E17 | How to Navigate Ethical Leadership Dilemmas

Hi. Welcome to lead with a coaching mindset, a Podcast where we explore how leaders unlock their potential. I am Dr Damian Goldvarg, and I am very excited to discuss my new book, lead with a coaching mindset.

Hi everyone. I'm Elaine Padilla. I'm also coach and I will be the host of this podcast. We hope that you find this space inspirational and thought provoking. Let's get into it.

Hi, welcome to lead with a coaching mindset. Today we are going to be discussing with Elaine the chapter two of my book that focus on ethical issues. Hi, Elaine.

How are you today? Hello, good to see you again. Hi, Damien, looking

forward to discussing ethical issues. The name of the chapter is ethical leadership and coaching the engine of maturity. And I really care about this book, because I believe that ethical leadership is a foundation for all leadership. If the people don't trust the leader, it's very difficult to follow them.

Okay, well, what if I don't know anything about ethical leadership? What is ethical leadership and what makes it important

So Elaine, ethical leadership is the ability to lead, following ethical principles, being respectful, listening to people and using a language that is appropriate in showing integrity. Integrity very important is consistency between what we say and what we do when we do not have integrity, when we promise things and we do not fulfill our promises, that the fastest way to lose trust. And there is a big relationship between ethical leadership and trust. We have another chapter coming up in chapter four that is about trust, but there is a big relationship between the ethical behaviors and building trust or losing trust.

In your book, you mentioned ethics, but you also mentioned morality and how what's what's the difference between the two? How are they related?

Well, many times people confuse them. Morality is what is right and wrong at the society level. So as a community, we share some rules about what is right, what is wrong. So morality, in some way, applies to everybody, and then ethically more individual is how I behave, following or not this behavior, these norms or these rules. So ethics are about my decision, what I decide to do, and how my decisions are aligned or not with ethical principles. So for example, coaches, we have ethical principles that we follow, and we are ethical coaches or ethical leader when we follow some guidelines, and some of these guidelines are related to being consistent between what we say and what we do, being respectful of others, using the right language, being transparent as much as we can not lying, not lying there like a bit basic, but sometimes it's lost. These days, what is true and what is not?

My gosh, you know, you bring up this interesting point of of not lying, but you know, sometimes organizations and leaders can't share everything that's going on. So how, how does a leader like navigate that right the balance between what am I able to share as a leader and what is it that I can't share because, for whatever reason you know it's important to not share with with your, with your with your team.

That is a great point. And here is where we want to be as honest as possible, including that we cannot share the information, because, if not, there is a perception of manipulation, and people don't have a crystal ball. They don't know what leaders can share or not share means the leader, it does not communicate and does not say, Okay, this is what's going on. I'm sorry I cannot share this information. I will let you know. As soon as I know, as soon as I can share the information, I will let you know this is what is the appropriate way to deal with this, because if they don't say anything, the perception may be that they are withdrawing information, keeping information for themselves. They try to manipulate situations. Instead of saying, You know what, I wish I could share the information, but I can't. Whenever I can, I promise I will let you know. So in that way, there is transparency. So I think this is what people want. People who want transparency, they want to know that the leaders care about them and that they're not trying to manipulate them, yeah, that they're going to share the information as soon as they can.

Yeah, yep, definitely. Having worked in large organizations, part of teams that are part of large organizations, I know that I've appreciated when a manager says, I wish I could tell you or I actually. Me, I don't know, but I will when I can, I definitely, instead of sort of, like dodging the elephant in the room, that that can lead to frustration, I know I've have felt frustration and just, yeah, I lose trust.

So do you know Elaine when there is a good relationship and a trustworthy relationship, people are able. Leaders are able to say, Listen, I know you are frustrated. I know that you're concerned. I know that we may need to let go some people, I understand that I will do my best to share information as soon as I can, and if they really care about the team, team knows so it's about how you cultivate the relationships. And when you get to this point is when people know what you have cultivated over time is not overnight that you gain or lose trust. Is behavior that are consistent, so that the other piece that is also related to trusting that consistency. It's like you are transparent all the time, not every now and then. You are consistent between what you say and what you do all the time, not every now and then. So that consistency also helps in building trust in at the end of the day, leaders are role models. So that the reason why ethical behavior is important, because if the leaders are not ethical, they lie. They are not transparent. They are telling everybody else, okay, it's okay to do that. Yeah. And this is, I think, one of the challenges we have in society these days, leaders at different levels that are not saying the truth, manipulating the truth, and people not trusting. And then you see that at different levels of society. Yeah.

So tell me more about you know, what does, what does an effective, ethical manager look like? And do you have any any stories that you want to share where you know a manager successfully navigated an ethical dilemma with a direct report? Yeah.

Well, in the book, I talk about four different behaviors that are pretty specific. We're talking about the integrity, that consistency between what we say and what we do. I also talk about respect. Respect is a big issue. It's treating people well with dignity, appreciating differences, genuinely appreciating differences. We do not need to agree. We may come from different backgrounds, but we still appreciate people who are different than us, but that's a relationship between ethical behaviors and dealing with diversity. Also confidentiality is keeping confidential information. If you tell me something and then I go and share that with other people, people are going to say, I cannot trust this person is not very ethical. So keeping confidentiality is another way to show ethical behaviors. And then in terms of examples, like in the book, I shared example of David, one of my clients, that he figured out that somebody was not being transparent with information like he was making, he made some mistake, and he was trying to hide it, and my client didn't know what to do. So he came to coach and said, Okay, I don't know what to do if I don't know if to let that go, if I if I confront the person, I am afraid about how the person is going to react. I am pretty sure that this is what's going on, but I'm not 100% sure. So I don't know what to do. And we explored and we discussed what will be the best approach. And he finally decided to take a risk and confront the person in a respectful and appropriate way. So this is what he did. He went back to the person and he said, Okay, I have this information. I may be wrong, but this is what is I am with what I learned, and I was curious to know what's going on so you can tell me, so we can see what we can do together. And then my client was right. The direct report had hidden some information, made the wrong decision, and by confronting and by talking about it, the person was able to fix what needed to be fixed. And I think that Elaine that's a big issue. When we make mistakes, it's important that we recognize them. We acknowledge that even as leaders, that make us human, and if a leader makes a mistake, if they can go back to the report and say, I'm sorry and make a mistake, that's a way to recognize that we are all human. Sooner or later, that is going to happen. So being honest and open about it is a good role model for the others, because if they do it, the dealer reports are going to be okay doing it too.

Yeah, I was wondering if there's any value in instead of confronting a person like one on one, talking about the issue to the team as a way to give the opportunity, you know, give the individual who maybe is not doing the best thing to kind of correct their will.

That is tricky, because that's happened to me. Listen, that happened to me a couple of weeks ago. Where I was part of a committee, and one of the participants is has a very strong personality, and she was very strong, and some people in the team felt that they were not assertive enough in confronting the person and putting some boundaries. And so I'm I made a comment to the whole team. I went, Okay, I think that we have to be careful how we come across, and we need to be assertive, and we need to let people know if they are if their boundaries are not appropriate, or they're going to be too strong. And I say that to the person, the couple of people who are not doing that, but the person who took it wrong was a person that I didn't mean to communicate that, so she was upset with me. Why I say that, you know, like, can you see? So I think that it's tricky when we do it in general, I think that sometimes I learned my lesson about going and be very specific if you wanted somebody to get feedback, sometimes doing it in a general way may or may not work.

So the person who needed to hear it didn't hear it, but somebody else thought you were talking about them, and they got

upset, yeah, because they thought they were talking about them and it wasn't so next

to that, okay, so just a few moments ago, you were talking about the principles of ethical leadership, and you were kind of highlighting them. And in one of the one of the points is you're you talk about having personal integrity, and you highlight self awareness, self legitimization, self completion and self love. Tell tell us about about those four and then which was your favorite?

Well, these are from Anna calante. She wrote a book about ethical leadership and integrity, and I thought that her four elements were really good to include in the book, and for Liz to be familiar with them, and each has a different flavor. But interesting about the last one self love is that when we love ourselves and we have, like, what we call good self esteem in not being narcissistic or it's more about okay, I care about other people, but I also care about me, and because they do care about me, I want to have behaviors that are aligned to my values. So in the way that I behave is aligned to what is important to me, and when we do that is a way to show self love is we're being authentic and we're being consistent between what we think it's important and what we do, and when we let that go, when we are not paying attention to our value. What you would ask people when they do something that they don't feel good about it, they don't feel good about what they have done, but they don't feel good about themselves either. So it's like when you ain't doing something that you don't think it's right or aligned to your value, that you were asked to do something and you don't think it the right thing at the end, there is a little bit of sense of shame for doing something that you didn't think was a good idea. So here, I think that that the one that I think that is important, that we are consistent to what is important to us as much as we can. And I do believe that that is an act of self love.

Yeah, yeah, the, you know, the values. And I don't know if you right now, I don't remember if you dive into values in another chapter, but I they're so important in decision making, and it's, you know, as a fellow coach, I realized that I've had conversations with people, and when they're struggling, and we start to have that conversation around values, some people don't have clarity on that, and then they realize that that's why they're having trouble making a decision because they're not clear on their values. Tell me about values and the importance of being a coach leader. Yeah.

So here, I do believe that value belong to this section, where we behave aligned to what was important to us. So when we had to define values, what are values? Values is what is important to us. So when we need to make decisions and when we do things, when we follow what is important to us, we are consistent with our values. We make decisions that we feel good about it. So by being clear about our values, help us to make the best possible decision. So as coaches, when we're working with leaders, we explore what are our leaders values, so how they align or not to the decisions that they need to make. But this applies to life, to all of our decisions, any decisions that we need to make, at work, in our personal lives, our future, which is important to us. And this also changes throughout. Our life, what is important to us now is not the same that was important what's important to us 20 years ago. So we need to be clear how that changes and what is important for us today, and how we can behave and make decisions based on that.

Wow, yes, yeah. Valleys is so important, and I know it can impact leaders who are within an organization for a long time, their values align with the mission of the organization, and then at some point, like you said, they shift, they change, and then it's just time for them to to move on to another organization where their new values align, and it's easier for them to make decisions because they're aligned, yeah,

and I think it's time to wrap up for today, but we're going to we're going to continue talking about ethical issues in our next episode. So join us in a couple of weeks, we're going to continue discussing this chapter. So thank you, Elaine, for being such a great partner in this

program. Great. See you everyone later.