Episode 96: Morals and Ethics - What are They and How They Affect Nonprofit Organizations

Welcome to another edition of "Around with Randall" your weekly podcast making your non-profit more effective for your community. And here is your host, the CEO and Founder of Hallett Philanthropy, Randall Hallett.

Thank you again for joining me, Randall, on "Around with Randall." Today we talk a little bit in our adventure in growth and in the nonprofit world about ethics and morals. Nothing really has been happened in my life that would indicate that this was a necessity in terms of discussion and conversation, but there have been just tangentially some things that kind of ran, I ran into, that made me think more about this and I thought it might be an interesting conversation to figure out how and what ethic and ethics and morals mean to us. And most importantly within your organization. Why they're important and what you can do to elevate this conversation.

So let's, I guess, start from the very beginning. What are ethics and morals? Well if we start with ethics are the things that societally, we as a group, a community, an association whatever the, whatever your however you triangulate society in this particular context. They set up kind of the rules. What are the things that we are going to be okay with and those become ethical?

Morals are more internal. They're driven by, certainly, outside effects. The way you're raised your religious beliefs possibly, or even what the community thinks, but they're internal decisions.

Ethics come from some of the base words in our ancient greek, latin. So ethos, meaning character. Morals is from the latin word mos, meaning customs. And so when we talk about this we talk about it from the standpoint of ethics being the rules that govern our organization, or our community, or whatever group of people and morals are the the principles or habits that we choose to make right or wrong. Internally sometimes people consider them the same, and I'll give you an example of where you can differentiate them, and in some ways this, in my past it seems pretty relevant. If you are in law school you take criminal law and one of the things you spend a lot of time in criminal law talking about, and then it's kind of added into in terms of of various other classes like constitutional and other things, but is this idea of a defense attorney.

You're, as a defense attorney your morals, if you're defending someone who is accused of murder, your morals say that murder is wrong. Universally I think we all agree upon that, but the law and the genius of it is that the ethics of, or the canons of law indicate, the need to defend or create an opportunity for a defense for anybody accused of anything. It's accepted that someone will stand in front of a judge or a jury and try to create a scenario or situation that they view their, that the jury or the judge would view their client, the accused murderer, as not being that. Even if they know that it's true or the evidence strongly shows it, they have a ethical responsibility to defend that person. That's what makes our our legal system so brilliant.

But that's hard. I have a friend of mine who i went to law school with who's elevated himself and justifiably so because he's brilliant and just a wonderful human being and an amazing lawyer, but into the hierarchy of the federal judicial system as a defense attorney and a public defender at the federal level. And I've asked him, how do you, how do you balance this morality versus this ethical? The morality of what people are doing in federal cases, selling drugs, terrorism, huge massive crimes. Being ethical enough that you, your morality allows you to defend them, but the ethical nature of your, our profession demands it. They're in conflict. He speaks about that. He can silo them, but he didn't do it, but he believes the system needs that support or that defense is necessary to create a sense of equality. I couldn't do that. He's a... he has a better definition or self-realization, actualization in this area when it comes to ethics and morals than I do. He's an amazing person. Those people that do that, I think of them as just remarkable.

But what are the benefits of this? I mean, that's when we get past the example. We think about our own lives. Why do, why are these things important? Well there's studies out there and we can start to begin to tie some of these benefits, maybe eight of them or so that I thought of that might be helpful to talk about.

The first is that basic needs are satisfied when we have a sense of ethics and morals. Maslow's hierarchy of need talks about this, that safety is that baseline first level, one of them, first-level need. Well safety is built on society having a sense of ethics, or a sense of customs, where we don't hurt each other. So there's lots of different psychology perspectives, but what it does is it satisfies the basic human interest that what we need is to live safely, to live justly.

Number two is that if you're a professional, which we are in the nonprofit world, it's usually part of a professional code. It's the benefits of having it in our instance. It's the donor bill of rights.

Third is the idea of credibility. I think we all strive for credibility that we are viewed by our colleagues, in my case of clients, in maybe your case donors, that we have credibility. And certainly that's true in personal relationships. Credibility allows us to feel as if we have deeper interpersonal relationships because people believe in us. This is the old adage when I think about my children, do as I say not as I do. Or do as I do not as I say. In some ways you almost have to do as I do and do as I say. You want to be uniformly because I want my kids to know that what I say and what I do are the same, and that I have credibility in their eyes.

Maybe a fifth one to consider is, it's a benefit of corporate culture so as we start going out of society, we start moving into our own individual organizations, that you want to be a part of an organization that has a sense of belief and ethics and customs that you can align yourself with. We've talked about this before, what we're learning in this millennial generation is that this concept is more important than it is, in mind, in the generation x or the baby boomer. People are willing to accept less money to work for an organization that fits with their own morals, aligning with the ethics of the organization, the mission, the direction. And they're willing to walk away from those organizations that don't. So it has an immediacy need in terms of what we're dealing with today. It also unites people so I wanted to look at it.

Another example is when you have a group of people that all believe very similar things it's very unifying. Let me give you an example. Very basic. The coming together of our country here in the United States in the 18th century, so you know, anywhere from 1720s up through obviously the Revolutionary War, into the Articles of Confederation, and then the Constitution in 1887, is exactly this. You had 13 different colonies: Massachusetts being much different than Georgia. But they came together under a common sense of ethics, common belief system, taxation without representation. We should be... we don't want to answer to a king. We believe in more of a democratic process. All of those things coalesced in terms of uniting people with vastly different perspectives, and if you think about the times in communication they also didn't know each other. It's not like you would have the news on and be able to see what's going on in Boston if you lived in Georgia or Charleston, South Carolina. You would have no relation. Most people never knew anybody from anywhere else, but we have the same belief system which means we unify together for common cause.

Having strong ethics and morals and aligning them together also helps with our decision making. And frankly, this is a challenge right now in our country is that we have people who believe certain things. We have other people who believe just the opposite and it makes the decision-making process. The ability to get to goals more complicated. This is why congress can't pass anything, because you have two generally groups of people, particularly on the extremes, who have no believe, similar belief system, or at least one they don't recognize or want to recognize or understand. And so that makes it very hard to do things together.

Having common ethics and morals also helps with long-term gains, meaning you can see the long run rather than the short run. You're willing to give up something now to get something bigger later. And if you don't have common ethics and morals it's hard to trust. So you only take into the tactical, the now, and we go back to congress, two parties not able to figure out that they have more in common than they do different. And as a result they're not able to give each other the benefit of the doubt to look at the long term.

The last is that over time, and I think that history proves this to be true, is is that those who have the most similar over time morals and ethics, particularly the ethics, but how customs and society work are the societies that secure their place in history and create a sense of calmness overall in terms of what's the future looks like. When you look back into the histories of the fall of the Roman empire and of great empires like certainly the Ottoman empire you look at the French empire with Napoleon even the British empire and it's not demise because it's still there but its diminishment. It came because of differing customs, values, ethics, and morals as the society splintered a little bit and so the more you're aligned with your community the more likely you are to have similarities. And by the way, I'll give you one from American history. The Civil War was fought over this. Civil War was fought over ethics and morals, belief in slavery, belief and abolition. Certainly there were economic and other issues, but that's a time in our own history when we had that separation and it was a war that brought us back together. And the cost of that, how do you measure those lives?

The real question is, and so those are the some of the thoughts and benefits is really what we're talking about inside your organization. What can you do to create more ethics and morals in your own organization, for yourself, for the group, for a family, for whomever? So I've got a couple of thoughts here.

The first is that you have to be open about what these mission, values, ethics, and morals are and what you believe in, and it's the willingness to talk about them. So number one is being willing to be open about them. Number two is then to create a shared sense of what these actually are. We deal with this in nonprofit work at a very high level but not often discussed with our missions. Our missions define our ethics and hopefully the people inside their morals.

What's interesting is that all too often we get so caught up in the business of our nonprofits that we don't go back and spend much time, particularly with our boards, in our offices, certainly with some level of exercise or activity to understand that mission, those ethics, and those morals.

One thing that we, I talk about constantly. You see other people who deal and train boards to talk about is having mission moments. How do we always bring that commonality of why we're here to the forefront. So what can you do as an office, as a board, as a group, as a department to always ensure that we're keeping the morals and values and ethics in mind? And sometimes we just forget them because there's too much business to be done.

So the first is to be open. The second is to share. The third is to create a sense of accountability so there's some zero uh tolerance things that I think we all agree upon. Let me give you kind of an HR example. Sexual harassment is unacceptable at every level. You can imagine that's one that's very easy. But what about other ethical violations? Some of them are formalized like having policies around harassment. Some of them are informal, and those are sometimes the most challenging. When somebody lies to you in the office they have violated a morality clause that most of us have, we don't like to be told anything but the truth. And if it's your boss that makes it harder. Or if you are the boss you might have lost it. If you've lied. I remember what my mom taught me early on in my life and still does to this day, that she always viewed trust like a building that it takes a long time to build it up but if you take out the third floor the building crumbles and it takes a long time for that trust to be rebuilt. That's what we're talking about when we talk about a sense of accountability. There are the organizational, institutional accountabilities, but there's also the unwritten informal ones where you don't you stop working with someone, or you stop communicating with them, or the relationship becomes toxic. You then have to retreat back to, here are some of what are your morals, and values, and ethics? And organizationally, what are they? And number two coming to a shared sense of that. So if you lose it you gotta retreat to rebuild it, is really the lesson of the of the moment when we talk about this as a leader.

The fourth thing that's most important is then to model it. Easy ways is that well we start our day at eight a.m and then the leader shows up at 8:45 every day. You got to walk if you're going to talk to talk how to walk the walk. Kind of a simplistic way of looking at it, but when you don't model that behavior that's when organizations, particularly when it's the leaders, begin to fracture. And it really affects the long-term viability or success of the organization. I'm dealing with a client right now who is going through the outs put or the the downstream effect of having absolute chaos when it came to ethics and morals. Donations have gone away. Huge chunks of their philanthropy operations has disappeared. People don't believe in the organization nearly as much. They're trying to recapture it. And what I'm working with them on is we've got to go back and start with, what are the ethics and morals and values, and how are they shared, and how we're going to create accountability for them? Then what we can do is start building and behavior will become an important part of that.

Another thing to keep in mind is to reward great behavior. It doesn't have to be formalized. It can be as simple as when you're a leader or a colleague to say thank you, I appreciate your honesty, I appreciate our relationship, I appreciate that. I feel safe being able to talk with you to share concerns. I think this is one of the things at least I hope that my clients and the people that I've worked with and worked for and worked on behalf of you and me that they trust me and that reward the good behavior that's rewarded, is they keep telling me things and I don't share them. I think there's great value in rewarding behavior, and I'm not talking about formal reward. Again it can be as simple as a verbalization that you appreciate someone and what they mean to you and that you trust them.

The last technical thing that i think is important is to hire for character. We get so caught up in the job descriptions and the outcomes, and I'm not here to say we shouldn't pay attention to them. But I do want to say that there are ways to test, to ask questions about character, about someone else's morality, what they believe their, the ethics of the organization should be. If you're not asking those questions when you're in the hiring process, whether you're the decision maker or you're part of a small group, that influences the decision maker or you're just out in the community talking with people, aligning their character, their particular view of morality and ethics is important. We don't test for it often enough, and there's ways of doing it, and as a result until we know what those traits are and what drives people, we don't know all the details that we should when it comes to bringing people on board. And it may mean if you get crossways with your morality being one and the organization's ethics being another, you may have to walk. You may have to leave. I think, and morals are not concrete, they're always shifting like sand. The question is can you look at yourself in the mirror and know who you are? Can you look at your organization and know what the code of ethics are, written unwritten, actual or perceived? And can you create an alignment for yourself inside of both and then find other people who match those particular values, ethics, and morals? If you do that you'll go to work every day, I think, a lot happier. Even when there's struggles, even when there's strife, anyone, even when there are problems and challenges having that kind of commonality will make those things much easier to deal with.

Don't forget to check out the blogs - 90 second reads at halllettphilanthropy.com. If you'd like to get ahold of me podcast@hallettphilanthropy.com. Appreciate your time. Remember that the morality and ethics we deal with every day to start when we get up and we come to our jobs in the nonprofit world are all about wanting to make a difference. That's one of the basic necessities of philanthropy, love of mankind, which leads us right to my favorite saying: some people make things happen, some people watch things happen, then there are those who wonder what happened. The world that we live in are our desires are to be people who make things happen, and finding others who want to do the same for the people and things that are wondering what happened, and that's the commonality of ethics and morals in a very very 50,000 foot view. I think we all serve when it comes to the idea of nonprofit work and I hope you remember that and know the value that you deliver each and every day. I'll look forward to seeing you right back here next time on "Around with Randall." Don't forget make it a great day.