Changing Business Ethics Starts By Changing Beliefs
“Are the business work ethics and values in your organization suffering? Would you like to improve these critical skills necessary for business success? Consider, then looking at the beliefs that are supporting these values and ethics.First, let’s take care of some logistical issues so to speak. You must have a written values statement that is explained to all new employees when they hire in. This values statement must be demonstrated by everyone to everyone, both internal and external customers (employees and clients).
Your employees must be held accountable for their ethical behavior or lack thereof. There must no be any exceptions because exceptions only reaffirm the current internal belief systems of your employees. These belief systems started why back in school or within the family when so and so received special treatment.
Then and only then can you begin to address the real obstacle to changing business ethics – the foundational belief systems of everyone within your company. And, no, by belief systems I am not referring to spiritual or religious beliefs even though they may be part of this overall system. But, rather, belief systems are the mental schema from which we take action regarding current events.
Every human being has a foundational belief system. This system is comprised on 3 key elements: Knowledge, experience and emotions.
In the 1960’s a Swiss developmental psychologist by the name of Jean Piaget released his findings from a comprehensive study of his children in how they learned. Many so called other professional psychologists debunked his study because of the limited pool. Yet, Piaget revealed a lot about how we as humans make sense of what we are exposed to within what we call learning.
Human beings learn by matching new knowledge with existing experiences with the goal to make sense of it or learn it. If for some reason, the new knowledge does not make sense, the human being casts it off and learning was not successful. This is why some young people or adults get it while others do not.
Within our belief systems, we have learned knowledge and hopefully have grown through these experiences. Yet, without understanding the impact of emotions within this process, is where many miss the boat.
For example, how we felt about our experiences is very much ingrained within our memory. My father modeled reading and showed great emotion when sharing a favorite book or explaining something he learned. I became an avid reader for two reasons: His physical modeling of reading and the emotional joy from reading. Therefore, I embraced a belief reflected through an attitude demonstrated by my behaviors that reading was an incredibly good thing and had tremendous value.
My mother on the other hand did not enjoy reading. Consequently, my younger sister saw my mother’s behavior and to this day she is not a great reader because she truly does not enjoy it. Her belief is that reading is not as valuable as my belief. In neither case, no one is wrong or right, but the belief needs to be identify.
A recent survey released by PopCap Games demonstrates how beliefs affect business ethics. The results of this survey suggested that white collar executives believed it was OK to waste up to 1 hour per day playing video games while on the clock. Their reasons for several from needing some down time to just relaxing. However, their beliefs were telling them that is was Okay to take this time away from the company. Again, until you identify the beliefs, you will not change behaviors.
There are many more examples regarding the impact of belief systems on business ethics. People for the most part know what they need to do to get to where they want to go. However, until the beliefs which are reflected through attitudes are changed, your people will still not want to change. And it is this want to which ultimately drives business ethics.
P.S. And if you do not believe that beliefs are the key to changing behaviors, how many times in a day do you hear someone use the word believe or belief compared to know?
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Tags: business, ethics, corporate, code, managing
