Difficult Decisions. Eric Pliner
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them just yet, which means that we also don't know anything about their answers, which is why the approach in this book is probably wrong or at least ill-suited to some of the tough questions that we're bound to face.
One thing is for sure: I'm not going to tell you what's moral, what's ethical, or what your role is as a leader. I'm not going to tell you what's right or wrong, helpful or harmful, or who your stakeholders are. These are highly subjective questions with context-specific answers. Our aspirations to objectivity in any of these matters are merely pretensions, likely imbued with personal experiences and ways of living in the world that are so core to who we are that we hardly notice them anymore.
With that in mind, I'm not going to try to persuade you about my particular views, nor am I going to go overboard in sharing my expertise. Hopefully, this book will help you to unpack your own expertise and to understand your own views with greater skill and sophistication. Hopefully, you will find a path to more intentional application of what matters to you by figuring out with greater clarity exactly what matters to you. Hopefully, the exercises here will help you to understand the realities that become manifest through your opinions and perspectives and the identities and experiences that inform them.
My desire to focus on understanding your opinions and perspective is in no way intended to suggest that I don't believe in facts—or their importance. After years of working in the behavioral sciences, I suspect that not everything that we classify as science constitutes permanently resolved fact. It only takes a cursory review of the lack of replicability of many classic experiments in psychology with well-accepted findings to illuminate that point. By contrast, faults in our earlier understanding and the healthy evolution of our thinking do not negate the existence of facts. Instead, they reflect the importance of lifelong learning and openness to new information. Our prior collective certainty that the Earth was flat does not make it any less round.
What I am concerned with is how, as leaders, we interpret the world around us based on our current knowledge and what we do with that interpretation. How do we use our understanding of good and bad to enrich the quality of our lives and of life on Earth more generally and to leave the world better than we found it? Several of these words—good, bad, enrich, quality, better—are far from value-agnostic in their definitions. As leaders, we make choices many times each day that impose our interpretation of these words on others. Responsible leadership, therefore, begs our thoughtful consideration of these words and their related concepts, of the sources of our interpretations, and of the impact of our interpretations on others who may or may not share them.
Right or wrong, whatever this approach represents, at least it's by design and not by accident.
Hopefully, you will leave this reading having reflected on where you've come from, who and where you are today, and how you got here. Hopefully, you will have considered where you want to go next, both as an individual and as a leader, and how you'd like to get there. Hopefully, you will design a plan and approach to complex personal and professional challenges with intent, enabling you to make tough choices with insight, integrity, and empathy. And hopefully, you will get to do so well ahead of the next round of pain inherent in making the most difficult leadership decisions: the ones that highlight our conflicts, our contradictions, and our hypocrisies, yes—but also our humanity and our ability to shape the future.
You're going to want to grab a pen and some paper. Some of this might hurt a little bit. At the very least, maybe you'll be more ready for whatever is waiting for you tomorrow. If not, well, don't worry. This book is probably wrong anyway.
Eric Pliner
September 2021
Note
1 1 Paul Walker and Terry Lovat, “You Say Morals, I Say Ethics—What's the Difference?” The Conversation, September 18, 2014. https://theconversation.com/you-say-morals-i-say-ethics-whats-the-difference-30913.
Epigraph
Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
—The Man in Black in The Princess Bride by William Goldman
CHAPTER 1 Difficult Decisions
I had been in the role of chief executive officer of YSC Consulting, a 30-year-old, global leadership strategy firm, for about two years when one of our client teams approached me with a dilemma.
Sixteen months after we felt the first economic effects of COVID-19, our financial performance had returned successfully to its pre-pandemic levels. Still, like many businesses around the world, we remained only a few months removed from worrying whether our boutique consultancy would survive the economic and health crises imposed by the pandemic. The climb back to strong earnings had been arduous and exhausting, and our attention was heightened to every possible opportunity to maintain our recovery and growth.
Everyone was pleased, then, when one of our longstanding partners moved to a new company – this time, a defense contractor and manufacturer – and called on our client team for support. Our contact's new organization needed help shaping their approaches to leadership succession and to diversity, equity, and inclusion, the confluence of which represented one of our firm's sweet spots. The client anticipated a sizable contract, enough to close a gap in forecast performance for the region, and knew that our capabilities were a strong match for the organization's need. Our team went to work immediately, using their knowledge of the client, the industry, and the current moment to craft a custom solution that matched the caller's circumstances precisely – exactly what any great consulting firm would do.
But when Cara, a member of our administrative team, proofread the proposal, she was uneasy. She'd used a superior set of research skills to dig into the gap between the company's carefully curated public image and less savory activities that independent media outlets had reported more recently. Cara was concerned that we were compromising our values in service of the potential opportunity.
We were no strangers to working with complex or controversial industries; our client portfolio included tobacco companies, oil and gas companies with known histories of environmental damage, pharmaceutical manufacturers sued for artificially raising prices of drugs to treat rare disease, low-end retailers accused of exploiting rural communities, financial services organizations that had settled extensive claims resulting from the sale of mortgage-backed securities, and plenty of others. As leadership strategists, our work helps organizations to design their desired leadership styles, interactions and dynamics, and organizational cultures with intent, rather than leaving those critical human elements to default. Incorporating thoughtfully designed values, expectations of sustainability, awareness of community and environmental impact, and deep understanding of the constellation of organizational stakeholders is at the heart of what we do, and so we embrace opportunities to help leaders, teams, and organizations to make changes to their strategies or operations to lead with integrity, pride, and resolve. These particularly challenging scenarios were among those where our work was most impactful and most rewarding. But this one felt different.
Cara's discomfort was on my mind, but I'd heard plenty of discomfort before. We'd made the collective decision to encourage our colleagues to opt out of participating in any project or account with which they felt personally misaligned, and that practice had worked successfully to date, without compromise to the business. She wasn't asking to step away from the project, though; she was asking that the firm make a choice to turn down the opportunity and the partnership entirely.
We had to weigh another element, one that reflected our ethical context. Without a doubt, Cara's thinking was informed by an experience in our professional community that had brought us closer together. In the fall of 2019, we'd licensed the TED platform for use at an internal,