When we take full responsibility for our behavior—when we really own what we do and the impact of our —we immediately impose a range of extremely hardy pressures on ourselves to do the right thing. These pressures range from wanting to be proud of a job well done to wishing not to be humiliated or punished for doing the wrong thing. By contrast, the less responsible we feel for our actions or the less we care about their impact, the greater the distance we can create between ourselves and those extremely helpful pressures.
None of this is any great revelation and, in fact, it is all arguably common sense. However, it is usually forgotten when discussing the causes of ethical and legal problems in both individuals and organizations alike.
The point here is that when our efforts to build and maintain better ethics are exclusively focused on teaching the rules and building compliance programs, we are systematically missing the boat where the prevention of ethics problems is concerned.
Why? Because the more exclusively we focus on compliance as a goal in itself, the less we are focused on helping employees learn to understand and take responsibility for the actual impact of their decisions, whether those decisions are good ones or not. Once you add that focus—and once you show employees that doing the right thing is a tool for their personal success and not just the success of your company—then it will be much easier for them to focus on keeping ethics problems from developing; they will simply be more motivated to do so.
Christopher Bauer helps companies build and maintain cultures of ethics. In doing so, his programs also improve leadership and promote managerial effectiveness. Information on Bauer Ethics Seminars is available at
