Difficult Decisions. Eric Pliner
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after speaker blended original research, cutting-edge ideas, and personal experiences to spread ideas about leadership, business, and our firm with passion and power. As one well-loved colleague – a particularly powerful speaker – shared her childhood experience as a refugee from civil war in vivid detail, the room hardly moved. Over the subsequent days, the business worked together to turn our co-workers' rich ideas and personal narratives into decisions about organizational practices and our desired future. Deciding that we wouldn't work with organizations that manufactured and/or sold weapons of war was relatively straightforward; we had few if any clients that met those criteria anyway, and our colleague's message was undeniable.
On a personal level, I didn't take that stance lightly. While I hold a degree in peace and justice studies, my father was a career civil servant for branches of the US military prior to joining a private-sector firm that contracted with those same agencies. We'd had a version of these discussions and debates around our family dinner table for decades, often agreeing to accept that our conversations were unlikely to be closed or resolved in any meaningful way.
Nevertheless, the firm had held this decision with real pride and shared it publicly, fully considering the possibility that we might countenance a version of this exact dilemma in the future: the opportunity to deliver meaningful work to people who wanted it, needed it, asked for it, and were prepared to pay for it, but with whom we could not align our values. We'd opted to employ what some call an “abundance mindset,”1 the belief that ample opportunity in the marketplace would allow us to readily find work that we wanted to deliver, in line with our values and cultural priorities. Essentially, we were confident that we'd never need to take on work that hurt in the ways that we'd identified.
What we hadn't accounted for, though, was an unanticipated and drastic shift in context that created a conflict between our morality and our role responsibilities as leaders and service providers. The world had changed since we'd determined that we could turn away prospective revenue. Neither our survival as a firm nor our ability to fully employ our people – many of whom relied on us for health care for themselves and their families – were guaranteed. Perhaps they never had been, but years of strong performance had left these existential questions well out of sight. But after a year where nearly every organization in our industry had laid off employees, reduced compensation, restricted hiring, closed offices, defaulted on financial obligations, or taken other measures to save cost in exchange for protecting their organizations and the majority of their people, turning down a large contract with guaranteed revenue – thereby potentially putting some of our people, their livelihood, and their families at risk – seemed irresponsible, if not downright unethical.
Simultaneously, the client organizations and their leaders who sought support from us, some of whom we were meeting for the first time, were also in new waters. Every organization we encountered was grappling with often unprecedented leadership dilemmas about right and wrong, good and bad, survival and destruction, wellness and illness, diversity and similarity, speed and deliberateness, short-term and long-term needs, even life and death. And few of them had the luxury of time to seek a wide range of perspectives; they wanted perspective, support, coaching, and thought partnership from trusted advisors, which we are, and they needed these supports urgently.
We were clear about the belief that our work delivers meaningful impact and helps leaders and organizations to shape a desirable future; we'd found a way to balance it with the belief that we did not want to cause further harm to our community members or to the world, and we backed that up by not supporting the manufacture and sale of weapons of war. We held the unshakable belief that accepting an organization as our client makes us responsible to be of service to them; our role is to provide them with experiences and support to ensure intentional design of the leadership styles, interpersonal dynamics, and cultures that enable successful achievement of strategy. Although we hadn't thought of it quite so dramatically in the hardy years prior to COVID, we also held the fervent belief that our ability to sustain our firm, to meet our financial obligations, and to employ our people without compromise to their livelihood, their families, and their health care, was good for them, good for the world, and good for business. Now that these criticalities were no longer guaranteed in the ways that we had naively assumed, it was incumbent upon us as leaders to consider the conflict anew.
At first glance, this apparent dilemma sounds like a textbook display of an oft-levied accusation against private-sector organizations and leaders: The moment that financial performance is challenged, values go out the window. But scratching the surface only slightly reveals that this paradigm is not, in fact, present in the most stereotypical way – and almost never is.
The real conflict is between competing dimensions of personal morality, ethical context, and the role responsibilities of the leader – all of which exist in service of good.
So, is it right to turn away revenue that might protect employment, compensation, and benefits during a period of macroeconomic uncertainty and high unemployment? What if completing activities to earn that revenue runs counter to the psychological contract explicitly agreed with the moral view of the organization’s employees? On the other hand, what if engaging in these activities furthers the organization's ethical position – about helping leaders of all kinds to make good judgments and to use their drive and influencing skill to shape the future?
In her book How to Wow: Proven Strategies for Selling Your [Brilliant] Self in Any Situation, author Frances Cole Jones asks herself and her readers, “Do you want to be right, or do you want to be friends?”2 It's a straightforward question that begs deeper exploration: What matters most? Intellectual integrity or real relationships? Holding on to our ideas or holding on to other people?
The answer, of course, is both. People and principles are inextricably linked, and it is nonetheless often impossible to make everyday decisions that attend to both with equal passion.
Over and again, leaders are called upon to make complex decisions quickly in ways that fulfill the responsibilities of our roles, that are in line with the ethical expectations of our sociocultural context, and that match our personal morality. The most difficult decisions cannot be made objectively, no matter how many analytics we complete. But understanding the sources of our views, examining rather than blindly accepting our feelings and obligations across stakeholder audiences, and knowing the pressures and incentives of the contexts in which we operate can enable us to make tough calls successfully.
That doesn't mean that there won't be trade-offs and that everyone will be happy with our choices.
Ultimately, I signed the contract, and we took the organization in question into our portfolio as a client. You might stop reading now, convinced that my team and I sold out, that we made an immoral choice to prioritize profit over people, to place our shareholders' interests above our ostensible values. I've considered that possibility plenty of times – both before making the call and since. But the simple action of scribbling my name on a tablet screen belied the hours of self-reflection, team discussion, open debate, process consideration, research, and values clarification that went into making this difficult decision. Confronted with an array of options and a seemingly endless mix of opinions, I am confident that we made the right choice for our firm and our people. We didn't avoid the apparent conflict between our roles as leaders, our personal codes of morality, and the ethical context in which we operate, even (especially) where those dimensions were misaligned. We indulged the challenge, clarified how we would choose, explored the factors driving us toward and away from each potential outcome, and made a difficult decision with insight, empathy, and integrity.
Making Difficult Decisions
How many decisions do you make each day?
What's the toughest decision you've had to make?
Why was it so hard?
How did you ultimately make the call?
Did you get it right?
How do