The news today is filled with lines being drawn in the sand.  While few of us face the terrible decisions our world’s leaders must face, we do all face our own “line in the sand”:  witnessing unethical behavior at work.

Over the course of teaching ethics in the past seven years, I’ve relied on the work of Mary Gentile, recently retired from the Darden School, and her framework called “Giving Voice to Values.”  Gentile gives practical, applicable advice about how to speak your mind when you know what’s right and without getting on a soapbox, influencing the organization to do the right thing.  She suggests:

• Anticipate the common ethical dilemmas you’ll face in your role at work and in your industry. Make a note that these challenges are a normal part of your work.
• As you would for any other normal part of work, prepare for them. You can do that by writing a script that you can recite when the issue arises.
• Practice the script out loud to develop “muscle memory,” just as an athlete would. Do this so that when the pressure is on, you can say your words calmly, naturally, without moving the conversation into high-stakes territory.
• Go one step further and anticipate “reasons and rationalizations” that your counterparts might bring up when you speak your mind, and be ready to respond to those as well.
• Think of persuasive arguments to accomplish your goal, which is not to win the argument, call out unethical behavior or admonish your colleagues. Your goal is to get the organization to do the right thing.  What might motivate them to do the right thing (beyond “it’s the right thing”)?

The practicality of Gentile’s work appeals to me greatly.  If it does to you, too, her book lays it out very clearly.

My students’ openness to this approach has changed in a few areas these past few years.  What’s happened?  #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter.  The executives I teach – of all genders and ethnicities – are calling a “times up!” on issues they have been silent on in the past.  Their “line in the sand” has changed. They are speaking up more and putting up with less.  One example: According to a survey by Glassdoor, nearly half of Black and Hispanic employees have left jobs because they experienced or witnessed discrimination at work.

As you anticipate the ethical dilemmas you may face, think about where you can be most effective by persuading….and where your “line in the sand” might be.  What’s your “red line” on out-moded workplace behavior?  And how do you want to react next time you witness it?  For all of these scenarios, Mary Gentile’s work is here to help you make a plan and start building your ethical muscle memory.

Maybe it was hard to put your finger on why, so you just chalked it up to mismatch of personalities.  Or maybe you’re leading a team that doesn’t seem to trust you!  What’s behind that?  A forthcoming book by Sandra Sucher and Shalene Gupta can help you diagnose the reasons behind not trusting – or not being trusted – and give you advice for moving forward.

According to the authors, legitimacy and competency are the foundation or “table stakes” of trust.

Legitimacy is about how or why you were chosen for the position.  Was there a thorough search process that found you to be the most qualified person for the role?  Or were you brought in from the outside because the person who is now your boss knew you and trusted you?  If it was the latter, that doesn’t mean you aren’t qualified, but it does mean that a fundamental component of trust will be in question when your team sizes you up.  You’ll likely have some trust-building to do.

If you aren’t competent at your job already, you need to get there – fast.  Taking steps to understand areas of the role that you haven’t previously mastered, admitting your blind spots, and having a growth mindset will not only increase your competency, but make explicit to your team that competency matters to you.

But those are just the foundation for being a trusted leader.  If you want to achieve the productivity that come to teams with high levels of trust, you need to check the ethical or moral domain of trust:  your motives, your means and your impact.

Motives:  Motives are the “why” behind what you do.  Every leader has to make trade-offs that will serve the interests of some stakeholders over the interests of others.  Be aware of the tradeoffs you make, and be explicit with your team on why you’re making those tradeoffs.  Talking through your decisions – such as why you are coming down on the side of employees over the needs of customers – not only help your team understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, but also help them learn how you expect them to make decisions going forward.  If one of your explanations sounds self-serving, then it probably is.  Your team will likely notice that whether you say it aloud or not – and their trust may be the price you pay.

Means.  What rules exist for your organization and your team?  How do you get things done?  For instance, how do vacation or shift schedules get determined?  Do the department favorites pick their spots first and others get what’s leftover?  How are outcomes — such as sales — achieved?  In any manner possible?  Or only through an honest, collaborative sales process?  The “how” of how things get done and how rules get made is a key driver of trust.

Impact.  What impact do you and your decisions have on those around you?  Whether your impact is intended or not, you need to acknowledge and take responsibility for that impact in order to earn the full trust of those who work for you.

Next time you feel trust is lacking, run down this list of components – and then put your effort in to rebuilding and regaining the trust of your team.

*Ideas for this blog taken from: Sucher, S. J. and Gupta, S.  “Leading with Trust,” Harvard Business Review online, July 17, 2019.  Their book The Power of Trust:  How Companies Build It, Lose It, and Regain It is out July 6, 2021.

Recent research reported in California Management Review* gives us hope!  It encourages us to beef up our feeling skills.

That’s right:  “All the feels” may soon pay off at work.

The Feeling Economy is on the horizon.  The new research explains that as computational power and artificial intelligence (AI) implementation across all fields increases, we are entering a new economy “in which the feeling tasks of jobs, such as communicating / coordinating with others and establishing / maintaining interpersonal relationships, are becoming more important for human workers than the thinking tasks of jobs.”*

Using a US Department of Labor database, the authors examined 41 tasks that have been used by economists to track the nature of work for several decades.  This research categorized each task as either a mechanical, thinking or feeling task and then looked at how the importance of those tasks to the various jobs had changed from 2006 to 2016.

What they found was that (not surprisingly) the importance of mechanical tasks decreased over that time and the importance of thinking tasks had increased a little.  But the surprise to many of us is that the importance of feeling tasks grew substantially.  Specifically, as firms turn over more and more of the thinking tasks to AI systems, the need for humans to do the feeling tasks is increased.

What’s a feeling task?  Here’s an example of a few:

• Developing and building teams
• Guiding, directing, and motivating subordinates.
• Establishing and maintaining interpersonal relationships.
• Assisting and caring for others.

These are tasks that will take decades to train machines to do.   So for now, firms are relying more heavily on humans to do these things, and leaving the thinking to the bots.

What are the implications for you, as a human (we’re assuming), an employee, and a manager?

• Your next co-worker may be a computer – embrace that and learn to work with it as you would any teammate. Help it do the right thinking while you focus on posing the right questions and communicating the outcomes to others in your organization.
• Look for ways to optimize job and task allocation across people and your firm’s artificial intelligence capabilities, based on what they’re each good at: Feeling and thinking, respectively.
• As your organization’s AI capabilities scale up, be sure you’re hiring for people skills (feeling) more and thinking (or at least, hard quant skills) less.
• Emotions have been a key element of strong brands for some time; this will continue to grow as the thinking aspect of value creation becomes more commoditized. Revisit your brand strategy to make sure you’re creating and appealing to the feelings that customers will increasingly value.

Want to increase your Feeling Economy readiness?  Consider exploring some of Daniel Goleman’s work on Emotional Intelligence.  Or to develop higher-level interpersonal and leadership skills, enroll in a course on Leadership & Influence.  Here’s one developed by faculty at the Robert H. Smith School of Business.  Leverage your natural, human, feeling talents!

*Huang, M., Rust, R., and Maksimovic, V.  “The Feeling Economy:  Managing in the Next Generation of Artificial Intelligence,” California Management Review, August 2019, pp. 43-65.