Stone the Devil ?

I'm intrigued no less by certain turn of events the last couple of days and it has forced me to ask certain questions of myself.

What is the moral compass of a Team ? How much is each team member responsible for upholding the highest ethical standards ? What kind of help his organization can provide if he is facing a moment of truth and he is tending to err on the wrong side ? How do you prevent the event to happen in the first place ?

On the other hand , I tend to ask myself about the moral compass of Leaders . Two leaders in as disparate fields as Sports and Social Media have succumbed to their most basic instincts and are being conveniently labelled as cheats. Their fall from grace comes at the backdrop of tougher regulatory norms than ever before, global debates on cyber security and most likely the strictest internal guidelines and processes in both organizations, Cricket Australia and Facebook .

We can be sure M/s Smith and Zuckerberg , both, would have been part of scores of sermonizing workshops on ethics (sportive and corporate), but still they could not apply those controls on themselves.

The Australia cricket captain and the Facebook CEO would have their reasons for the alleged misdemeanor, but I would attribute them to the following reasons :

a. Organizational pressure to succeed at all costs. (Haven't seen a organization which celebrates losing yet and those that do only do lip service. )

b. No support system (counselling) to which a conscientious employee can reach out to in case he is under pressure to engage in unethical practices.

c. Treating the person responsible as the Devil incarnate and demonizing the behavior to such an extent that has a such a person been ever been able to resurrect his career. Steve Smith and Mark Zuckerberg however will be clear anomalies , I can bet on that.

d. The approach firms adopt in making employees follow the rule book is based more out of fear of consequences than on desire to make holistic changes in their organization's ethos.