The concept of moral awareness

First of all, there’s the learning objectives. First, understand the concept of moral awareness, what it is. And then second, learn to be morally aware. First though, I’d like to tell your story I think you might find interesting from my own personal experience.

It goes back to when I was in college. I had an internship in a human resource management department. It was in Minneapolis, Minnesota. But the point there is that the office headquarters was way, way out in the boonies. It was like 30 or 40 miles away, in the middle of nowhere basically. And it took a good hour to get there.

So what? Well, I liked it. It was beautiful, the headquarters was brand new, the windows, it was gorgeous. Well, here’s the thing. One of the first projects I worked on was this project to start a van pool program.

What’s a van pool? Well, what they did was they hired a bunch of vans that parked in the center part of the Minneapolis area, and transported the clerical workers who worked at the company out to the corporate headquarters. So, I said, that sounds great, whatever.

Why don’t they take a bus? Well, there’s no buses that go out there. OK. Well, why do you need this anyway? And the answer was, they had an incredible shortage of clerical workers. At any point in time, 20% of the clerical work force, clerical positions, were vacant.

And I go, OK. And this is the HR director, the human resource director. And I said, well, why? Why are so many positions vacant? And she said, well, it’s because we’re in the middle of nowhere here.

80% of our workforce is clerical. They don’t earn a whole lot of money. A lot of them don’t have cars. Even if they do, they don’t want to drive all this way out. So we have a really difficult time attracting workers.

And I said, OK. Well, that’s interesting. I’m learning here. So I said, well, why did they build the corporate headquarters way out here? And she said, well, basically– and this is, of course, the HR director– but she said, the people who made the decision, the corporate CEO and the board, just never thought about it. It never occurred to them, believe it or not, that putting a

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corporate headquarters way out here would result in a difficulty in attracting an adequate supply of labor.

And so here we are. We’re stuck with it. OK. So what’s this all got to do with anything? It’s not moral awareness in this case, necessarily. It’s, well, I’ll give it another label, human resource awareness. They didn’t have the awareness of the human resource issues that went into this strategic decision they made.

And they paid for it. I’ll come back to this example in a little while here, but let’s go on. What is it? Let’s define it first of all, and here’s a real simple, straightforward definition. Moral awareness is the recognition that an issue or decision has a moral component.

So you see that side of the issue. In your other classes that you’re taking, in your marketing class, I’m sure what your professors are doing, or are going to do, is give you some kind of a case where the dumb company didn’t see the marketing implications to this big business decision they had. Or, perhaps in your finance class, you’ll do a case where the company hadn’t really thought through the critical financial applications of what they were doing. They didn’t have financial awareness.

Well, moral awareness is no different. It’s just that component to a decision and the decisions do have that component, and it’s important to be aware of it. So that’s what this is about. OK. Let’s get into what might affect it. And just to keep things kind of simple, I divided into three kinds of categories, personal factors, situational factors, and organizational factors.

I’ll just go through each one really quickly with an example. But personal factors– I read a story, it was in a book actually. It was a book about white collar criminals who were in jail and were interviewed in jail and who told their story to the reporter. How did they end up in jail? And one of them was just very straightforward.

The person said, well I had a substance abuse issue. I was drunk all the time, 24/7 basically. And he goes, I had all these assistants handing me things to read and to sign. And I just signed them, I didn’t even read them. And I was doing this for months and months on end before it turned out that a lot of stuff the person was signing was dragging the corporation in a direction it really didn’t need to go from an ethical standpoint.

And the CEO was, in this case, just as complicit in it as anybody else because it was his signature on all the documents. So it’s not like if he would have read those things, he wouldn’t

have done anything about it. No, he probably would have said, were he to have his more awareness intact and not be drunk, let’s just say, he might have said, no, we can’t do this. This is taking us in the wrong direction.

And another one that’s kind of similar is another person. He basically said, well look. This case was another personal thing. I was going through a divorce, my family was falling apart, it was horrible. I was having some mental health issues, I was really struggling. And the corporation was struggling too. And all this was too much in my life.

And he goes, all I could do was focus on one thing. And that was the next day, or that day or the next day, no further. All I could do was do what it took to get the corporation through the next day, the next week, and that’s really all I could focus on. And what happened was he, by not seeing the big picture, he was making a lot of short-run decisions that put the corporation in a horrible ethical position.

Then he gave a kind of a metaphor, which I’ve kind of hung onto, which kind of stuck with me I guess. He said, OK, imagine that you’re climbing a tree– well the metaphor being climbing the corporate ladder I guess– but you’re climbing a tree, right, and you’re going up. You’re going higher and higher and higher, but all you’re doing is you’re looking up and forward, you’re not looking down.

You’re not looking where you came from. You’re only looking forward. And he talked about how you go further and further out on this branch, and you’re only looking out, you’re not looking down. You’re not looking back, you’re not seeing how narrow this branch is becoming. And you get far enough out, it snaps, it breaks. You fall down to the ground.

And that’s where I am right now, he said, I’m in prison. And basically, he didn’t use these terms, but he lacked moral awareness. Maybe he had good reasons for it from the personal things that were going on in his life, but he didn’t have moral awareness. One more category of things, which I’ll come back to. This isn’t as obvious maybe.

Your subconscious, subconscious beliefs and values. Things you know but you don’t know you know, if that makes any sense at all. These can affect your decision making too, especially your moral awareness. And that’s another kind of thing associated with you as a person. Like I said, I’ll come back to that one. Situational factors. OK.

These can be lots of different things. I’ll give you a personal example that happened not that

long ago. I was angry about a decision here at work, at Temple. There was this programmatic issue that I was supposed to deal with, and the person who was directing it said I wasn’t dealing with it correctly. And I was really upset. I wrote one of those mad emails in response, saying things I probably shouldn’t have said. Well, things I shouldn’t have said.

And I hit send and there you go. And I regretted it, and I regret it. And I violated the most important rule of sending a mad email, and that is wait 10 seconds, count to 10 before you hit send. In fact, you should probably count to 100 or count to whatever before you hit send. What that gets at is that, when we have enough time for a decision, we often see the big picture. We often see what’s going on.

Conversely, if we don’t have a lot of time for a decision, we often don’t see all the factors that go into it. Now, I did have a lot of time, I just didn’t think I did. A lot of bad decisions people make in life are because they don’t have enough time, or they don’t think they have enough time. So it’s one of those situational factors to always pay attention to.

Yeah, the quarterly reports are due tomorrow. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take a second, pull your chair back from your desk, think about what you’re doing in order to hit those numbers that you’re trying to hit. Finally, organizational factors. This is another story about a person in prison, but in this case, what he said was a lot of my bad decision making can be traced back to the mentor I had.

This guy was my boss in my first job, right out of school. I was all excited, I was a high flyer, I was just ready to conquer the world. And this guy basically gave me the advice, look, it’s a dog-eat-dog world. Do what you got to do to get ahead. If you don’t, they’re going to eat you. OK? Ready, shoot, aim is your philosophy, right?

That’s the way you make decisions OK? And he said, well, I adopted that. That was the value system I took on. And yeah, you know what, that got me into a whole lot of trouble, including 26 months in prison where I am right now. I didn’t have the moral awareness. It just didn’t dawn on me that other people, who look at what I’m doing, might not think I’m doing the right thing, including the federal government.

So yeah, organizational factors– who you work with, the organizational context, the culture, the climate. All those can affect your moral awareness. OK. Now, let’s try to get a little bit of prescriptive stuff in here. How do you increase your moral awareness? I could fill 10 slides, perhaps, with ideas and things, but what I wanted to do is hit three main things I think that you

can do and keep in mind.

First of all, study and understand ethics. Let’s go back to that human resource issue I brought up at the very beginning. Had the CEO really understood the importance of human resource management and what it entailed, how recruiting could be difficult, and so on and so forth, if he understood that issue, he probably wouldn’t have put the corporate headquarters way out where it was. Or, if he was going to start a van pool program, he would have started it out right when they were building the headquarters.

That’s what you’re here for, in one way or another. In fact, arguably, if you get nothing else out of this course but an increased moral awareness because you understand ethics better, in my view, at least, it’ll be a success. The more you understand something, the more you’re going to be aware of the issue and be able to anticipate when it’s in the case, problem, or issue that you’re addressing. OK.

Second, make conscious your unconscious biases and prejudices. Now that comes straight from the Carter article, which is assigned. He gave some examples in the story about people who possess unconscious beliefs about things. They don’t know that they, in a sense, believe this, or they never really tested these beliefs against reality, that’s just the way they’re going through the world.

And he gave one example, you’ll probably remember this from the article, of the man, the male supervisor, who had a lot of female subordinates. Now, this guy was brought up to believe that women are sort of the fairer sex, or all this sort of old stuff, where they’re not as competent really. They’re not as smart. They can’t do as well at work. He’s very chivalroustic, whatever that word is. That was just how he was brought up. OK?

And so when he came to performance appraisals, he went easier on the women than he did on his male subordinates. When it came to assigning work, he gave the women easier tasks to do. And when questioned about it, he goes, well hey, you know, that’s just the way it is in this world. Now, what Carter would say is, though he might have had good intentions, this person is unethical.

He’s not a person of integrity. Why? Because we have a duty in our lives to bring our unconscious prejudices and biases to the surface, to make them conscious. And then test those beliefs against reality. We have that responsibility in life to be a person of integrity. It can be prejudice like this man had, where if he had looked around, he would have seen well, no.

be prejudice like this man had, where if he had looked around, he would have seen well, no.

Women aren’t any worse at work than men are. They’re not any worse, when he was in school, at the schoolwork they’re doing. It’s just a ridiculous belief to hold. And, of course, Carter would apply it to racism and a whole bunch of other stuff too. So bring conscious your unconscious biases, to the extent that you can.

And lastly, surround yourself with good people. You notice they put good in italics. What I mean by that are people– is that people who are ethical, people who you trust to be consistent with your value system in terms of the decisions they make. Choose the right mentor. If you see your mentor is telling you things that, sort of whoa, what’s that, think about finding another mentor.

When you’re choosing your organization to work for, and I know you’re not going to have a lot of choice necessarily, but as you go along in your career, you might have plenty. Choose an organization that has good principles, ones that you don’t have to go to work every day saying, man, I can’t believe I work here. I can’t believe I do the things they’re making me do. Because when you have good people mentoring you, and when you’re in a climate that’s good, then you see the ethical angles to things that you might not otherwise see. You get good advice.