Corporate Ethics Can’t Be Reduced to Compliance; Harvard Business Review, 4/29/16

Peter Rea, Alan Kolp, Wendy Ritz, Michelle D. Steward, Harvard Business Review; Corporate Ethics Can’t Be Reduced to Compliance:

"So what can a company do to excel ethically? Instead of focusing on the poor choices you want employees to avoid, focus on the positive virtues you want them to exhibit.

Plato emphasized a virtue-based system of ethics 2,400 years ago in his Academy. The philosopher believed that virtues were best encouraged through questions and discussions rather than through statements and proclamations. In other words, we learn ethics in conversation with others.

So rather than getting together with senior managers to craft a “values statement,” corporate leaders should instead foster a series of structured conversations between leaders at all levels and their teams. The goal of these conversations should be to develop a common language to help frame examples of how people live out the organization’s values or classical virtues. This is inherently a social process — virtue is learned, not inherited. Leaders are already teachers of their culture, whether they are aware of it or not, so they should ask themselves how they can teach it better.

Here are questions for each of the seven classical virtues that companies can use to shape these conversations and shift their focus from complying with the rules to excelling ethically."