The Business Ethics Blog

In yesterday’s blog entry, I mentioned that I was attending the Global Ethics Summit in New York. I was there in part because I had been asked to moderate a panel, the topic of which was “Tone from the Middle: Who, Why and How?” It’s a great topic. I’ve long said that there are two competing truisms with regard to creating an ethical culture within any company. One has to do with leadership, and the idea that ethics has to come from the very top of an organization. The other truism has to do with buy-in, and the fact that ethics cannot be imposed from the top down — you have to get buy-in from the folks on the front lines. But too seldom do we talk about the crucial middle layer, the layer of managers that takes orders, and other more subtle signals, from the C-suite, and passes them along. And whether they pass along a clear, urgent signal about ethics or a distorted or weak signal is a huge variable. That middle layer is a crucial conduit, but it is also a crucial source of ethical momentum if and when leadership from the top is lacking.

It’s worth noting that the audience at this event consisted mostly of corporate lawyers working in ethics-and-compliance. The questions I posed to the panel were designed with that audience in mind, but hopefully they are of broader interest. Here are a few of the questions I posed. I welcome your own answers and suggestions in the Comments section.

• Many companies, especially large ones, use web-based tools as an efficient means of conducting ethics training. But such tools may not be ideal for conveying and ensuring the right “tone,” which seems to be something intangible. What concrete steps can a company with thousands of employees take to reach that crucial “middle” layer of the company and make sure that the tone there is right?
• Why have so many firms struggled to reach the “middle”? Is it a lack of appreciation of the importance of the middle? A lack of understanding of how to influence that middle layer, or something else?
• Assuming we can figure out how to influence the “tone at the middle,” the further challenge is to figure out what that tone should be. The short answer, of course, is “an ethical tone.” But what does that mean, more specifically, in practice? What kind of tone should we be looking to establish?
• Having the right “tone at the middle” arguably involves two challenges: one is avoiding a negative tone — a culture of fear, a culture that is afraid to talk about ethics — and the other is promoting a positive tone — a culture in which ethics is talked about openly. Those are perhaps 2 sides of the same coin, and maybe the one has to be avoided before the other can be promoted. Which part of that is likely to be more challenging?
• One of the problems with relying on tone at the top is that the top can be pretty unstable. The average tenure of a CEO these days is something like 3 or 4 years. Is the relative stability at the middle of an organization part of what makes the tone at the middle so important?
• In my own blogging, teaching, and consulting, I sometimes meet resistance to the use of the word “ethics” (as opposed to “corporate citizenship” or “CSR” or “integrity,” for example) because for some people the word “ethics” immediately makes people think of wrongdoing. Is finding the right language to talk about “doing the right thing” a challenge?