Braintrust Query: How can we improve the ethics of HOW we get results, over getting results?
At a recent leadership summit conducted by The Solderquist Center for Leadership and Ethics, attendees heard an earful about the decline in leadership ethics across corporate America, with especially troubling insight into tomorrow's leaders.
The next generation will come with the Generation Y mindset, driven by some very strong cynicism around Big Corporation leadership and their self-serving decision making over the best interests of their employees and their shareholders. There are plenty of examples that have driven the cynicism, including watching friends and parents get downsized/right sized out of work, the meltdowns of Enron, MCI, Worldcom, etc., as well as the continued steady stream of fat CEO compensation and parachute packages.
Five years after Sarbanes-Oxley was supposed to restore the public's faith in corporate America, some recent statistics bear out that younger Generation Y workers are both disengaged and distrustful of corporate leaders.
According to respondents from KPMG's 2005/2006 Integrity survey (covering 4,056 U.S. employees across all levels of job responsibilities):
- Fifty-seven percent feel pressure to do "whatever it takes" to meet business targets;
- Fifty-two percent believe that their code of conduct is not taken seriously;
- Forty-nine percent believe they will be rewarded for results, and not the means used to achieve them;
- Forty-seven percent believe policies and procedures are easy to bypass or override.
Although nearly two thirds of employees believed that their leaders served as positive role models for their organizations, roughly half suggested a lack of confidence that their CEOs knew about behaviors further down in the organization. While 70 percent agreed that their CEOs would respond appropriately to ethical matters brought to their attention, nearly half suggested a lack of confidence that their leaders would be approachable if employees had ethics concerns.
The new generation of workers are showing that they will quickly move on from one career path to another if they feel they can personally advance their growth and compensation agendas, or if they feel the slightest mistrust in the leadership of the organization where they currently work. Turnover and "talent replacement" are at unprecedented levels, creating major barriers in fulfilling the three- to five-year strategic plans for growth of many major corporations in the U.S.
So much for stability.
Discussion Questions: What should universities and corporations do to reinforce the critical importance of business ethics in tomorrow's leaders? What key steps can be taken to reinforce the importance of how you get results versus simply getting results that drive a company's stock value and personal gains?