In business, the question of moral philosophy is one of the complex ones as it reflects the unique values and rules of an individual. Ethical content may be determined by individual needs rather than by organizational issues: a manager who has difficulty giving candid feedback may be assigned a project to develop and give detailed behavioral feedback to a problem subordinate; a manager having trouble managing upward might be assigned to develop a presentation for a senior executive. Such programs are usually conducted online, over time, and under the guidance of a coach, perhaps with a group of peers. Returning for a second training session, participants share their results with the training group.
The strengths of the moral approach include that the problems are relevant to the individual and that one-on-one coaching and feedback are provided. Its limitations spring from the same source: individuals may not choose the most important areas to work on, there may be little accountability for results, and even if individuals change, the unchanged context to which they return may not support that change over time. The use of job experience for development has a long history. Such phrases as “earning one’s stripes” and “doing time” have long been used to describe organizational career progress. In their heyday, when long-term employment and steady progression were the norms, systematic rotation programs and career paths mapped the experiential path to the top. Today’s organizations, emerging from the downsizing era and finding themselves short of needed leadership talent, have neither the time nor the stability to wait for such processes to produce results. In a trend unlikely to fade, organizations are attempting to accelerate development, with both good and ill effects. Although acceleration efforts have caused companies to look more closely at the assignments they provide to their high-potential managers and to become more efficient and effective in their use, the emphasis on speed has led to shortcuts that may cause talented people to derail, or even worse, may encourage moving poorly prepared people into senior roles (Ferrell et al 2009).
The main theories and approaches used by managers and leaders in business are egoism, deontology, utilitarianism, teleology, relativism, virtue ethics, and justice (Ferrell et al 2009, p.149). The changing nature of the competitive environment, new organizational forms, globalization, and more sophisticated theories of leadership have all contributed to the emergence of new ideas about who should be developed. For example, new organizational forms are driving who gets development: programs involving as participants joint venture partners, customers, suppliers, unions, and even competitors are becoming more common as organizations become more virtual and see leadership as something that must cross fuzzy boundaries. Similarly, flatter, leaner organizations and the rise of team-based structures have broadened the leadership pool to include teams with no formal leaders, and managers. The majority of individual take into account the consequences of their decisions and overall good of ethical principles applied.
Individuals often assume that all members of the high-potential group should have the same or similar experiences, and so they design lockstep programs or rotational assignments for the pool rather than for individuals. Even though the sequence of programs or events is often timed to coincide with presumably ethical development transitions with content designed for the challenges faced at each level, the assumption is still that people in the same cohort have the same developmental needs. Organizations are learning, however, that development can be frustratingly individual and even gearing. Ethics policies to generic transition points may not be tailoring enough. Some are taking individualization one step further by combining individual assessment with individual coaching to provide different development plans for each executive. The main virtues that support business decisions are trust, self-control, empathy, fairness, truthfulness, gratitude, moral leadership and civility (Ferrell et al 2009, p. 159). Cost, of course, has been a major consideration in individual approaches, but the cost in salaries and bonuses of executives who fail plus the business losses incurred as a result of inadequate performance have grown so exorbitant that even the expense of an individual coach can seem modest. Leadership development happens one leader at a time and like leadership itself is always in a context.
The context of the ethics extends from the potential leader’s immediate manager and organization unit all the way to the global business arena. Development is a fragile part of that context, which may be development-friendly and supportive or development-hostile and destructive. Given the substantial nature of the forces and the fragile quality of leadership development, we leave to the futurists a description of alternative scenarios. Although the popularity of the term leadership itself will likely fade, the demands associated with leading complex organizations will not. The trend in leadership development will be toward more individualized approaches, tailored both to the growth needs of individual executives as determined by feedback and coaching methodologies and to the business needs of the organization. Still, the action in leadership development will move inside corporations, supported by an array of service providers. Organizations will become more effective in using experience as a teacher and as their leaders become more committed to and better at coaching their executives will learn their way into better performance. Improvements in technology will support more effective use of on-the-job learning, just as it has revolutionized business practices. The business imperative for leaders who can handle the complexity and change ahead is so compelling that efforts to develop leadership skills will continue unabated.
References
Ferrell, O.C., Fraedrich, John, and Ferrell, Linda. (2009). Business Ethics, Ethical Decision Making & Cases, Seventh Edition. Boston, MA: Prentice Hall.