Zoo York is a style and social philosophy inspired by the New York City graffiti art subculture of the 1970s. Its name originates from a subway tunnel running underneath the area of the Central Park Zoo. This tunnel, called the Zoo York Tunnel, or simply "Zoo York," was a haunt of very early "old school" graffiti writers who hung out with the hippies around the Central Park Bandshell in the late-1960s and 1970s.


Q: Can being ethical increase a company's bottom line?
A: I think in a lot of ways. Not in the sense that you can say, we can do factor analysis or some research and show the precise contribution. But if you are treating your employees in a way that they really understand -- and is full of respect, honesty and candor -- they're more likely to give 110%. If the values are clear in the company, employees are more likely to be able to cope with change because they aren't quite so threatened by it and because they understand the underlying values.

As far as customers are concerned, if you are faithful to your promises, if you build that sense of trust, you are more likely to retain your customers.

Q: What are the most common ethical problems that managers face?
A: There's a variety. But the heart of a lot of them is understanding the degree of responsibility. How far does one go in resolving an issue if an employee has a problem or if a customer has a problem?

Conflict of interest is also big one, in terms of making decisions about meals, gifts, entertainment, or personal investments, and things like that. There are also fairness issues in dealing with employees, whether it's legal things like sexual harassment, or just more generally the climate and the way in which people are dealt with. How far do you go down the road with an employee that you've counseled to improve their performance?

With customers, often the big issue is figuring out what it really means to be honest, given the nature of the product or the nature of the marketing process in that particular industry. What's puffery and what's a lie?

Q: How can managers think about resolving some of these issues? Do you have any blanket advice?
A: There are a few general things. First, it helps to have some clear values that are tied to the nature of the business. It's important to know what you're in the business to do and to know your operating values, be they efficiency, quality, or whatever.

Second, it helps to have clear policies. For example, you can argue about what the rules should be for what you're going to accept and what you can't accept when it comes to meals and gifts. But if you have a rule, even if it seems arbitrary, it's a common rule for everybody. Then you can deal with it.

That leads to a third thing, which is having processes in place that encourage and enable people to raise questions. You want people to escalate issues so they don't just make a judgment on their own. If they're not sure what the right thing to do is, they ask for help.

Q: What are some of the main reasons that people do unethical things?
A: The common assumption is probably wrong -- that the biggest reason is that people are greedy and unethical. You do have some people who are bad apples. But I don't think that's what really drives it. More often, people are wearing what I call loyalty blinders. That is, employees become too loyal to a narrow goal in the organization. They get so locked in on that that they forget the larger world and the constraints on their behavior. They do what they shouldn't do. They cut corners.

What drives that, in my experience, particularly in recent years, is the relentless pressure of publicly held companies for quarterly results. There's the perception of this huge pressure to meet goals. The perception sometimes is, "I have to do anything I can to achieve that." And that's why, I think, it becomes so important to have these explicit ethics programs. They counterbalance those business pressures.

Q: Is ethics training a one-shot deal or is it something that should occur over time?
A: I think, if you're starting from scratch at a company, you start with some kind of an initial one-shot awareness-building training. It gets people to understand the message. You can use some cases to get employees thinking about the decision-making process.

Over time, you do more specific technical training. If there are certain legal requirements in a department, you might discuss those. Or there may just be special issues for people in sales or in human resources.

Then you want to do refreshers for all employees on a regular basis. And as you do that, over time you begin to build from a more specific focus on sort of business practices and ethics and code of conduct out to the larger values.

I encourage mid-level managers to lead a lot of the ethics training discussions with assistance of a trainer. That way, the message is seen as not coming only from the ethics types. In the long-term, the training might look less and less like formal training and more and more like just an integrated part of what the organization does.

Q: Can you give me an example of an ethical dilemma that manager might have to resolve and how ethics training could help?
A: Let's say that you have a manager who is responsible for providing incentives to his or her salesforce. There might be an unintended consequence of one of those incentives that the organization hasn't looked at. It may be setting up a kind of a conflict that the company didn't anticipate between what it's selling in sales over here, and what it can deliver over here in manufacturing. Or it may create a conflict with how the company wants to deal with its customers. So, the training may raise everyone's awareness.
 
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