Skills to look for in an ethical leader

Curious leaders can be disruptive, revolutionary leaders – if they’re open to new, uncomfortable and challenging ways of working and living.

Humility

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Humility is the sister of curiosity – and we should never try to develop one without the other. Humility, particularly intellectual humility, enables leaders to be open to the possibility that they’re wrong; that their habitual way of doing things is not the only way, nor is it the best way. Humility also protects leaders – and the people they impact – from the “great man” model of leadership, whereby leaders believe that great social change happens because of a leader’s force of will alone. Ego is the enemy of ethical leadership, which means we need to cultivate leaders who are able to take themselves out of the picture and focus on the people who need them and the problem that needs to be solved.

Care

When you ask someone to describe a person they admired growing up – maybe a parent, teacher, or a friend – it’s unlikely that they’ll describe how competent or successful that person was. What they’re likely to talk about is how the person genuinely cared about them.

Leaders should bear this in mind for two reasons. First, leaders who care are leaders who listen – particularly to the experiences of those who have been negatively affected by a difficult decision. I’ve seen plenty of leaders make decisions that disadvantage one group of people, with good reasons, but who have failed to show that they care about the group who have been disadvantaged. So many ethical problems occur not because the wrong decision was made, but because the way that decision was announced and executed left people feeling disrespected, left behind or alone.

What’s more, leaders who care are invested. Investors use the term “moral hazard” to describe situations where one party holds all the financial risk if something goes wrong. The party with no risk – or no moral hazard – isn’t likely to care about the outcome one way or the other, as they have no real stake in what’s happening. Leaders can find themselves in a similar situation – the choices they make won’t affect them personally, which can mean they fail to properly consider all the relevant variables. True care is an emotional investment – it gives a leader some reason to be rigorous and careful about the decisions they make, and makes the people affected feel understood, even if they don’t get the outcome they’d like.

Trustworthiness

There’s a lot of talk about trust at the moment. Organisations, governments and leaders want to “build trust”. They hire consultants to measure how much people trust them and to give them a “trust score”. But often they’re not paying enough attention to the reasons why people trust or don’t trust them.

People trust for all kinds of different reasons, so if we’re being trusted for bad reasons, then the trust we’ve built is a dodgy asset – it’s not as valuable as we think.

Instead, leaders need to aim to be trustworthy. That means thinking about whether they’re being trusted for good reasons. Trustworthy leaders don’t rely on authority or status for their legitimacy, they prove their leadership credentials by being open about what they’re doing and the reasons why.

It’s important to remember that by the time leaders are facing a crisis, it’s too late to be developing these skills. Our social and moral lives are full of competing, contradictory beliefs, ideas and values – developing the ethical clarity that helps us get past all this noise to make careful, reasonable and just decisions takes time.

That means even as we work through today’s crisis, we need leaders – today’s and tomorrow’s – to be putting in the work to ensure they’re ready for the moral tests that lie ahead.

Matt Beard is an ethicist and program director of the Vincent Fairfax Fellowship at Cranlana Centre for Ethical Leadership.