8. Loyalty
9. Patience
10. Presence
Honesty is the most important quality of all, so it heads the list. The remainder are all equally important, so, for ease of reference, I’m presenting those nine in alphabetical order.
These qualities are sometimes referred to as virtues. But if we’re going to talk about virtue, we must talk about Aristotle, which means we must first talk about Monty Python.
What’s Monty Python Got to Do with It?
When you hear the name Aristotle, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? A college philosophy class? Tom Morris’s book If Aristotle Ran General Motors? The second husband of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis? Or Monty Python’s “Philosopher’s Song,” which suggested that Western civilization’s great philosophers loved not wisdom but drinking? And what does a philosopher who has been dead over 2,300 years have to do with character in the modern workplace?
The answer is that The Good Ones owes its existence to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. There are essentially two approaches to thinking about ethics. The first looks at conduct and is primarily concerned with the question, “What should I do?” The second, which originates with Aristotle, asks not, “What should I do?” but rather, “Who should I be?”
The conduct-based approach to ethics is about solving quandaries such as these:
A. You’re standing in line at Starbucks and overhear two colleagues discussing confidential information about a client. Should you say something to them or mind your own business?
B. Your boss asks you to lie. You fear you’ll be fired if you stand up to him. How should you respond?
C. You’re attracted to your new direct report and suspect the person is attracted to you, too. Would it be acceptable to act on your feelings and ask this person out on a date?
When business ethics or ethics in everyday life is discussed in our culture, it’s almost always along these lines. Dear Abby, the Ethicists column in the New York Times, articles in the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and Forbes, and heated debates on cable news networks focus on the right way to act in a specific situation. My own work until now has also been concerned with conduct and has been heavily influenced by a masterwork by Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress called Principles of Biomedical Ethics. As the title of that book indicates, a conduct-based approach to ethics is based on ethical principles. Applying these principles to the above situations, for example, suggests the following responses:
A. Your colleagues are violating the rule of confidentiality, which is derived from the “respect others” principle (or what Beauchamp and Childress refer to as the principle of respect for autonomy). Because you are in a position to prevent this violation from continuing, it is better to do something rather than nothing. Unless your company requires you to report your colleagues, this means speaking privately with your colleagues about what you have overheard and encouraging them to be more discreet.
B. If the request is more significant than “Please tell me you love my outfit even if you don’t,” it would be wrong to compromise your own integrity by going along with your boss. He or she is violating several ethical principles, particularly “be fair.” Chances are you won’t be fired if you stand your ground. You’re more likely to encounter serious consequences if you lie for your boss.
C. If you pursue a relationship with a subordinate, you could wind up being accused of sexual harassment or alienating other employees and jeopardizing your career. Office romances are appropriate only when the two parties don’t work in the same department and don’t have an imbalance of power between them. According to the “do no harm principle” in this situation, the right choice is to look for love elsewhere.
Ethical principles provide a framework, not a formula, for making the right decisions at work and in one’s personal life. They’re useful for solving conundrums like the ones above. But the character-based approach to ethics is not simply about solving puzzles here and now: it aims to develop traits that prompt us to live our whole lives honorably.
Character is a much murkier concept than conduct, which may explain why discussions about it are not common in either business or our culture in general. When I began conducting interviews for this book, I started the conversations by asking how the subjects hired employees of good character. More often than not I was met with stony silence. Then: “That’s a good question.” Or “What do you mean by character?” Or a long sigh. I quickly learned that opening an interview with what seems to be an unanswerable question was not a good strategy.
Aristotle discusses character in terms of virtue, which he defines as a mean between two extremes. The virtue of courage, for example, lies somewhere between cowardice (a deficiency of courage) and foolhardiness (an excess of courage). Virtues aren’t one-size-fits-all. For a person with a meek disposition, it might require an extraordinary effort to stand up to an office bully, whereas a bold person would have no trouble doing so. Courageous would thus be a fitting term for the former person but not for the latter. Even if virtues cannot be quantified in the same way as other abilities (say, performing risk analysis in accounting, or having strong communication skills in any field), they may still be evaluated.
Outside academic circles, virtue has overtones of repressed Victorian sexuality, religious fervor, or something our great-grandparents would have fretted about. To avoid these connotations, I talk about high-character employees rather than virtuous ones, even though from a philosopher’s point of view they’re the same thing. And to avoid his unfortunate association with dry academic texts (to say nothing of Monty Python), I won’t refer to Aristotle very often either.
Wait — What about Trustworthiness?
In reviewing the ten qualities above, you might wonder, “Why isn’t trustworthiness on the list? Isn’t that really the most important characteristic of all?” Trustworthiness is essential, and it’s hard to imagine having any kind of meaningful relationship with someone you don’t trust.
But trustworthiness isn’t a single quality. Rather, it comes from a combination of several qualities, particularly honesty, accountability, fairness, and loyalty. If I hire you to work for my organization, The Ethics Guy LLC, it’s because I trust you, and the reason I trust you is that you have demonstrated that you tell the truth, you do what you say you’re going to do, you treat people fairly, and you won’t jump ship in the middle of a project if something better comes along.
You might also wonder why integrity isn’t on the list of ten crucial qualities. It’s for the same reason. Integrity is not a single trait but rather the expression of many traits. Can an employee be considered to have integrity if he or she is as honest as the day is long but is also a selfish, disloyal, and persistently angry person? No. Employees with integrity aren’t merely honest: they’re also accountable, fair, and patient.
One additional question about the items on this list requires more than a cursory answer: Don’t different cultures understand character differently? The answer may surprise you.
Character and Culture
In an episode of Mad Men called “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword,” the advertising firm Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce tries to land an account with the Honda Motorcycle Corporation. The Japanese executives present a very different way of doing business than their American counterparts, most notably by avoiding direct communication. They do so not in the way that Japanese culture is often mischaracterized (by saying “yes” when they mean “no,” for example), but rather through signals such as not sending a gift the day after their first meeting, which may indicate that the meeting did not go well.
In Business Insider, Stuart Freedman observes that “avoiding confrontation, saving face, and keeping harmony are a few of the values that influence how the Japanese communicate disagreement, or for that matter anything they think could be upsetting to another person.” Where an American executive might say “no,”