Understanding Ethical Failures in Leadership

Terry L. Price's new book, Understanding Ethical Failures in Leadership (Cambridge University Press, 2006), provoked in me a great deal of thinking about what is behind the ethical failures of elected and appointed municipal officials. I will be talking in terms of officials, but Price speaks only in terms of leaders in general, with an emphasis on governmental leaders.

His central thesis is that such ethical failures are fundamentally cognitive rather than volitional, that is, they come not out of selfishness or will, but out of mistaken beliefs and limited knowledge. His interest is especially in how mistaken moral beliefs are less about content (is this right or wrong?), but about scope (does this moral obligation apply to me, to us, to them?).

Thus, officials do things they would not approve of others doing, because they believe they are different in many ways. Much of the book looks at how leaders justify their actions to themselves and, often, to others. Municipal officials tend to justify themselves in the name of a group of people, whether it is their circle of supporters, their followers in a more general sense, the community, or society as a whole. Officials also make exceptions of themselves in the name of particular goals, goals they feel will better their community. In doing so, they often lose sight of other moral considerations, particularly the morality of the means they use to try to attain these goals. An important question here is whether it is any worse for politicians to focus on their self-interests (from direct financial benefits to furthering their career) than on the interests of a particular group (whether it be class, social, partisan, professional, or ethnic) or particular goals (e.g., a particular development, getting the budget passed). Considering this brings into question the morality of representative democracy as it is usually conceived: competing politicians representing competing interests within the community rather than the community as a whole.

The central unethical acts of a municipal official -- deception, manipulation, secrecy, intimidation, suppression of dissenting views -- are often supported, or even expected, by followers. Thus, any guilt or shame officials might feel is often offset by feelings of pride and conscientiousness in working hard to attain group goals. Politics is, after all, a team sport, although Price does not present it this way. People tend to overestimate their team's goals and underestimate the costs of their actions to others. And officials tell themselves that everyone does it, that if they don't do it, they'll lose the game, and "doing the right thing" would not only let their side down, but also undermine the respect others have for them and, therefore, their ability to get things done.

In addition, success (getting elected, attaining goals, getting away with unethical conduct) tends to inflate a belief in a leader's ability to control outcomes and conceal actions and their effects, that is, to cover up wrongs that are done. This makes officials believe not only that they can continue to get away with unethical conduct, but that is not unethical under the circumstances, but instead necessary.

Officials (and their followers) also tend to believe that they have personal characteristics that differentiate them from average citizens, whether it be drive, initiative, or expertise, technical, political, or managerial, and that therefore they know better and may ignore, deceive, or manipulate others, especially those who wrongly oppose them. And they often believe that because they are faced with extraordinary demands and situations, and because so many people depend on them, they are forced to do extraordinary things to accomplish their goals. These beliefs together form a feeling of entitlement, a special kind of arrogance that underlies much unethical conduct.

The typical response to moral criticism is, "you don't understand." That should set off an alarm. This not only shows disrespect for constituents, but is very often a sign of denial, of refusing to think through a problem ethically rather than technically or in terms of effectiveness. And when we find ourselves excusing unethical conduct in municipal officials, that should also set off an alarm: we are enabling their denial, accepting that it's okay not to think about the consequences of the means by which they seek to achieve their goals.

Price doesn't say this, but I think that we put officials in the position of parents, that the essence of the specialness they feel, the way they feel different rules apply to them, is similar to the way parents feel with respect to their children. When a resident lies or tells on an official, it's a crime; when an official lies or covers up wrongdoing, it's the way adults have to act in order to get things done. Officials are mature and knowledgeable, citizens naive and ignorant.

If, for all these reasons, municipal officials are indeed fallible in their application of moral considerations to themselves, what can they do to stop getting things wrong? They can become aware of their fallibility and, by looking at historical mistakes, learn what inclinations lead to ethical failure. This is one reason why ethics training is so important. Such awareness can lead them to question whether the way they try to attain even the best of goals is acceptable, whether there are other ways that will do less harm to those who are not followers, but merely citizens.

They can also work harder to explain to themselves and to the public why they have deviated from common moral requirements. Just as officials should explain clearly why they take a position on a particular issue (and not doing so is itself unethical, because it is goes against the basic democratic principle of accountability), they should also explain, at least after the fact, why they acted the way they did, why it was necessary to ignore common ethical principles to accomplish an important goal. If they cannot publicly justify their actions, then their actions were probably wrong. And when they do something they cannot justify, I would add, they should publicly apologize and do what they can to make up for it. In this way, the public can learn to trust municipal officials and to differentiate between which actions are morally justifiable and which are not. Denial of wrongful actions, as denial of conflicts of interest, leads to mistrust and undermines government effectiveness, requiring more manipulation to get anything done. It's an ugly spiral familiar to people in many cities across the country.

I will now go beyond Price's book. Municipal officials tend to forget that although they owe a great deal to those who voted for them, their principal obligation is to the public at large. This conflict between officials' obligations is rarely dealt with in ethics codes, but this is not due to its lack of importance or frequency. The reason is that political obligations, especially when parties are involved, are difficult to restrict through laws without restricting free expression. But that doesn't mean they are outside the realm of ethics. They can be dealt with in aspirational ethics codes, that is, in the purposes and goals section of an ethics code, where law gives way to ethics.

Another reason this sort of conflict is rarely addressed is that it usually does not involve money, and most ethics codes limit themselves to financial conflicts. And the press focuses its attention on where the money is going, not on what unethical acts are occurring. More attention, I feel, needs to be paid to non-financial conflicts, which is why an ethics code is not sufficient to create an ethical environment.

The improvement of an ethical environment is dependent on leadership. But it is also dependent on followers expecting less loyalty from leaders, and giving their leaders less rope to play with. Just as officials should question themselves more, knowing that they will tend to make exceptions of themselves where they should not, their supporters should do the same.

One section of Price's book that seemed right on point with respect to what I've seen of municipal government is his discussion of Irving Janis's book Groupthink. Especially in a divisive atmosphere, officials strive for a wall of unanimity rather than realistically and openly appraising and leading discussions about alternative courses of action. To the outside world, it seems that their only concern is getting away with doing what they want to do with as little trouble as possible (and they tend to treat dissenters as troublemakers, as the cause of divisiveness rather than an important part of the democratic process). Janis wrote, "The more amiability and esprit de corps among the members of a policy-making in-group, the greater is the danger that independent critical thinking will be replaced by groupthink, which is likely to result in irrational and dehumanizing actions directed against out-groups." And this sort of groupthink tends to blind leaders to the immorality of decision-making processes (particularly elements of fairness, respect, and equality), and it leads to the exclusion of or even the suppression of outsiders.

I will end my first blog entry with a quote from Price's book: "What we can expect of leaders ... is that they acknowledge one of the preconditions of public life in a liberal [theory-wise, not re political views], democratic society: the capacity of people other than themselves to make determinations of justification."

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired
City Ethics, Inc.