Company culture is set at the highest levels of an organization. If, in a large company, Board Members declare support for innovative initiatives but do not espouse the values contained within these initiatives, that cultural shift will not occur – it is the role of a leader to define what is acceptable, what is not, and what that organizations “culture” is. Ethical leadership is the integration of progressive, inclusive values into leadership techniques and initiatives (PSU, 2013). If done correctly, ethical leadership produces an inclusive, diverse, innovative organizational culture that inspires change, growth, and productivity. However, if ethical leadership is not present, even if ethical, progressive initiatives are introduced, cultural change will not develop, and these initiatives will be less successful. Unfortunately, I have witnessed this in my own company.
On the surface, we’ve implemented at least a dozen initiatives geared towards creating diversity, inclusiveness, and investment in human capital in the past five years. Many of these are geared towards getting women additional experience, mentors, and increased exposure to networking opportunities. We have lectures on branding, workshops on career management, and have an entire center dedicated to promoting employee skills in career management. Yet, diversity and inclusiveness are not part of our culture. Diversity and inclusive behaviors are different – diversity is quantitative, how many of this kind of employee do you have, at what level; while inclusiveness is how much this diversity is actively incorporated and culturally accepted in the company. One might have great diversity numbers, but poor inclusion. Secretary pools are a great example of this phenomenon – a company that has a large number of secretaries who are female, but a small number of managers who are female in the same department will look like they have great diversity. If those women are not able to rise out of the secretarial pool or gain opportunity to grow as employees, you do not have inclusion. Those women are limited, for cultural or societal reasons.
This happens in our company. I worked on a project to gear career development opportunities towards our Admin population at the executive level – pretty much the only admins we have. For a huge global company, we keep this kind of employee to a surprising minimum. We generally have a very egalitarian attitude towards employee equality – we do not use titles or last names in meetings, rank is less important than accomplishment, and we utilize an integrated, company-wide team structure. However, we manage to be incredibly sexist, in equally incredible, subtle ways. For example, we had one fellow, a vice president (we have many), say to us, “She’s an admin, what else would she do? Why does she need training?” The short answer, in this gentleman’s case, is that she needs training because she does nearly all of his paperwork, fields his calls, arranges his meetings, tells him what he needs to do, and, generally speaking (as most admins do), tells him how to do his job in a wonderfully polite, effective way. So, typical executive level admin, right? In our company, absolutely. Almost all of them fulfill a role like this, and, as such, our productivity would benefit from training these ladies better, providing them access to career development sources, and laying out a clear, concise promotion, raise, and position chart for them. That, of course, was what the project was all about. Needless to say, we met a lot of resistance. As a former admin, I found this to be appalling – we go on and on for ages about how we want to promote early talent and women in our company, innovate through diversity, and utilize our global organization to better meet the needs of our customers. Well, in light of this kind of behavior, that just looks like a bunch of lies.
Progressiveness is not scaring off an extremely effective executive, among other things. In this situation, ethical leadership at the upper levels of management would have prevented this kind of sexism – it isn’t ethical to treat others in a derogatory, discriminatory way just because it’s your perception of their “group.” It is ethical to actively pursue an objective, inclusive viewpoint that is not based on negative assumptions. Leadership methods that do not include ethical behaviors and attitudes will not be as effective at cultural change as those that do.
Pennsylvania State University. (2013). Lesson 14: Ethics and Leadership. Psychology 485: Leadership in Work Settings. As obtained from https://courses.worldcampus.psu.edu/su13/psych485/002/content/14_lesson/printlesson.html