Stick to Your Ethics - Always

Stick to Your Ethics—Always

As you strive to maintain an ethical standard of conduct, remember that part of being ethical is being consistent. Unethical people, according to publisher Earl Graves, tend to shade a situation for a particular audience—altering or changing their story or their spin on it. If you adopt that approach, you will eventually get caught and your career will flame out. Graves puts it this way: "You can wake me up in the middle of the night, and what you heard this afternoon is what you are going to hear tonight. I am not going to feed you bull. I don't have to remember the second time what I told you the first time because it is going to be the same. You can put that in your book." That is the essence of true professional ethics

A strange note on the ethics of the invincible executive. It seems that top professionals can get away with a lot more in their personal lives than they can in their professional lives. Charismatic leaders ranging from former President Clinton to Rudolph Guiliani, to Jack Welch and the CEOs of several Fortune 500 companies, have survived professionally despite past drug use, extramarital affairs, and the like. While holding your standards of personal conduct to the same level as your standard of professional conduct is very desirable, it quite frankly—and bizarrely—does not seem to be an absolute prerequisite to long-term success. Most invincible executives respect the privacy of others because they expect others to do the same for them. They tolerate personal transgressions—especially those in the distant past—as long as the actions in question have not impacted professional performance or created a legal risk at the office.

In fact, those who try to impose personal moral standards in a professional context are often the most vulnerable to attack. Who can forget the hypocrisy of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich when he criticized President Clinton's personal morals, all the while having an affair with a staffer? Invincible executives seem to be exceedingly careful not to criticize the personal lives of others. If they do and are clean themselves, they look like moralistic dogooders; if they criticize others while hiding their own transgressions, they are setting themselves up for a catastrophic fall.