Moral Leadership is the Cure for Today's Toxic Managers

Though we are living in a world that?advocates emotional intelligence and leading with empathy, there remain many toxic leaders who are solely out for themselves and who do great harm to their workplaces without regard for the consequences. Can a healthy dose of morality overcome an unrelenting pattern of toxicity?

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the prevalence of toxic leaders in business. It seems that the next headline about a failing leader is rarely far away, with the list of leaders caught trying to con the public only getting longer.?Think of Silicon Valley Bank’s Greg Becker, Crypto-King Sam Bankman-Fried, Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes, Uber’s Travis Kalanick, and We Work’s Adam Neumann.?

Whether it’s news of the latest scandal, inappropriate behavior in the workplace, or an outright lack of accountability of those in charge, many of today’s leaders continue to exhibit a shocking lack of moral compass and values.

In my book, True North: Emerging Leader Edition, my co-author Zach Clayton and I write about the risk of losing your way as a leader, outlining 5 archetypes of leadership that can happen when you lead without your True North. See the figure below for a quick summary.

All of which begs the question: why do leaders, who were once darlings of their respective fields, fall from grace and lose their way? And, even in cases where there may be some good intent, how can leaders bridge the disconnect between their intentions and their toxic consequences??

As Zach Clayton and I explore in True North: Emerging Leader Edition , when you lose sight of your values and moral principles, you begin the ethical drift which can culminate in behavior that is universally condemned and destroys your reputation. Although it is relatively easy to rebound from a business failure, it is considerably harder to recover from a character failure. The seeds of such disaster are sown when we haven’t discovered our True North by exploring our life story, addressing our crucibles, and understanding our motivations. As a consequence, we place too much emphasis on external measures of success or fame and wind up being trapped by them.?

What can you do to ensure this does not happen to you? Take time for a personal morality check: What principles do you stand for? What are your most important values? What ethical boundaries would you never breach?

Moral leadership

In today’s era, there is a crying need for moral leaders. Think of Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Winston Churchill, and Martin Luther King, Jr. as great moral leaders. They set a standard that few of us believe we can achieve. Yet the virtues they demonstrated are within our grasp.

The need for moral leaders is not a new phenomenon. In 342-326 BC, Aristotle postulated three qualities of great communicators: logos, ethos, and pathos. While logic and empathy are required characteristics of today’s leaders, what is often missing is ethos, or ethics and morality.?

As a leader, you can be a brilliant person possessing a high EQ (or emotional intelligence), but without a moral compass, you will ultimately lose your way. Today we see this happening in real-time to Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, two of the greatest innovators of our era.?

This view is paralleled by a more contemporary thinker, LRN Founder Dov Seidman, a leading advocate for moral leaders. Seidman observes that?“Leadership is how leaders touch hearts, not just minds, how they enlist others in a shared and significant endeavor and create the conditions where everyone can contribute their fullest talent and realize their deepest humanity.”?

What defines moral leaders?

Ask yourself, are you a moral leader? Here are 5 defining characteristics of moral leaders that you may recognize in yourself or others:?

1. Moral leaders are driven by purpose and animated by patience as they wrestle with issues of right and wrong.?
2. They pursue causes that inspire them with an energizing life force, giving them the courage to take on difficult challenges.?
3. They are introspective and cultivate high levels of self-awareness and emotional intelligence.
4. Moral leadership doesn’t require religious faith, although many moral leaders are inspired by religion and spirituality.?
5. Moral authority must be earned by who you are and how you lead.??

To this, I would add that in making decisions, moral considerations must come first for moral leaders, irrespective of the negative consequences they may face.

Becoming a moral leader requires having a clear sense of your values. These values become the standards of behavior that shape your True North, derived from your beliefs and convictions.?With one exception, there is no right set of values. One person may value kindness. Another person may value excellence. Only you can decide what your most deeply held values are. When you do, you will be able to align with people and organizations that share similar values; a worthy skill that will help you find personal fulfillment as you pursue professional growth.

The exception is integrity. Without integrity, you cannot build trust with people, nor will you be able to make moral decisions. Upholding your values requires moral courage by taking action for moral reasons despite the potential for adverse consequences.

Ethical boundaries

To be a truly moral leader, you also need to establish ethical boundaries. If moral values inform the positive principles you live by, ethical boundaries set absolute limits on your actions.?

You will encounter many gray areas in life and work, especially when it comes to your morality and ethical conduct as a leader. The line between “right” and “wrong” can easily blur. I encourage you to let your True North, based on your moral compass, guide your decisions. With the right guardrails in place, you can avoid the types of ethical lapses that cause derailing as a leader.

My moral compass kept me in check?

In my mid-career, I made the decision to leave a promising career at Honeywell to join Medtronic – in large part because I was inspired by its mission and values. In my first year as president, I appointed a very talented executive as president of Medtronic Europe. At the time he was running a subsidiary company we had acquired four years earlier. Six months after his appointment our general counsel came to my office along with our chief auditor. They showed me that this person had been running a bribery fund on behalf of Italian physicians for more than two decades.

As it turned out, terminating this practice and firing him was the easy part. We decided to make a public release about what had happened, which caused a great deal of controversy. Next, we turned all the information over to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as we may have violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). (The SEC later said we were not in violation, in part because we had discovered the practice and disclosed it.) Even harder for me was acknowledging to Medtronic’s executive committee and the board of directors that I had made a grievous error in appointing him without fully checking out his values and behaviors.

Lesson learned.

As a result, we did a thorough study of all our international business practices and found several other deviations that caused me to replace the entire leadership of our international business with leaders whose integrity was beyond reproach.

Are you leading with morality? Here are a few practical suggestions to continue your development:

1. Write down your values and your ethical principles. What is the moral compass that guides your actions and your decisions?
2. Then describe the most difficult ethical dilemma you are currently facing and chronicle the “least generous” interpretation of your actions.?
3. Next project forward a decade and assume the worst: you have derailed in a major moral failure. Envision the situation in which you could lose your way.?Now, what guardrails will you put in place to ensure this could not happen to you?

All the best on your journey,

Bill George