The Fading Ethical Divide

Two major events that kept the social media engaged in India, over the last two weeks, were from completely different domains but had a common streak somewhere deep down their behavioural origins. For the cricket lovers, it was the rude shock of a team’s collective involvement in deliberately altering the condition of the ball and thereby unethically reverse the swing. For others, it was the alleged complicity of a well-known and well-respected top-notch banker in some business transactions involving her husband’s company and that of a large client of her own bank, that could well have crossed the proverbial ‘Lakshman Rekha’ between business ethics and improbity.

In the corporate world, we are much familiar with the pressures of performance. With large scale commercialization of sports, the same pressure is felt amongst the sportsmen as well – be it an individual game or a team sport. With multi-million-dollar advertising and media industry lapping up sporting heroes at mind boggling remuneration, the motivation and urge to stay on top surges manifold. Winning becomes more important than playing the game.

With big money involved, the sporting world has also been corporatized to a large extent. There are equal number of managers, coaches, motivators and other support personnel as the number of players in a team. A lot many professionals are involved in sports management and that has emerged as a serious, lucrative career option. The high stakes bring in cut-throat competition and razor-sharp performance measures. The game hasn’t remained a game anymore. It is a business venture and hence it unconsciously propagates the philosophy of winning by all means – fair or unfair, right or wrong, by hook or crook, by shining the ball or by roughening its surface.
Like in sports, the leaders in corporate world too want to emerge as winners all the time. They typically have a more formal education in the management of winning. The purpose of their engagement at a corporate is solely for winning. Winning for the organization and thereby winning for themselves. With the ‘winner takes all’ policies of HR /Compensation managers, the young minds get attuned to focus only on winning. The process takes a back-seat.

All the leadership programs that the young managers attend during the course of their early career are all focussed on ‘winning’. And most of them also bring out ‘networking skills’ as one of the key skill to ‘winning’. All through my professional career, I have had an overdose of such tutelage on ‘networking skills’ in all forms of pedagogy. Nothing wrong with that – just that they fail to alert the young minds on the risks and the perils of crossing the ethical line. Using reference of the personal connects of one’s spouse to expand one’s own business line is one aspect. It may indeed be considered as a good, neat, harmless ethical networking. But when it involves one’s business connects – and particularly in an enterprise where public money is involved – it surely is not the best example of professional ethics.

In the corporate world, motivating, enticing and threatening individuals to stretch their goals to elasticity-defying levels is not a very uncommon scenario. And the high stakes attached with these goals – be it a business target or a sporting milestone – infuses the individuals with such an intoxicating urge to succeed that they tend to believe that achieving such a result is the only raison d’etre of their existence on this earth. The results become most important and any questions on the probity of its means become meaningless.

Somewhere along my mid-career crisis, I once had an outburst with my Manager on various seemingly ‘unethical’ practices. My otherwise upright Manager, in a resigned tone, just said – ‘they are smart people’. So, the smart corporate leader has learnt to keep the ethical line hazy. He has learnt to be ‘legally right’ and be ‘politically correct’, while staying on top of that hazy line so he can reach on both sides of the ethical divide, without seemingly crossing the line. Just that, sometimes, the sun shines brighter and people catch him on the wrong foot. And that is the only solace the upright, conscientious few can get – that some sunny morning, the rough side will get exposed on its own to check the illegitimate reverse swing.