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Article Excerpt
Dov L. Seidman is the founder, chairman and chief executive officer of LRN. LRN was founded in 1994 as a privately-held company that provides companies of all sizes an integrated set of applications and services that help companies foster and fortify enduring, ethical corporate cultures that encourage self-regulation based on shared values, rather than externally-imposed rules. With uncompromising commitment to this mission and vision, Mr. Seidman has successfully grown an organization that is having a significant impact on the ways employees and management behave in the workplace. An innovator and leader in ethics and compliance management and corporate governance solutions, LRN works with more than 200 organizations many of which are the world's most successful companies, including 3M, Viacom, DuPont, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Raytheon, The Dow Chemical Company, Tyco, and United Technologies Corporation. Our interview was conducted on March 8, 2006, just before the Enron trial commenced.
Ken Thompson: Part of my goal is to reframe the way people think and act regarding ethics training and education. You are in a unique position to tell us how business views and how you view the traditional ethics training.
Dov Seidman: I was struck that you used the word "reframe." It is essential to reframe and re-contextualize how we look at what people conventionally think is ethics training. Frankly, the minute a company says, "we need to train our people on ethics," they start going down the wrong road.
Most people will tell you that they are more ethical than their neighbor is, certainly more ethical than their colleagues are, and in many cases, more ethical than their boss. Most adults think they already have developed a tested ethical compass based on the right values. It is innate human nature to believe that we can figure out the difference between right and wrong. People do not want to be trained in something they already know--particularly if the mandate for training comes in a response to what they perceive, as somebody else's ethical failing.
Besides, training is typically effective for basic, rudimentary endeavors and business processes. Training is moreover thought of as a distraction--something you do because you have to, but that takes away time from your "real" work. As children, we had training wheels on our bikes to support us before we could ride on our own. Telling people that you would like to train them on ethics engenders cynicism because people believe they already have good ethics. People say, "Before you train me, why don't you train the management team? They are the ones who seem to need it most."
However, if you reframe, re-contextualize and engage the very people who think that they are already ethical, you get a different reaction. Most would like some continuing education and skill development on how to recognize and become more effective at resolving sensitive conflicts, how to wrestle with and struggle with dilemmas, how to write thoughtful and careful e-mails. This is increasingly important in the context of global business. You can't always assume from an e-mail address if the recipient is a man or woman. By reframing the issue of training, those same people who said "no" to training on ethics, affirmatively embrace education because they see how it can make them more successful on the job and beyond.
Framing is the crux of the matter. If you get it right at the beginning, you have a chance. If you get it wrong at the beginning, people will shut down and tune out. They will think the company is just trying to check a box, cover itself by requiring a 35-minute online training class. Therefore, in the spirit of framing, I reject training and embrace the higher burden of real education in ethics, which is much more complex, nuanced and more difficult to accomplish. To truly educate, you have to adopt a different pedagogical approach. You have to do more than just make people aware of what issues they might face on the job. You need to transcend awareness training to true skills development, thought processes and reasoning abilities. It is about a way of reasoning, it is about a way of making ethical decisions, it is about inspiring more respectful, appropriate conduct.
K.T.: How do you define ethics and how is it different from just complying with the law?
D.S.: I think the distinction is really important. Ethics is all about how we conduct ourselves and make decisions. Ethics are the norms, attitudes, and beliefs having to do with how people treat each other and get along in the environments they find themselves. For example, on the job, you do not need ethics if you are on an island by yourself. Ethics comes in when you find yourself on a team, in a community, at a company. It has to do with how you treat others. How we communicate. How we get along.
Now, in very narrow definition, some people might argue that the Sopranos have good ethics. They have a code of conduct--a code that is based on amoral and in many cases immoral values--but they explicitly adopt this code and understand the consequences of breach. They do what they say and say what they mean. The Sopranos illustrate the literal deadly consequences of allegiance to a code while at the same time being devoid of an ethical and moral compass.
The relationship between values and ethics is essential. What guides these ethical beliefs, norms, attitudes, and practices? I have found that people are not interested in ethics as a noun--as a static field of theoretical and philosophical study. I believe that ethics is an adjective. It should always modify and animate what we do--for example, ethical sales practices, ethical decision-making, and ethical conduct in a meeting. The more we teach and talk about ethics, not as a noun but as an adjective, people connect the how they do things to what they do. Teaching ethics as a noun tends not to be effective.
K.T.: So, you are saying that much of what we do in education when we focus on the history of ethical thought, probably is not perhaps serving our students very well.
D.S.: Yes, we tend to teach ethics as a noun. That has to do with compartmentalization--the silos you see in business. Academia has the same silos to the degree it devotes separate classes to ethics and doesn't integrate, or attach how we do things to what we do. Again, life is not just about what you do, but how you do it. If you do not talk about how in context of what, then people have a tough time applying ethics in practice. However, back to your point, how do you define ethics?
We are a Rule-of-Law society. We put law above man. The greatest companies put their codes of conduct above the capriciousness and proclivities of any CEO. Therefore, the fact that we would rather be governed by law as opposed to another system, I think, is very powerful. The problem is the instrument of law tends to be rules, and as you know, rules are over- and under-inclusive. Laws also reflect a floor, rather than a ceiling on appropriate conduct. Laws and rules are enacted in an effort to create predictability and certainty. Where they have failed to create predictability and certainty, however, is in variation in human conduct.
You need to be 18 to vote. Yet, there are some 25 year olds voting in elections who are not particularly mature. There are 15 year olds who might be very mature with a highly developed sense of civic duty and responsibility who do not get to vote. However, it is an easy election to administer if you show up with a drivers license. We can tell if you get to vote or not. A better election would be for all mature people with a highly developed sense of civic responsibility to show up at the polls. However, it would be nearly impossible to administer. How would you teach maturity? How would you build consensus around what mature behavior is and is not?
But that is in fact where we are at today. When the CEO of Boeing leaves the company and the explanation given is that he brought disrepute to Boeing, it raises the question how do you teach repute versus disrepute? "Repute" or "disrepute" are ethical concepts. What do the other Boeing employees say? "Wow, decisions at the highest levels are being made in the sense of repute?"
It is no different from...
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