The Five Steps You Must Follow to Create an Ethical Culture

How do you incentivise your team? And how do your measure your team’s performance? In most businesses, the answer to these questions will be hinge on growth, sales, or profits. However, as an advisor to global companies seeking to recover from the effects of major ethical scandals, I argue that this common approach to performance and reward is too narrow, and can create serious trouble in the long run for your business.

Every person and organisation has a ceiling to what they can achieve without starting to compromise their ethical practices and integrity. If growth, sales, and profits are the only measurements that truly matter, an environment of excessive pressure can result. When employees are pushed to an unrealistic degree, they can find themselves forced to cheat. And, as the sordid news headlines indicate, pervasive cheating inevitably gives rise to ethical scandals that can seriously damage an organization’s reputation for a long time.