Tag: The Ethics Institute

As part of the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants’ (SAICA) month-long focus on ethics, we have contributed valuable insights during a webinar on how a good ethical culture is the enabling environment for every activity of the enterprise, how it enhances the quality of all resources, and how it is the regenerative source for an organisation’s trust capital.

If there’s any situation that’s going to show your true colours, it’s a crisis. Sticking to your values during a crisis is vital. It is important to navigate your way through the COVID-19 crisis, successfully and with integrity. As part of SAICA's new Leadership in a Time of Crisis series, I highlighted the importance of leading ethically during these difficult times. 

We should get some strategy consultants to draw up a set of values that we can post on the walls. Ask them to include the usual suspects - integrity, fairness, honesty, excellence, a passion for customers - and perhaps some cool phrase like ‘at this company we make magic’, ‘losing is not an option’ or ‘we make it happen!’. That should take care of the ethics thing that everybody is getting so worked up about.

Many organisations are reluctant to manage their ethics performance. Why? When leading practice has moved beyond the question of whether ethics can actually be ‘managed’ (taking it as given that it can), and huge efforts are underway getting the ‘how’ of ethics management right as well, it seems perverse to ignore this aspect of organisational life.

South Africa’s current woes are in large part a result of a large-scale breakdown in ethics (both personal and professional) and good governance practices. One only needs to look at the goings-on at Steinhoff, KPMG, Eskom, SARS and VBS Bank to see the impact that unethical behaviour, large scale looting and unchecked business practices have had on the South African economy and on South Africans, whose confidence in the leadership of this country and those in business is at an all-time low.

In an ideal world, successful private companies would distribute their wealth responsibly among stakeholders. Instead, many companies allow the unchecked pursuit of financial success to distort their thinking and their values, leading to extremes of wealth accumulation. In our materialistic society, displaying financial success is accepted, even overtly encouraged. However, many such habits lead to a deadly culture of arrogance and a (barely concealed) disdain for those who are less successful.

The need for ethical leadership is much clearer and more urgent now than it has ever been since the dawn of the new South Africa. Unfortunately, it took massive corruption to elevate the importance of ethical leadership in the public consciousness, and so the cost has been high to get us to this level of awareness.