Raising Ethical Issues

The March issue of the Harvard Business Review contains an article by Mary Gentile called Keeping Your Colleagues Honest.  HBR adapted from that article to provide one of its recent Management Tips of the Day.  For those of us in compliance, we are often forced to raise and confront others on ethical issues.  This can be challenging!  Read through these tips and think about how you presently handle these situations.  Can you do it better?  These tips may help make any future discussions you have just a little less painful. The tips may also be useful to disseminate to employees to provide them with some guidance on how to raise such issues and make them feel more comfortable in doing so.

1. Treat the conflict as a business issue. Present the issue as you would any other business issue: provide sufficient detail, tailor your message to the audience, and deliver it in an appropriate context.
2. Recognize that it's part of your job. Ethical issues may feel like a distraction from "real" work, but identifying, thinking through, and acting on them are part of everyone's job.
3. Be yourself. Don't assume that you have to be confrontational, assertive, or courageous to bring up an ethical issue. The best approach is to be yourself and use a style you are comfortable with.

Mary Gentile is a senior research scholar at Babson College and her book, Giving Voice to Values, is forthcoming from Yale University Press in September 2010.