When reading about ‘big business’ or perhaps banking, it can sometimes seem that leadership in large commercial organisations means working outside ‘normal’ ethics and beliefs, and operating in some kind of parallel world, where the only value that matters is how much money you’ve made. “The end justifies the means”, goes the saying.
More and more businesses and other organisations are recognising the value of ‘ethical leadership’: leadership which depends on navigation by ‘moral compass’. And many people are also commenting that we might not be in quite the same global economic position had a few more people behaved more ethically.
Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, argues that leadership based on principles is not just a good thing, but essential.
He says that effective people live their lives and manage their relationships not around priorities but according to a series of natural laws, such as fairness, justice and integrity.
These values have underpinned life, both personal and business, for thousands of years, and continue to be crucial.
Natural laws, based on principles, operate regardless of our awareness of them or our obedience to them.
Stephen Covey, Principle-Centred Leadership
The Importance of Natural Laws
These natural laws or principles have been around for centuries. You might even describe them as the foundation of civilisation.
They surface in the ideas of religions, such as kindness, helping others, justice, fairness and equity, and some of them also run very deep. You have only to hear a child’s heartfelt howl of “It’s not fair!” to understand this.
Indeed, there is plenty of research that suggests that for most of us, it’s not so much how much we’re getting in absolute terms, as that we’re getting ‘our fair share’.
See our page: Justice and Fairness for more information.
Covey believes that we instinctively trust those whose lives are based on these principles of natural justice, fairness and equity. That may be because values, beliefs and principles are relatively hard to change, so we instinctively understand that those who demonstrate these natural law-based principles will be trustworthy.
You can change the way you behave relatively easily, but not the values that underlie that behaviour, and which are underpinned by these principles.
Resource: skillsyouneed.com
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