In you career, you will have to deal with many ethical issues. What are likely to be the most challenging and what is your plan for developing the competencies you will need to handle those issues effectively?
First, ethical issues should be distinguished from their false brothers. For example, when you receive change in the supermarket and the lady in charge gives you 20 instead of 10 by mistake – it is not an ethical issue. You should return the money.
Second, recently I came across a very interesting ethical issue which in the end resulted in this post.
Imagine, that you are a manager of the team. Your boss comes to you one day, closes the door and says: “Tell anyone and you’ll be fired. We gonna outsource your whole department to a cheap faraway country. We need half a year to do that and full support from the current team. After that we gonna fire them all, apart from you, of course. You will be promoted. But we need to do this transition quickly and effectively. This will save us a billion zillion dollars”.
What are you gonna do?
I do not know the right way to respond. Maybe you should be loyal to The Company. After all, they pay for your heart, soul and mortgage. And your team members are big boys and they should already know that there is no such word as “fair”. As a second thought maybe your boss is just testing how loyal you are?
To hell with the loyalty then.
I will go to my team the same very day and tell them everything. Something like:
“Guys, this company neither loves us, nor respects us. We have to pass our duties to guys in cheap faraway country and then say goodbye. This is bad, bad, really bad news and I understand your shock. But let’s look at it another way. It won’t come to you as a surprise-surprise two week’s notice. We have half a year to polish our CVs, and I will give you all good references, and we will probably receive a nice paycheck in the end”.
OK, let’s make the problem a little bit difficult.
The situation is the same. But you do not like the team you lead. They are arrogant, lazy and overpaid. And the people from the cheap faraway country are good workers and will benefit very much from your firm’s investment into their economy.
Will your decision change?
Nope. I will do the same thing not because I love my team and view them as “my guys”, but because I feel it is the right thing to do. I am not in place to judge if the guys are overpaid: we have a market, aren’t we? They can be a bad team, but they are my team. And maybe I am a bad leader if I have (or agreed to have) such a team. And my people will still face problems with paying loans on time, searching for a job, dealing with their undermined egos, etc. My people are more important than my company.
Good. You treat a team as if they were your family. So let’s make your choice tougher.
You’re not a boss. You are a consultant. Your firm has signed a contract and you have signed non-disclosure agreement. You will help us make the transition and promise to keep our purposes secret.
Yes, this is tough. I cannot say “I won’t work on this project” - someone has to do the job. I cannot tell the people, because it is not really my business. I cannot make their life better in any way. And I cannot be sure that they won’t go straight to their boss – and then my firm gonna lose a billion zillion dollars they obviously promised seducing it to carry out this contract. The only way I see is guerilla warfare. I might begin asking question like: “What do you think your company gonna do after this transition?”, “What have they done previously in such situations?”, and even “Have you looked at the job market recently?” If they are smart they will understand. If not, well, at least I tried.
There is no easy answer to an ethical question. (If your answer was “Just get up and get out of their”, imagine that your mom needs an expensive operation and you need the money badly. Who would you choose: your team or your mom?) Your answer might be completely different from mine.
I will just do what I feel is right. Right to how I feel, how I was brought up, in what I believe…
