Ethical Behavior As a Team Endeavor

It would be easy to say that politics is a team sport, like football, while ethics is an individual sport, like tennis. But this simply isn't true. Both ethical behavior and unethical behavior can be done as a team.

Four years ago, in one of my first and most important blog posts, on ethical failures in leadership, I wrote that politics is a team sport, continuing as follows:

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.

This is one serious problem that arises from the team sport aspect of politics. But there are others. Most of the problems come from the way the team aspect of politics works on personal ethics, including the way compromising one's personal ethics over time tends to weaken those ethics, and the way being a part of the team tends to make it easier to justify one's conduct.

In a recent blog post on ethics environments, I touched on the team aspect of ethical behavior.

It is important to recognize that a poor ethics environment is everybody’s doing. If a mayor’s aides were to remind him that it is not professional to give a contract to his sister, because it would lessen the public’s trust in government, the mayor would likely not do it. A mayor who would go ahead and do it anyway has probably been enabled by silent aides and colleagues for years, that is, by others who are looking after their own personal interests, as well, without recognizing that, in the long run, being silent is against everyone’s interests.

Open Communication
Teams communicate. They communicate about everything, so that they understand what they are doing and can best work together. If one member of a football team doesn't understand a play, mistakes will be made. This is as true about the financial issues of budgets, the traffic issues of planning, and the legal issues of legislation, as it is about the ethical issues of contracts. Without a full, open discussion, mistakes will be made.

The big difference is that, in sports, everyone on a team wants to ensure that no mistakes are made (except, perhaps, those who just want to hog the limelight). In government, there are some people who want mistakes to be made, because they believe those mistakes will be in their interest or in the interest of those important to them personally or politically. These people do not want to discuss the local government's funding of pensions, the dangers of increased traffic near a school, or the conflicts between an ordinance and state law.

With government ethics, things are the same, or even worse. In many matters, there are individuals who can benefit from ethical considerations not being discussed. And when it comes to ethical considerations, few people (even those uninvolved) want to go there unless forced to by the press, the opposing party, or "some damn gadfly." One reason is that openly discussing ethics in department and board meetings, especially in public, seems so much more personal than discussing financial, traffic, and legal issues. But it doesn't have to be that way.

A department or board can incorporate ethics discussions into every meeting by, for example, making it an ordinary part of meetings to ask, at the beginning of the consideration of any matter, if anyone involved might have a conflict, and then to discuss each conflict and how to deal with it responsibly. This makes such discussions less personal, takes the burden off the individual, and teaches each individual the decision-making process to employ outside of meetings.

Done well, such regular discussions will lead to each individual making a decision before a matter is discussed, removing the need for lengthy discussions. But the opportunity to ask others' advice, and the comfort of having such matters treated as professional rather than personal, remains.

The Role of Subordinates
If this is done, it is also much easier for subordinates to both participate in ethics discussions involving superiors (who have the most conflicts) and to have their opinions respected. A mayor or department head cannot so easily dodge the ethics advice of his subordinates if this advice is formalized as a regular process.

A mayor or department head who realizes that she cannot rely on the usual silence, who knows there will be open consideration of her conflicts before they become public, will not only be far more likely to disclose her conflicts and recuse herself, but she will also be more likely not to allow avoidable conflicts to occur. For example, she will not get involved in a development if she knows she will not be allowed to use her office to help the development along, even indirectly via her aides. Nor will she encourage developers to get involved with her family members or to give her large campaign contributions.

On a football team, one player's inability to read the defense is not just a personal problem; it's a team problem. The same is true in government ethics, and the solution is the same:  talk about situations and how to read and solve them.

The Conflicted Official
Similarly, a government official with many conflicts is a liability, just as a slow football player is. No matter what the official's other talents are, no matter that everyone feels on balance the official is a help to the government, the conflicts remain a liability and they should be treated as such. Balancing expertise against conflicts doesn't mean that the conflicted official is always, on balance, useful. A planning commissioner who is a developer should not participate in every matter any more than a slow athlete should be used in every play. Sitting out can be best for the team.

In this case, the reason is that the planning commissioner's conflicts undermine trust in the planning commission. Despite what the planning commissioner may say, the planning commission, as a team, has an obligation to the public to recommend (or even require) recusal even when such a commissioner has a rather tenuous relationship with a party before the commission (for example, the commissioner has recently competed with the party with respect to a particular development project).

The best thing that can be done about the injurious aspects of politics as a team sport is to bring the best aspects of teamwork into government ethics.

What Sort of Team
This sort of teamwork does not arise out of just any sort of team. Sports teams work on an us-against-them ethic. This doesn't work in government, because the "them" is too often the public (and when the "them" is the other major party, the public interest is very often not the goal). When there is an enemy (that is, when people feel there is an enemy), open communication suffers. Ethical teamwork works best when there is no opponent.

Fear, however, is the principal enemy of open communication and ethical teamwork. There can be no ethical teamwork where individuals are afraid to speak up. Fear usually originates with leadership, but in many ethics environments, fear is there no matter who the leaders are. It's part of the organizational culture. A team whose members fear each other is not going to be ethically successful.

See the following related blog posts:
It Takes a Village: Behind the Indictment of Philadelphia's Vincent Fumo
The Responsibility of Lawyers and Other Professionals for Unethical Conduct

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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