Being a leader involves making various decisions that affect the daily functioning and overall trajectory of the business. One of the cornerstones of successful management is being able to take an ethical approach to your decision-making. This, in itself, may well seem quite straightforward. It’s unlikely you got into business to make immoral or damaging choices. Yet, it can still be quite challenging even with the best of intentions.
An important first step is to acknowledge that truly ethical and positive decision-making requires intention and focus. From here, you can empower yourself to put strategies in place that ensure you — and other stakeholders — make choices that reflect company values and influence success.
Build Your Leadership Intelligence
Being a good leader is often about recognizing that you will always have something to learn. This certainly applies to addressing moral dilemmas and making decisions. You’ll gain a better understanding of these situations by the experiences of facing them, making mistakes, and seeing others make errors. But there are also leadership intelligence skills you can develop that empower you to think more ethically and act accordingly.
There are multiple types of business intelligence successful leaders should learn. Creative intelligence is good for innovation, while body-kinesthetic intelligence boosts nonverbal communication skills when dealing with clients. Emotional intelligence helps you to consider the emotions and experiences of others, enabling you to act more empathetically. Logical-mathematical intelligence boosts critical thinking, which is vital for both making balanced decisions and analyzing the potential consequences of actions.
There are certain courses you can take to aid you in building these traits. Many courses related to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) can enhance your logical-mathematical thinking, while there are online classes focused purely on empathetic leadership traits. It’s also important to look for opportunities to gain experiences that enhance these forms of intelligence. For example, community initiatives working with people in need can be great ways to develop emotional intelligence.
Minimize Unethical Bandwidth
As the leader of a business, one of the aspects you have a certain amount of control over is the bandwidth for unethical actions to occur. Many poor behaviours are not necessarily driven by stakeholders being bad or unscrupulous people. There might be factors within their working practices and environment that influence their propensity to use less-than-moral actions. By organizing your operations and company culture in a way that minimizes these influences, you can foster positive decision-making. Let’s look at some of these examples.
Solid bookkeeping practices
Bad bookkeeping practices have significant consequences. Alongside the potential for financial loss and compliance issues, not keeping track of finances can lead to poor decision-making. This could include bad strategic choices based on inaccurate data, but bad bookkeeping could also hint at unethical actions driven by confusion, desperation, or pressure.
Optimizing your company’s bookkeeping practices can minimize the bandwidth for such issues to occur. This could include maintaining a regular bookkeeping schedule and investing in accounting software that keeps accurate records and provides informative reports.
Responsible workload management
Being busy is a good sign for your business. Yet, when your staff are overburdened by unnecessarily excessive duties, they can easily become disengaged. If they see that management isn’t addressing their stress, they might even start to cut corners to hit targets.
This type of unethical decision-making may be avoided by leaders who implement more responsible workload management systems. You may be able to cut down the number of repetitive tasks with automation. Keeping an open dialogue with staff is also important, so they can express issues with workloads without judgment.
Maintain Transparency and Authenticity
Moral dilemmas and decision-making challenges are not best faced behind closed doors.
When actions and choices are kept transparent, there’s often a greater sense of integrity and authenticity in the workplace. Not only can everyone see your actions and what has been factored into decisions, but your knowledge of everyone else’s decisions, priorities, and concerns can help inform your choices.
Maintaining transparency and authenticity begins with talking. Encourage daily open communication with your staff members about what they’re working on, the challenges they’re facing, and how they’re feeling. You and other business leaders should also share your thoughts about the decisions you’re making and what contributes to your choices. This helps to build a culture in which everyone is comfortable communicating honestly.
Another useful element is to document everything. Create processes that ensure all key decisions and actions are documented fully, with a full breakdown of what contributes to different outcomes. It may make it easier on leaders and staff if you create document templates they can complete for this. Making such items openly available on the cloud boosts visibility and allows staff to use the information of previous decisions to help them make better choices. They may even learn from others’ moral or practical mistakes.
Conclusion
Navigating moral dilemmas so you can make ethical and successful decisions benefits from implementing a solid framework of responsible leadership strategies. These include building business intelligence and minimizing the space for poor ethics, among others.
Additionally, aim to make ethics a topic of conversation throughout your business. Encourage workers of all levels to engage with you on the subject, provide their perspectives, and raise what they feel are executive-level missteps. This keeps everyone meaningfully involved in improvements that result in positive decisions.