Professional Ethics: Building Your Success on Honor and Integrity

By Jacquelyn Lynn

In today's business world, trust is hard to earn, easy to lose and, once lost, extremely difficult if not impossible to regain. According to Randy G. Pennington, president of the Dallas-based Pennington Performance Group, growing consumer skepticism is sending businesspeople a clear message.

"Organizations must maintain the trust of their customers, employees, suppliers and communities if they hope to succeed," Pennington says. "And to do that, they must ensure the integrity of their products, services and relationships."

Is success without integrity possible? That depends, Pennington says, on how you define success, and how long you want your run to be. If your goal is strictly to make money and you're out for a quick buck, integrity might not be an essential element of your operation. But if your vision is a solid organization with a stable future, the opposite is true.

"The history of business shows that it's highly unlikely that you can be successful long-term without integrity," he says. "And if you're looking at the long-term, you can't survive without the trust of other people." Integrity, he adds, is more than just ethics. "Integrity goes beyond a belief in moral principles to guide all aspects of personal and organization performance."

Owners, managers and employees are faced daily with ethical dilemmas for which there are no easy answers. Complicating the issue is the fact that not all the companies and individuals you compete against adhere to the same high standards. "It takes a lot more effort to compete ethically," Pennington says.

Within an organization, one solution is to articulate the company's values and ethics in a policy statement, and use that statement both as an operations guide and a marketing tool. "While we all believe in doing the right thing, our perceptions of what the right thing is can differ between individuals," Pennington says. "A statement clearly sets the standard and then communicates that standard internally to employees and externally to customers."

Of course, no single policy statement can be expected to cover every possible specific situation. The line between appropriate and inappropriate behavior is often fuzzy. For example, when is entertaining clients a relationship-building exercise, and when is it an attempt to unduly influence a purchasing decision? To help resolve ethical dilemmas, Pennington suggests holding your decision to the glaring light of publicity. Ask yourself how you would feel if your actions were reported on the front page of the newspaper.

When if comes to your employees, be prepared to deal swiftly and decisively with any violation of your values statement, but temper your action with understanding. "I ask people to distinguish between mistakes of the head and mistakes of the heart," Pennington says. "Is this a mistake of the head-meaning that my heart was in the right place, but I just didn't think about what I was doing. Or is it a mistake of the heart, which means my heart was not in the right place and I knew I was intentionally being dishonest or violating the company's values, or being unethical."

Understanding the true motivation of the behavior helps you determine what action to take. "A mistake of the heart means you probably don't want that person around," Pennington says. "If it's a mistake of the head, you want to talk about it and learn from it."

When your organization does experience an ethical lapse, it's not the end of the world; recovery is possible. Begin by admitting what you've done to the affected parties. "Admit it openly to all those concerned," Pennington urges. "Take responsibility, then immediately put a plan in place to correct the situation."

Of course, you may not be able to totally repair the damage. Pennington compares it to a marriage when infidelity has occurred; the relationship may survive, but it will never be exactly the same. Rebuilding trust takes time and effort-something you should consider before you take an ethical risk.

The final word on the issue of ethics and values is the bottom line. People want to do business with people and companies they trust-and without customers, no business can survive, and without buyers and sellers, no real estate investor can survive.

Jacquelyn Lynn (www.jacquelynlynn.com) is a business writer based in Orlando , Florida.