Ethical Challenges Danger Zones

Ethical challenges confront every manager, business and stakeholder. Leaders often make unconsciously bad decisions are made through biases and faults in judgment. To make informed and ethical decisions we can use the same guidelines in general decision-making. The framework for ethical decision-making includes a focus on quality, breadth and honesty.

To improve the quality of decisions, managers must first collect data and facts to make well informed decisions. This includes all information and no one piece should be overlooked. Potential risks and accurately judging risks is a very important part of maintaining quality. Other principles that influence quality of a decision are ethnocentrism, stereotypes and faulty perceptions of causes.

Ethnocentrism is the view that your own way of doing activities is better and others are worse. This is a very stubborn approach and almost always does more harm than good when making decisions. Leaders who depend on stereotypes rather than facts are more likely to make unfair, ill-informed and overall, bad decisions. A perception of causes can also be a detriment to the ethical decision-making process. To accurately determine the actual cause of an event a manager must focus on people and hold people responsible for their actions. To avoid quality danger zones managers should use quantitative processes, have explicit corporate policies and dig deep for the root of each problem.  

Breadth of a decision is the impact a decision makes to all stakeholders. Making an ethical decision requires a manager to analyze the implications for each person involved in the outcome. The consequences to an action are often times difficult to estimate so a manager must keep an open mind. Simplifying consequences can negatively affect the breadth of a decision and creates an unrealistic viewpoint.

The first way managers simplify consequences is through ignoring low-probability events by overlooking the miniscule possibility of something bad happening. To make an ethical decision, each probability and risk should be appropriately considered. Ignoring that the public may “find out” is when a business does not consider society as a stakeholder. To avoid this a manager can be transparent and consider the public’s reaction to each decision made. The final way of simplifying consequences is discounting the future, which is basically not considering future consequences. To avoid breadth danger zones, leadership can compile a list of potential stakeholders, evaluate stakeholder perspective, be appropriately transparent and consider future consequences.