out when you join an organization with deeply held values in a strong culture like Nationwide, is that they don’t actually want you to change the culture. They don’t want you to change the company. They want you to bring your intellectual capability and your leadership to bear in a meaningful way.

But if you can’t [00:29:00] get along, which is fundamental in that culture, they’ll move you out. And the statistics beared out. Uh, you know, it’s been a number of years now, but when I left Nationwide. The retention rate of people that were brought in at the VP level after four years was under 25%.

Maureen: When I was at Accenture, I joined with the experienced hire experiment.

Most people joined the firm straight outta college, grow through the firm. As you know, I came in as a senior manager along with a whole crop of people who came in at senior manager, associate vice president level. It was a very difficult process because how experienced hires worked was very different than people who grew up in the firm.

I don’t know the stats, but the attrition rate was also very high.

Greg: That can be avoided if you are explicit with your organization about your intention to introduce change

Maureen: and introduce the systems that reward and disincentivize some [00:30:00] behaviors. Because I think they were explicit that they wanted this, but the distance from we say we want this to making it work is a long trip in some cases.

Greg: Yeah, and I think in that particular case, you’ve got a highly decentralized organization. It’s, I think, very, very difficult to instantiate. Change consistently inside of what was essentially a partnership.

Maureen: Mm-hmm.

Greg: Where you’ve got lots of bosses and you know, they can agree on some basic things. But I mean, at the end of the day, Arthur Anderson split from Anderson Consulting, which is now Accenture based on a perceived violation of the underlying values of the firm.

It was fundamental to that split and uh, I think at the end of the day, ended up doing grave damage. The firm itself didn’t even survive it. Yeah, we could dumb it down and say it’s only because of how they handled the Enron account, but it’s not that simple. You know, maybe a topic for another day. We can kind of unpack that one.[00:31:00]

But why was it that that team did things that they should never have done that put the firm at risk? And that gets back to the point that you’re making, right? It was a fundamental shift in what was important to the firm that didn’t get talked about explicitly, didn’t get dealt with explicitly, and so people did the wrong thing and it took down the company.

Maureen: And it’s a good example to end on that, the consequences for. Having a clear ethical framework following it and creating a disincentive to violate the ethics in some cases is live or die for the company. It’s not just the public black eye of what’s happening at Columbia. ’cause my assumption is they’ll continue as a university.

They may go through some difficulty, but we won’t be talking about that university that used to be known as Columbia. Where we do talk about that firm that used to be known as Arthur Anderson.

Greg: You’re right, and it does get us back to the very beginning where I was talking about the fact that a values [00:32:00] framework that’s explicit and understood, and then ethical behavior tied to that moral framework that is consistently modeled over time can in fact be an existential element of an organization and if it gets violated.

Sufficiently enough, deeply enough, particularly when it involves legal issues, it can absolutely end an organization and has in the last 10 years. You could point to, you know, multiple examples where a company ran afoul of their own espoused moral framework to the degree that the organization no longer exists.

Maureen: And the upside of having one is not just I get to stay in business. We identify what we stand for. We attract the right people, we attract the right customers. My clients know what to expect from me. My employees know what to expect from me. When we make a change, which we do, we discuss it as a group, and everyone won’t like every decision we make, but they will understand the rationale and be able to live with every [00:33:00] decision we make.

Or they will choose to exit in some cases.

Greg: You don’t want to be attractive to everybody, then you’re not distinct, and it’s very difficult to operate an efficient, effective organization with no distinction. You want to be a place that certain type of people want to work and certain other type of people don’t want to work.

You want to be a place that attracts a certain type of customer with a certain set of values and doesn’t attract others. As you can tell, I’m pretty passionate on this topic. I think it’s so important, and I think as you pointed out, we live in a world with. An increasing pace of new moral hazards coming at us.

Now, more than ever, this underlying component of the framework, this pillar of an organization’s identity needs to be talked about, needs to be practiced, needs to be taught, needs to be understood.

Maureen: And I would add to that list openly, grappled with.

Greg: Absolutely,

Maureen: Greg. Thank you. And for our listeners who haven’t already [00:34:00] followed you, where do they find out more about you and your new company?

Greg: I’m on LinkedIn. I’m doing advisory work on a regular basis, and this particular topic is one that I’m going to be spending more time talking about because I think it’s so fundamental and essential. So I’ll be releasing content like this and others to help leaders grapple with these questions of fundamental identity for their organization and for themselves as leaders.

Maureen: Thank you for continuing to share your insight and wisdom with our listeners. I think it’s crucial at this point in time.

Greg: As always, Maureen, it’s a pleasure to be with you and I really appreciate the opportunity to have these rich dialogues and hopefully in a way that creates a real texture for people, not just a soundbite.