7 Lenses

Linda Fisher Thornton: Well, it's definitely not any one thing. It's much bigger than any one simple definition could describe. After several years of researching the question of why there wasn't one accepted definition and why people couldn't agree on what it meant, I discovered that, in our global society, what we call "ethical leadership" is actually a continuum of different perspectives, and understanding the whole continuum helps us see our choices in a broader context.

So it's not any one piece, it's a bigger puzzle, and we need to see the whole thing to make good choices. So over time our understanding of good leadership is really evolving, to mean leadership centered in values. After doing this research, I've made it my life's work to help people see those values and learn how to apply them.

Rachel Salaman: And, from your work, how well understood is the idea of ethical leadership in companies of all sizes today?

Linda Fisher Thornton: Well, as you might expect, the level of understanding varies widely, especially because we haven't had a multidimensional definition in the past and people have been using oversimplified definitions, such as "ethical leadership is character," for example. So it depends on the company's leaders and how well those leaders can handle complexity, while at the same time staying true to ethical values. People have to make it a priority to keep their thinking skills sharp as the world changes.

Rachel Salaman: We're going to be talking about your book, "7 Lenses," and early on in that you discuss the business advantage of ethical leadership. Now, just to be clear, you're not suggesting that leaders adopt an ethical stance in order to boost business, are you, because that doesn't sound very ethical.

Linda Fisher Thornton: That's a great question. No, actually I'm trying to apply the carrot approach instead of the stick approach. I'm tired of people always talking about the ethical penalties and punishments and all the bad things that happen when you make mistakes.

Ethics isn't supposed to be negative. It's only negative when you get it wrong, when you violate those ethical principles, as there are many amazing positive benefits of applying ethical values that I think people need to know about, because it helps them move ethical learning up in their priorities and it lets them know there will be a return on the investment if they take the time to invest in that learning.

Every year there's more research that tells us ethical leadership drives organizational success in some really powerful ways, including attracting top talent, keeping people engaged, increasing job satisfaction, improving productivity, and improving profitability. So I'm not suggesting they do it just to boost business, but I am letting them know that intentional and consistent ethical leadership provides companies a competitive advantage, so I think that helps them take the journey.

Rachel Salaman: Now, in your book you describe these seven lenses of ethical responsibility, and then how to use them, with 14 guiding principles in four categories. So why did you organize the book that way?

Linda Fisher Thornton: It's a very interesting story, how it got organized that way, so I'm glad you asked about that. It's a lot of complex information that I was wanting to make very clear and simple, but the real story is I wrote the 14 guiding principles first and they were going to be the book, and the book had a completely different title.

But at the same time I had been working on a graphic of the dimensions of ethical responsibility, and I had not planned to include that in the book, and I had five dimensions identified but I knew it wasn't finished, so I put it aside, to go back to and finish it later. However, in the process of writing the 14 guiding principles, I figured out the last two dimensions of ethical responsibility and realized that I had seven lenses, and that the lenses would make the concepts so much easier to learn and remember as people were trying to understand ethical leadership.

So we added the seven lenses to the book and changed the name to "7 Lenses," really just in the last few weeks of editing the book, and the decision to do that has proven to be powerful because these lenses resonate with people and they find that it's easy for them to remember them. There are seven of them and there's the same number of digits in a local telephone number here, so they can remember it when they're in the middle of a situation, they can remember these different perspectives to think through.

Rachel Salaman: Well, let's talk about them in a bit more detail now, starting with the first one, which is a little bit surprising – it's the profit lens, the idea that businesses have an ethical responsibility to make money. So can you elaborate on that?

Linda Fisher Thornton: It is a little bit surprising to have a profit lens in a book on ethical leadership, but it's through the profit lens we can see the financial impact of our choices. So at its best, ethics requires setting aside concerns about money and personal gain and doing what's best for others. But leaders in business, government, education, nonprofit, any industry, also have to keep their organizations afloat, and that requires that they think about the money, so it is part of the bigger picture of balancing out all the variables.

Rachel Salaman: Well, the law lens comes next, with its key question: how can we avoid punishment and penalties? So what makes that an ethical question rather than a simple matter of abiding by regulations?

Linda Fisher Thornton: That's another great question. You're right that avoiding punishment isn't the most ethical approach, but there are different ways to think about the law. I believe that laws are the minimum standards of acceptable behavior in a society, because if we break the law we're punished or fined or there's a penalty for that, so they're really the floor, the minimum standard.

So in the strictest interpretation of this law lens, you could use it as a self-interested interpretation of following laws, and you could say, "Well, I'll follow that law but I'll still look for a loophole to make more money," or for personal gain.

But there's a better way to think about laws that's more "other" focused, and that is that they're really just rules for upholding ethical values, and there are values behind every law but they're not written in. So, for example, companies have to follow laws about assault and battery, we can't hit each other in the workplace, but the values behind these laws would include things like respecting human rights and dignity and respecting others.

So the values aren't written into the laws, so you have to figure out what they are, to interpret the laws at a more ethical level, but when you use a values-based interpretation of the law you reach for honoring the values behind the laws, which are at a much higher level than just the laws themselves, which are the floor, the minimum standards of behavior.

Rachel Salaman: Let's talk about the third lens now, which is the character lens. You mentioned character a little bit earlier – could you explain this one?

Linda Fisher Thornton: Character is one of the lenses that people are most familiar with in terms of the terms we use. This one includes moral awareness, keeping up as the world changes, and thinking about your impact on others, broadly, and also being guided by a moral compass, so using personal integrity.

This is about our personal ethics, using a guidance system that's morally grounded, and it's been called lots of different things, but whatever you call it, it is the personal aspect of ethics and keeping ourselves competent and ready to handle whatever's going on in our work and in our world.

Integrity is a word that appears in many company ethics statements, and one of the things that companies have to do is they have to explain what they mean by that and they have to expand on that, to say, "What are the things that that means in our organization?"

But moral awareness is a real game changer in ethics, because if you say, "I'm going to keep up as the world changes," then it takes your ethical decisions to a much higher level and it keeps you on the cutting edge of how ethical expectations are changing.

Rachel Salaman: I suppose you have to have a conscious commitment to it, rather than just coasting and assuming you're doing it right?

Linda Fisher Thornton: That's absolutely right. Some leaders think the same old thing they've always done is going to work for them, but it's the same old leadership in a completely new environment and it can cause more harm than good if they don't keep up.

Rachel Salaman: Well, let's talk about the next two lenses together. These are the people lens and the community lens. What do these concern?

Linda Fisher Thornton: We are moving beyond profit, law and character – these are more about the self, and we're moving to others. And when we look at the people lens, lens four, this is respect and care for individuals, for people in the workplace or in the community, preventing harm to people, and at the group and organizational level it's also, importantly, about full inclusion and respect for differences.

So people from all cultures and all backgrounds, all types of people, that the workplace works for everyone and everyone can do their best work. There are many companies who are striving for that type of environment, where everyone feels respected and can do their best work.

Then the communities lens is taking that a little broader, to contribute to healthy communities, and this might be things like improving availability of food or clean water, or improving libraries or parks, and companies will involve employees in volunteering in community service.

This doesn't just help the communities but it helps the employees grow in their understanding, their ethical awareness, when they help others who may not be as fortunate as they are, and they contribute to improving lives for others. So it helps them grow, so it's mutually beneficial.

Rachel Salaman: And then, moving on to the last two lenses, which are also somewhat related, these are the planet lens and the greater good lens. So could you tell us a bit about these, and how they differ from each other?

Linda Fisher Thornton: Sure. The planet lens, lens six, is about respecting and caring for life, nature and ecosystems, and that includes how we use natural resources, the sustainable decisions that we make when we're ordering supplies, for example.

Through the planet lens we look at an acre of trees and we see more than the money we could make by just selling them for timber. We see their value in providing clean air for communities, we see them as part of a bigger ecosystem that we humans rely on for our survival, so now we're using a very long-term view and protecting our natural environment for the future.

Then lens seven, the greater good, this is the highest level and longest-term of all of the lenses. This is about making life better for future generations, 100 years from now or more, and these two lenses differ in their focus but they're both looking at the long-term impact over a very long period of time, and it's powerful.

Now if you think about what we get when we look through all seven of these perspectives, as we look at our daily choices, and then balance them out, how do we balance out all the pieces of this puzzle, and we can only make good decisions about that once we see all the pieces that we're dealing with.

Rachel Salaman: So can you tell us a little bit more about how these seven lenses relate to one another?

Linda Fisher Thornton: So looking through one lens when you make decisions isn't going to show you the whole picture, and that's what many leadership theorists have been doing in the past, talking about leadership as character or leadership as sustainability; it is those things, but it's also other things.

So just looking through the profit lens, a company might produce products that aren't safe so they can make more money, but the importance of safety isn't seen until you move to the next three lenses: following safety laws, lens two; demonstrating good character, lens three, and moral awareness; and lens four, showing respect and care for people. So it turns out that we really need a kaleidoscopic view of ethical leadership to accurately deal with the complexity of our challenges.

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Rachel Salaman: A large part of your book deals with how leaders can apply these lenses to their day-to-day decision making. The first group of principles is "lead with a moral compass." How pliable is a person's moral compass generally? In other words, if you aren't brought up with one, are they easy to acquire?

Linda Fisher Thornton: Well, moral development isn't like physical development, it doesn't just happen without continued learning. So the minute we stop learning and become entrenched in our position then we start making ethical mistakes without even being aware of it.

So this moral center that we cultivate throughout our lives helps us make good choices in interactions with other people, and it reminds us that we need to think beyond our own interests, to consider the long-term well-being of other people and society, and it reminds us that how we treat people is an ethical choice and that it shows our ethics through how we treat people on a day-to-day basis.

So this first quadrant, lead with a moral compass, is about showing personal congruence, being morally aware and staying competent as the world changes, and also about modeling the kind of performance and leadership that we expect from other people, so they know what it looks like.

Rachel Salaman: I suppose what sits behind the idea of a moral compass is a basic belief that one should try to do the right thing, and that's almost more than a moral compass, isn't it.

Linda Fisher Thornton: It's even seeing the need, really.

Rachel Salaman: Yes, exactly.

Linda Fisher Thornton: You're right, it's seeing the need for why we need to think beyond ourselves. It's agreeing that thinking beyond ourselves is important and doing the work necessary to be ready to manage that on a day-to-day basis, so that's a good observation.

Rachel Salaman: So tell us a bit more about the second category of tips then, which is "bring out the best in others."

Linda Fisher Thornton: Yeah, this quadrant is really important, because leaders want to attract the best talent, and that means they have to create a workplace that will bring out their best performance and potential, and people are becoming more choosy about where they want to work, in terms of the good leadership that they'll get while they're employed.

So behaviors we should see that would bring out the best in others would include respecting others, and that's not just individuals but also differences, respecting boundaries of appropriate behavior, trusting people and being trustworthy, communicating openly whatever we can share and communicating with transparency so that we don't have any hidden agenda, and then generating effective and ethical performance, so that we are making decisions and choices that help other people not only be productive and successful but also ethical.

Rachel Salaman: And in your experience, what do leaders find most difficult when they try to bring out the best in others in those ways, and what would make it easier for them?

Linda Fisher Thornton: Well one challenge that I see is that some leaders don't realize how important it is for them to model the expected performance that they expect from others. Some people think, "Oh well, I've risen to a level where that doesn't apply to me," but there's a danger in that.

Say, for example, if they slip out of an ethics training session early, they're sending the message, "It's not important." They should not be surprised then if employees treat whatever was covered in that session as not important.

So every action of the leader is sending a message, and an ethical leader who says something is important will also behave that way as well, make it important. So what makes this easier is if you master the first quadrant first: lead with a moral compass. If you say that the ethics training is important you have to back it up by attending it, behaving that way, showing that it's important to you. The principles, these principles, build on each other. If you skip even one, then, when you try to apply the principles in the higher quadrants, you will not be effective because there's a gap in the foundation.

Rachel Salaman: And then the third and fourth quadrants are "lead with positive intent and impact," and "lead for the greater good." So what are the highlights here for leaders and managers at all levels?

Linda Fisher Thornton: So these are the game-changing quadrants, and this is not in other ethical leadership models that I have seen. We need to be in charge of our thinking, there is a lot more research about how, as leaders, we decide what we're going to do often just based on our gut feeling, our emotions, and then reacting to a situation, and then we rely on our reasoning to justify why that was a good decision that we already made. And that's the wrong way to make an ethical decision, of course, because it doesn't put enough good thinking in place for people to consider all the different constituents involved.

So leading with positive intent and impact, the third quadrant, is calling attention to the point that what we think impacts what we do, and we need to be intentional about our thinking and not just make decisions on automatic pilot or based on our gut reaction to something without thinking it through more carefully, and looking at the context and our choices and all the different constituents.

So this third quadrant includes principles such as using ethical thinking and doing good without doing harm. Sometimes people try to fix things and do something good but they don't really think it through or research it well enough and they end up doing harm in another way.

Also, working for mutually beneficial solutions. At this point we are not talking about "win at all costs," we're not talking about "win-win," we're talking about a "win-win-win-win," you know, all the parties involved have to be finding benefit.

It takes more effort, absolutely it takes more effort, but now you're talking about higher-level leadership, being able to apply these principles in ways that benefit multiple parties, and this is where the power of this type of leadership comes through, because then these kinds of companies and leaders can build powerful partnerships with one another and really effect positive change in their organizations and in the world.

The final quadrant, lead for the greater good, is the high-level, long-term principles and thinking really far beyond ourselves to consider the good of life, nature, ecosystems, and future generations, making life better for the future, for people that we will never meet, you know, all over the world – people we don't know and we won't know, but deciding to leave things better than we found them. This is a really positive leadership legacy at this point, because you're trying to effect change and make things better than they were when you found them.

Rachel Salaman: Is there a hierarchy among your lenses, or are they all equally important?

Linda Fisher Thornton: I think it's easy to see that they're not created equal because some are really narrow, like profit and following laws, but others are broad and long term, like showing concern for the greater good, so it's a developmental journey, a human growth journey, and we're each somewhere on this continuum in terms of which lenses that we're incorporating into our thinking.

We've been talking about ethical leadership in the past, I believe at too simplistic a level, so using all seven lenses when we're making a choice we can get the real picture of what's going on in our organizations.

To explain this in a different way, leaders are not either ethical or unethical, and this is the language you may hear people using, you know, "That leader was unethical." Well there are seven dimensions of ethical leadership and a leader could be ethical in one or two and not in the others, or four or five and not the others.

For example, you could have a leader who is completely toxic with people, violating lens four, people, really bad at interpersonal behavior that is damaging for people, but that same leader could be a pillar of the community, right, they're active in community service, they are making a difference in the community.

So the journey to becoming an ethical leader is mastering all and not just a few of these lenses, and it's an invisible process, and I think about it as becoming the best version of ourselves as we master all of this and put it together, and it is a long-term learning journey.

Rachel Salaman: And it is a lot to remember, as well, for people who are coming to this maybe a little bit fresh. Would you be able to talk us through an example that shows how someone might apply your framework to a day-to-day management dilemma?

Linda Fisher Thornton: Absolutely. So let's say an employee comes to you complaining that her male colleague, who has less experience, is making more money than she is. So you put this through the seven lenses to understand the nuances of your decision on how to act in this situation.

So through lens one, profit, if you find that it's true and you have to increase her pay, it will cost your department more money.

So if you just look through the profit lens you'd say, "Oh no, I don't want to look into that because it's going to cost more money," but you have to move up to lens two, law, well of course there are laws requiring equal pay regardless of gender, so you're bound by those laws.

In addition to that, if you don't address the discrepancy in pay it could lead to a lawsuit that would potentially cost the company more than it would cost to just adjust her pay and make it fair.

So if we're going to fix this problem, that would honor the law lens, but it also might be good for profitability because it might save money if there were to be a lawsuit in the future. Looking through lens three, character, it would demonstrate good character and moral awareness, of course, to investigate and correct any problem with fairness, so we would want to honor the character lens by looking into it and adjusting.

Lens four, people, it would show respect for your employee and all other employees to quickly correct any problems with fairness in pay, that would just make it a better environment. Which leads us to lens five, communities: ensuring that the pay is fair will help build trust within your team and within the company, which will improve the workplace community.

Through lens six, planet, well you'll have to pull pay reports to check this out, so you want to be sure you don't print out any more than you have to, right, and maybe save your documentation electronically instead of in a paper file wherever you can.

Lens seven, the greater good, by showing commitment to pay equity and making corrections when they're needed, you're making your employee's future better in the long term, and you'll be sending a message that you care about people's short- and long-term success, and that might attract more good people who want to work at your company.

So we can look at this in a very long-term way: following the pay equity laws and making it equitable within your group will make life better for future generations, for future employees in your company. This framework makes it simple to get the whole picture before you proceed, and it helps us overcome that tendency to make a quick decision without really understanding what we're doing.

Rachel Salaman: Now of course it's great if leaders can get to grips with their moral code, but what about people at other levels? How important are ethics lower down an organization?

Linda Fisher Thornton: Well, every employee should be concerned about ethics and carefully protecting the organization's reputation. Many major ethical problems that we're seeing in the news are happening at the customer service level, where people are working directly with customers, even when their companies have said they're committed to the highest ethics and they want to treat everyone with respect, where that really counts is in the day-to-day interactions with customers.

So these values have to be lived out every day, in new situations that aren't going to be in the rule book, and there will always be gray areas not covered in the rules and how we handle those will really define our ethics and people's perception of our company. So I believe that honoring these values is important for everyone in the organization.

Rachel Salaman: And what can actually be done to spread an ethical mindset throughout an organization?

Linda Fisher Thornton: Yeah, values ground our work, but the application of those values is the most important, helping people interpret them and apply them in their work. So to be fully aligned in terms of its messages about ethics it needs to be managed as a performance system that's centered in these positive ethical values and a strong performance management system that's aligned.

So when I say, "We're hiring people who use good ethics," we're also communicating ethical expectations, teaching people how to apply them, reinforcing that message and holding people accountable if they make mistakes, and then helping them develop skills long term, so that they proactively know how to make good choices.

There are two different ways we can look at a culture: prevention or cure. The cure approach doesn't work because it is basically "ignore the problem." And then, when you have a major ethical scandal, then you get your ethical culture system in place, but it's really too late because the damage, marketing damage, has been done and your brand value is tarnished.

So prevention is the way to go, making this a priority before there's a problem and using it to prevent those kinds of things that make the headlines that all companies want to avoid.

Rachel Salaman: Linda Fisher Thornton, thanks very much for joining us today.

Linda Fisher Thornton: Thank you so much, it's been great to be here.

The name of Linda's book again is "7 Lenses: Learning the Principles and Practices of Ethical Leadership," and you can find out more about her and her work at her website, leadingincontext.com, where there are plenty of useful resources.

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.