The key to sorting through ethical dilemmas is to form a triangle

You can deal more effectively with ethical dilemmas if you think of the tensions as forming a triangle, consultant Eric Pliner says. On one side is personal morality, on another is societal ethics and on the third side is the responsibilities of your role at work.

“Conflict within or among any side(s) of the triangle can be better understood and resolved by relying on the other dimensions,” he writes in his book Difficult Decisions.

Ethical conflicts will feel like they are deep within you. They dig, as he says, at “some raw aspect of our humanity.” But often they are stoked by others: colleagues, key stakeholders, the organization or the cultures and society we live in. The triangle model illuminates the full dimensions of your struggle.

Morals are about what we deem to be right or wrong. They define what we won’t stand for. They are developed over time. To get a better grasp of your personal moral standards, he recommends reflecting on moments where you witnessed, experienced or participated in something that you intuitively understood as wrong.

Ethics refers to what is considered collectively acceptable. “If morals are about right and wrong and laws are about what is allowed and what’s not allowed, ethics are shared views of what’s good and what’s bad,” he notes. Ethics are contextually dependent and are therefore not uniform. You experience that, for example, when you cross a border and run into different interpretations of ethics. Ethics also change over time.

A role – and its responsibilities – exists in relationship to other people. He distinguishes a role from a job: “A job has requirements; a role has requirements and interpersonal dynamics.” Like an actor, your role requires you to convey a message when you are on stage before others and can inspire an emotional reaction. Understanding your role and its requirements demands that you know to whom you are obligated, whose interests you must represent and what the dynamics are among the various parties.

At its simplest, the triangle enables use of the third dimension as a tiebreaker when two other elements are clashing. “Your personal beliefs don’t match with the responsibilities of your role? Well, what does your ethical context say is helpful or harmful?” he writes.

Sometimes the third dimension enables reconciliation of the conflict. Sometimes it allows for illumination of the underlying conflict and enables you to choose between the opposing sides. In other situations, it doesn’t reveal the best choice but explains the broader context and helps you to understand yourself better.

In Teaching the Dinosaur to Dance, Donna Kennedy-Glans, a former member of Alberta’s legislative assembly, offers another tool, A Measure of Integrity, designed to help organizations define and integrate their core values. For example, the organization may talk about sustainability, but how deep is its commitment to regulatory compliance, or to regeneration and restoration, if those factors are relevant?

Individually, particularly if you hold a leadership role, you must decide how to promote those values and how to walk the talk. It’s important, she stresses, to understand the organization’s reasons for committing to a value and where on the scale of possible commitment it has decided on.

She notes that unless you are a sole proprietor it’s unlikely the integrity purpose of your employer will align perfectly with your personal values. “If this tension is healthy - and open for dialogue - it can stimulate personal and/or organizational growth,” she says. But when enterprise integrity and personal integrity are out of whack, it can also lead you to become frustrated and disengaged.

She urges you to delineate your organization’s values, the scale of the commitment, the reasons for the commitment, and how you can act in accordance with it. The triangle may be helpful in such an exercise or when some value collision unexpectedly erupts.

Quick hits

• The longer you do something, the more you will be asked “what keeps you motivated?,” observes Basecamp co-founder Jason Fried. The assumption is that there’s a goal-based answer, something you are striving for. But he usually is motivated by the doing itself: “I keep doing something because I like doing something.”
• When you come to a gathering where people are chatting in groups, look to join a cluster with an uneven number of people – three, five or seven, for example. The networking specialists at Shepa Learning Co. in their newsletter point to research showing when there’s an odd number of people, someone is not a real part of the conversation and will be looking for a conversational partner.
• The last minute is not a buffer zone, nor is it the moment to double-check your work, says entrepreneur Seth Godin. The last minute should simply be sixty seconds to enjoy and to remind yourself that you successfully planned ahead.
• The will to win is wasted if it is directed toward trivial affairs, points out Atomic Habits author James Clear.

Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.