A common problem with old school managers is that they approach ethics is that as long as they are not clubbing baby seals or employing 12 year old workers that they are ethical.

Ethics in organizations moves far beyond this however. It means holding value in your employees and constantly advancing the organization for future viability among other things. I see many businesses and organizations missing these two main components of organizational ethics. If you read my last post about conflict and unwillingness to change then you will see an example of an organization that holds no value in their employees and is completely unwilling to change.

So what does this do to an organization?

First you lose any talented employees. The untalented ones will stay, but talented employees are in demand and constantly seek to expand their skills. If a job does not provide them with an outlet to exercise the skills that they have then they are likely to simply look for a place that will allow them to. Over time an organization is stuck with “campers”, which are employees who only do exactly what is needed to get a weekly paycheck and want to hang on to a job as long as possible to prevent them from having to learn new skills or go above and beyond to retain their job.

Secondly an unwillingness to change or advance the organization decreases the future viability. All of us know of an organization or business that became good at what they do and continued to just maintain throughout their existence. What happens is that organizations like this tend to get left behind, and eventually their worth fullness runs out. Without a conscious effort to advance the organization and stay on top of trends an organization is doomed to fail. This is unethical to both the employees, who will eventually face layoffs and closings, as well as any stakeholders in the organization who are tax payers or donors who have invested, board members, supporting industries, organizations that rely on your services. These are the people, not typically the management, are who pay for this particular unethical form.

The real problem is that these failures in companies who are not constantly aware typically do not show up until it is far too late in the process to turn things around.