Ethics – A Unique Competitive Advantage?

Ethics – A Unique Competitive Advantage?
In today’s massively competitive world, small businesses need every advantage we can get. Big businesses (especially public companies) are often focused on short term profits to please shareholders and Wall Street. That also means that they have to take short cuts in order to please their masters.

When one takes short cuts, ethics can become optional. Apparently Wall Street prefers short term profits over long-term results. Usually these tactics will catch up with the schemer(s). And their rear ends are handed to them in proper fashion (think Enron or even the current mortgage crisis).

The pressure for bigger companies to perform turns out to be an advantage for the small business entrepreneur. You see, we can decide to take the high road and act ethical in our decisions. In fact, we must. Often, we don’t have the budgets to absorb a poor decision. Small business entrepreneurs are usually one to two bad decisions from bankruptcy.

I run my business by ethics; not only because of the risk of the opposite, but because it just feels good. When you consistently act with integrity in all business dealings, the word gets around. Customers will want to do business with you and job seekers will want to work for your company. But the most important reason to be ethical (besides the highway to heaven) is internal. By acting ethically, your culture will shine with honesty. You’ll attract moral people and the aura of your highroad nature will guide the company’s decisions.

Once your employees see that you are uncompromising about your ethics, they will fall into place behind you. Believe me, it’s refreshing to see someone who talks the talk AND walks the walk.

But YOU have to set the example. There’s a Sicilian saying that translates to, “A fish rots from the head down,” meaning that if the leader is corrupt, so goes the whole organization.

A few years back, an employee of ours got caught doing some inappropriate things online at work. Other than this behavior, this person was a good employee. It would have been easy overlook this behavior because the good performance otherwise. But I didn’t hesitate in my decision. This person was fired at once.

Of course it was tough because I liked the person and it’s always a pain to hire, retrain, etc…. But I thought to myself, “What kind of message would I be sending to my team if I tolerated this behavior?” I would be telling them that rules and ethics can be bent if job performance is good.

No way. There is no gray area with ethics. The minute you bend the rules, you’ve just opened up your company culture’s Pandora’s Box.

Plus, when you’re ethical, it’s so much easier to sleep at night.